Agency-securities Books

Pritchard's book is really a collection of pieces on how indigenous activists can use international law and standards to advance their agendas at the United Nations. Overall the book is sound, although it is often dry and doesn't delve very deeply into strategizing. Pritchard presents the international mechanisms in a way that an educated layperson can understand, and the contributors try to demonstrate ways that these materials can be useful to activists. There is a lot of useful basic information here, and from a legal perspective there are a number of ideas that can be gleaned from the book. In terms of presenting the political situation it is not as effective, and I felt that more context and concrete examples would increase the utility of the book. I recommend it especially to students and activists who are new to the UN human rights system and want to fill in some of the procedural and legal details of the ongoing struggle for indigenous rights.

A consise review of the Kosovo liberation Army, based primarily on information abouth one of the leaders, without going into history of the developemnt on the Army. Missing part in the analysis is the role KLA played during the NATO attack on Serbia, including Kosovo

Examining selected incidents throughout world history, Sandra Whitworth (Associate Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies, York University) then makes her case that women need to assume a more central role throughout the peacekeeping mission process.

Women come into more contact with peacekeeping troops on a daily basis, but are not consulted about their presence and can even become victimized for so-called R&R (as in Cambodia and Somalia).

I think that the 'removed' decision-making which is discussed in this same book has assumed a heightened sense in the e-government era. E government means that an order to dispatch troops can theoretically be given over the Internet--facilitating a public official's complete emotional removal from the consequences of their policies. Such a distance further depersonalizes the population receiving the troops, depersonalized women are at risk of being victimized by their alleged liberators.

Equally important however, Whitworth questions whether these missions can respect the encountered women on their own terms regardless of who is in the peacekeeping ranks. Is peace merely the absence of violence as defined through Western cultural norms or is it consequently the presence of social justice? Since military training officially indoctrinates all soldiers to accept a certain set of values as being 'right', would and/or do women soldiers provide a egalitarian alternative?

One of her most interesting chapters examines post-traumatic stress disorder as it relates to the militarized masculine identity. Rejecting the pop culture construction of these men as 'messed up' and 'unbalanced', Whitworth instead argues that men who are exhibiting culturally 'feminine' (and degraded) characteristics are in fact the ideal peacekeepers (p. 172). It is the military construct which needs to be overhauled; these men should be a model.

She is also skeptical (pp. 220-221) because Security Council resolutions are fixated on doing the same thing in a different matter as opposed to recognizing the fundamental constructs of the existing system as being the problem. She believes that a different methodology of training and directing soldiers is needed.

Whitworth recognizes that some form of military is in fact needed in some cases. However, she wants readers to think about the fundamentally gendered meanings and problems which current military policies are assigning and constantly reinforcing through their actions. This suggests that a feminist and truly peacekeeping military is possible.

This book, written by Sir Marrack Goulding, serves the educated reader well, observing the slippery and somewhat sodden state of the contemporary landscape of nation states with creative fidelity and verve. Goulding, currently Warden of St. Antony's College at the University of Oxford, is a veteran of the British Diplomatic Service, serving from 1959 in garden spots across the world such as Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, Egypt, the United States, and Angola. Furthermore, from 1986 to 1993, he labored as the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations for the United Nations, closing out his career as the Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs from 1993 until 1997

Therefore, he brings a wealth of personal knowledge as well as a virtual cascade of personal anecdotes to bear as he observes the nature of these unsung heroes who attempt to preside over peace-keeping missions in all of the war-torn places where all other efforts to preserve civic order have failed. In one particular seven-year period (1986-1993) Goulding oversaw sixteen such peacekeeping efforts in places as far-flung as Angola, Yugoslavia, and Somalia. In so doing, he also witnesses a virtual transformation in the UN's attitude concerning its role in solving such regional conflicts. In this book he provides the reader with the kind of privileged insider's look at the nature of the UN's missions, warts and all.

To his credit, he pulls no punches in describing his own sense of frustration in dealing with the endemically disorganized bureaucratic maze that characterizes the UN, yet allows us to learn much more about how the often courageous individuals serving under its banner attempt to carry out the mission despite the amalgam of disquiet and disagreement rumbling on by member states over the course of action in any particular locale. He also provides the reader with a number of no-nonsense insights into the personalities and motives of some of its more memorable principal players within the UN orbit such as Javier Perez de Cueller and the notoriously complex Boutras-Boutras-Ghali. In so doing he also chronicles the internal dissension and dissatisfactions that often undermine the organization's effectiveness and efficiency. He also praises the gradual improvement of the UN's efforts in several of these conflicts to encourage democratic elections and the eventual demobilization of warring belligerents. This is an absorbing, honest, and unflinching look at the way in which the UN's peace-keeping efforts actually work, and as such it offers us some valuable insights as to its most dangerous and often most valuable activity. Enjoy!

Information Peacekeeping and Peacekeeping Intelligence are topics of great importance to me, and I have been writing about them since the mid-1990's, while also publishing several books on the topic and reading others, all easily found on Amazon and listed below. Hence I was most disappointed in the overly academic nature of the book.

I reduce it by one star because it does not focus on the transparency needed among predatory immoral corporations as well as covert operations by the United States and others that poison the well and retard possibilities for peace, and because while it is an original work and offers very valuable primary research in the form of numerous interviews, it completely missed the work done between the Brahimi Report and this book's publication.

The book discusses four kinds of transparency:
1) Cooperative (both formal and informal)
2) Ambient
3) Coerced
4) Unilateral (intelligence, confrontational, and proferred)

The author concludes that information is power and that the United Nations continues to be reluctant or unwilling to use this power (I would add that the US military has the same problem--commanders are spending 80% of their time on intelligence & information operations (I2O) but less than one percent of the staff and budget are assigned to this vital mission).

The author identifies the following impediments to UN success in information operations:
1) Staffing not there
2) Doctrine and procedures lacking
3) Bureacratic intertia
4) Continued fear of "intelligence" as evil instead of decision support

The author concludes that United Nations operations of all kinds could benefit from and be more effective if:
1) More information was collected and analyzed, and then shared
2) Transparency operations were an advanced form of presence beyond patrols and static monitoring--a pro-active form of UN operations
3) Strategic communications (the author appears unfamiliar with the term) are mounted against hate-mongering (the first stage of genocide).

The author focuses on information transparency, but does not appear to see budget transparency as one of the most important means of validating policies and beliefs. "It's not real until it's in the budget" is a phrase taught to me by the former custodian of all national security funds in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and I have come to the conclusion that transparency of budgets at all levels is the non-negotiable pre-condition for restoring the trust and engagement of all people in their own governance.

The author does recognize the excellent work published previously,
Peacekeeping and Public Information: Caught in the Crossfire (Cass Series on Peacekeeping, 5)

Below are books that complement this one and that are not, as best I can tell, drawn on in this work:

Intelligence Power in Peace and War
Intelligence Services in the Information Age (Studies in Intelligence Series)
Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
Peacekeeping Intelligence New Players, Extended Boundaries (Studies in Intelligence)
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption

The following book, at $150, is grotesquely over-priced, but the content, should it ever be more ethically available, appears worthy:
Intelligence for Peace: The Role of Intelligence in Times of Peace (Cass Series on Peacekeeping, 5)

Readers may also wish to search online for:
VIRTUAL INTELLIGENCE: Conflict Avoidance and Resolution Through Information Peacekeeping as published by the US Institute of Peace online
PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Leadership Digest 1.0
Information Peacekeeping: The Purest Form of War

I also understand that the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) is moving forward with concepts and doctrine for harmonizing the many Joint Military Analysis Centers that MajGen Patrick Cammaert, NL RN inspired during his tour as Military Advisor to the Secretary General. Separately, I am advancing an effort to engage 120 nations in a discussion of Multinational Information Sharing to be institutionalized through an Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements within any diplomatic service. It is slow going, but this book is another helpful stone in the road to peace through information.

Stephen Knott starts this fast paced book by recounting the myth that covert operations in America began with the Cold War, and searches for the truth or falsity of this belief. Then Knott recounts the history of covert operations in America, beginning during the Revolutionary war with George Washington. Knott points out how the founding fathers understood the value of secrecy and espionage run by the executive branch to maintain secrecy and deniability.

Knott explains how Washington created a contingency fund to pay for spies and secret diplomacy. Jefferson bribed Indians to gain territory and started to overthrow the Pasha of the Barbary pirates. Madison planned covert operations to gain Spanish Florida, to gain land, stop Indian attacks, and get Spain out of North America. Then Knott describes the efforts of Joel Poinsett for President Madison in Argentina and Chile where he tried to incite independence from Spain, and cut down the influence of the British. Eventually Poinsett worked in Mexico on behalf of President Monroe. Andrew Jackson sent Robert Anthony to Mexico to try and get Texas, to help protect New Orleans. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln supported covert efforts throughout Europe and Canada supporting the Union through propaganda in newspapers.

Knott concludes the book by showing how during the nineteen-seventies, congressmen wanted to control covert operations and set up a congressional oversight in the belief that this is what the founding fathers would have wanted. But, as we have seen, the founding fathers believed in covert operations with no congressional oversight, because even then congress could not keep a secret. Knott's book is full of surprising anecdotes detailing the use of covert operations by the founding fathers.

I just finished reading this book, which I had been meaning to get my hands on for about 2 years now.

It is a superbly well-documented piece of historical research and it's clear that the author, Robert Whymant, spared no effort in combing, analyzing and recounting the historic record on this extraordinary spy and the network he painstakingly built up in Tokyo in the run up to and start of the Second World War.

A review of the book's endnotes (it is extensively footnoted) shows that Whymant relied on a variety of sources, both official and private, including Soviet, Japanese and German archives as well as on personal accounts of those who knew and worked with the protagonists.

Personally, I found that the narrative, although quite exciting, is not as gripping as the works of Anthony Beevor, nor does it flow with the casual ease of Norman Davies' works, but is nevertheless a very entertaining read and does not get bogged down in unnecessary detail.

I am fairly confident that, for now, this represents the definitive piece of popular historical research on Richard Sorge, and it will be difficult for someone to do a better job than Whymant has done, unless more sources emerge from the Soviet archives or some other new revelations come to light.

I was very saddened to discover, after finishing the book, that Richard Whymant actually perished in the 2004 Asian Tsunami, whilst holidaying in Sri Lanka. This constitutes a very grave loss indeed.

Peck writes lucidly and with erudition, outlining the roles that myriad international organizations have played, or have capacity to play, in precipitating resolution to conflict. Of particular note and value is her focus upon mechanisms of function, rather than upon units of function. As organisations tend to redefine their roles upon a fairly frequent basis, Peck focuses instead upon what specific means of intervention seem to produce the greatest success. The only questionable aspect of this work is a marked tendency to view organizational interventions (by fairly large, significant actors: OSCE, OAU, OAS, UNDPKO) as really the only means by which conflict should be addressed, and peace built.

That aside, Peck's work provides a remarkable catalogue of the role that organisations have been able to fill, and offers insightful analysis into how more peaceful future outcomes may be provided for.

Mark is arguably America's foremost intelligence historian, and especially strong on analysis and oversight. The seventy-page bibliography he has put together is useful. There are other much longer annotated bibliographies, but this one reflects value in its selection and conciseness.

Using scores of individual cases, the independent scholar Thomas records the varied ways U.S. Justice Department agents tried to intimidate dissenters and suspected traitors into silence during World War I and the years after it when Wilson was promoting the League of Nations. The more sensational Palmer raids rounding up masses of immigrants on the basis of little more than rumors or vague suspicions are known as the standard example of government wartime practices going to excesses. But the scale of these and related, longlasting controversy obscured the widespread questionable practices Thomas relates in this work. The "focus on prosecutions had the effect of understating the scope of the department's activities. Far more commonly, department investigators watched, warned, and reprimanded suspected seditionists." In this, the Justice Department agents had a "tremendous degree of latitude" in making individual decisions about "speech [which] interfered with the war effort."

The latitude given to agents led to such practices as warnings on taking certain political positions, threats of arrest, entrapment schemes, approaching relatives or neighbors for damaging evidence, and impersonations. The wide, ill-defined net cast included clergy, African-Americans and other minorities, union members, and leftist activists and sympathizers. In most cases, these were Americans citizens simply exercising what they regarded as their right of free expression, association, or political activism guaranteed by the Constitution and taken for granted. In some cases, individuals were treated as dissidents simply for arguing that the War would last longer than the political leaders were saying it would.

The government excesses Thomas records could have been taken from newspapers in the months leading up to the Iraq War. For they are more or less the same as those used by the Bush Administration to stifle dissent and concerns over the Iraq War. By reaching back in history, Thomas informs or reminds one that such activities are not unprecedented, and in fact are predictable even in a democracy. Knowing about them, one can be on guard against them and in most cases prevent the institutionalization and unquestioned rationalization of them which would make them a permanent part of society.