PRETEXT FOR WAR

PRETEXT FOR WAR Bamford, James. A appearance For War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies. Doubleday. 2004 420 pp $2695

Bamford, author of sum of two units investigative studies of the National security Agency, The perplex Palace and Body of privys applies his talents to the circumstances surrounding 9/11.

He begins with a riveting chronicle of what happened upon September 11, including the greatest in quantity complete account of what took place and wherefore the hijacked planes were not discharge down. A few American fighter jet took not on in hot pursuit but were not armed. Others were being fitted with air-to-air missiles, on the other hand there was no time to finish loading them. plane if they had been carrying live weapons, the pilots had no authority to fire them.

In recounting the failures of intelligence before 9/11 Bamford points to missed ball of threads about the hijackers and the damaging rivalry between the CIA and the FBI in addition to their lack of communications. Bamford describes a damning portrait of U s intelligence agencies as exceedingly ill equipped to deal with the threats of terrorism and a post-cold war world. He run overs of U. S. intelligence agencies that lack specialists in many lock opener Middle Eastern languages and an insufficient number of analysts to deal with an avalanche of cyber-age data. Bamford traces the personal relations among the lock opener players spanning several decades and adds a certain quantity of interesting bits to the existing record: eg the Pentagon's distrust of the CIA's intelligence; internal sod wars among the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney above what kind of intelligence was used in planning for Iraq; and the Pentagon's establishment of separate intelligence stores to counter the CIA and DIA.

Bamford is also convinced that lock opener figures in the Bush administration including national security adviser Richard Perle Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld substitute Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J Feith, decided upon a plan to wage war in Iraq well before the September 11 terrorist attacks. He claims that these four leading hawks maneuvered the CIA, DIA and NSA in an attempt to justify a leadership change in Iraq that they had been planning to bring about for years. Bamford moves further that the administration's rush to war comeed from its failure to recognize the character of the Palestinian cause in arousing Arab anger against the United States.

This is an eye-opening work that you will find difficult to set down until it is finished and flat the last page will make you amazement if it can be true

Louis Kruh

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Copyright Cryptologia Jan 2005

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