finished reading Dismantling the Empire

(buy) By Chalmers Johnson.

(blogger just dumped what I wrote and I'm not rewriting it, so here are a couple of quotes from the book)


p 74
"From its inception the CA has labored under two contradictory conceptions of what it was supposed to be doing, and no president has ever succeeded in correcting or resolving this situation. Espionage and intelligence analysis seek to know the world as it is; covert action seeks to change the world, whether it understands it or not. The best CIA exemplar of the intelligence -collecting function was Richard Helms director of central intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973 (who died in 2002). The great protagonist of cloak-and-dagger work was Frank Wisner, the CIA's director of operations from 1948 until the late 1950s, when he went insane and , in 1965, committed suicide. Wisner never had any patience for espionage and other forms of intelligence collecting.

Weiner quotes William Colby, a future DCI (1973-1976) on this subject. The separation of the scholars of the research and analysis division from the sips of the clandestine service reared two cultures within the intelligence profession, he said, "separate, unequal, and contemptuous of each other." That critique remained true throughout the CIA's first sixty years.

[As I read this I thought and noted to myself "Turf wars are endemic in situations where law enforcement and public safety organizations overlap. Endemic because it is inevitable. Inevitable because testosterone = turf wars."]

p 165
It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces. none of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global spending, an amount larger than the next forty-five nations together spend on their militaries annually.

And Johnson goes on to prove this statement. I was surprised at how many books Johnson noted that I have read.