Bikewer
Penultimate Amazing
Seymour Hersh's newest book, dealing with "The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib".
When Hersh was interviewed on Diane Rehm a few months ago, I thought the book was going to be primarily concerned with the Abu Ghraib story, since that's mostly what they talked about. But that's just the first section. At the time, Hersh said that he hoped a "bunch of privates and sergeants" wouldn't take the fall for all this. He also said that when news began to leak out of Guantanamo, it would make Abu Ghraib seem like a walk in the park.
The book is an overview of the War on Terror, and I think that "highly critical" would be an understatement. Hersh deals with the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11 (and the fact that virtually nothing of substance has been done to correct them),
The largely untold goings-on in Afghanistan, the "Iraq Hawks" and how the NeoCons pushed the invasion of that country, the "faulty intelligence" that was used as a justification for said invasion, the internicene bickering between Rumsfeld and his generals, the difficulties of having Pakistan as an "ally", and the shape of the Middle East after 9/11.
It's a troubling book, even if only half of Hersh's information is correct.
On related notes, we see that Rumsfeld has decided to put together a Pentagon-run intelligence division answerable to himself:
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/23/pentagon.intel/
And this morning's local paper reviewed an article that's running in this month's Atlantic by Richard Clarke:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200501/clarke
with dire predictions of the "next wave" of attacks by Al Qaeda.
Clarke was head of counterterrorism for both Clinton and Bush.
I found many parallels between Hersh's book and the recently-read Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer.
When Hersh was interviewed on Diane Rehm a few months ago, I thought the book was going to be primarily concerned with the Abu Ghraib story, since that's mostly what they talked about. But that's just the first section. At the time, Hersh said that he hoped a "bunch of privates and sergeants" wouldn't take the fall for all this. He also said that when news began to leak out of Guantanamo, it would make Abu Ghraib seem like a walk in the park.
The book is an overview of the War on Terror, and I think that "highly critical" would be an understatement. Hersh deals with the intelligence failures that led up to 9/11 (and the fact that virtually nothing of substance has been done to correct them),
The largely untold goings-on in Afghanistan, the "Iraq Hawks" and how the NeoCons pushed the invasion of that country, the "faulty intelligence" that was used as a justification for said invasion, the internicene bickering between Rumsfeld and his generals, the difficulties of having Pakistan as an "ally", and the shape of the Middle East after 9/11.
It's a troubling book, even if only half of Hersh's information is correct.
On related notes, we see that Rumsfeld has decided to put together a Pentagon-run intelligence division answerable to himself:
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/23/pentagon.intel/
And this morning's local paper reviewed an article that's running in this month's Atlantic by Richard Clarke:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200501/clarke
with dire predictions of the "next wave" of attacks by Al Qaeda.
Clarke was head of counterterrorism for both Clinton and Bush.
I found many parallels between Hersh's book and the recently-read Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer.