Baer is a former case officer for the CIA, and the books kind of make for a True Spook's rebuttal to paper-pushing psychopaths like Michael Scheuer, who, contrary to what he and the Faux News crowd insist on implying, has never actually been out in the field doing the real work of intelligence-gathering.
The view on what, exactly, has happened to the CIA over the last few decades makes a lot more sense than the Village explanation. Essentially, Baer's view is that the CIA's failures -- not seeing the rise in radicalization in the Middle East, not knowing Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, etc -- are a product of the fact that political meddling and the bureaucratic spinelessness that accompanies it has led the agency to do almost no actual, on-the-ground intelligence-gathering.
Instead, things like looking at satellite photos and making up stories to go along with them -- looking at you, Colin Powell -- have replaced the old-school stuff.
Anyway, recommended. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/03/military_westpoint_knightsout_031609w/
The problem is the politicians run by the religious right and their ridiculous "literal" misreadings of folklore...
I think the period when the CIA was involved with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan was the period when he was in Beirut trying to figure out who Islamic Jihad was (which is actually pretty interesting).
I gather from the reviews that GW covers the collapse of the CIA a bit, too, so there may be a few points of similarity. I've been meaning to read GW, too, since Obama mentioned he was reading it during the campaign, and I wanted to know what he'd be absorbing from it. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
The second book, SWTD, is so far an indictment of the House of Saud both as corrupt rulers and as a mix of appeasers and outright supporters of Sunni terrorism, an investigation into heavy arms trading going into the country, and the implication that the clock is rapidly ticking down on the royal family.
Which is potentially, of course, a very scary prospect -- something that could conceivably make the Taliban taking over Pakistan look like a walk in the park. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
Abdul Aziz very carefully closed down the Ikwan, or Brotherhood, after they had served the purpose of facilitating the uniting of the peninsula under the House of Saud. But they have had to accommodate themselves to the attitudes of Wahabi clerics, as inconvenient as that may be to their own lifestyles. The question of the long term political sustainability of this coexistence remains. I highly doubt that a Wahabi Arabia would be an improvement over Saudi Arabia. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
