[F]ive years ago, you wouldn’t have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me… I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job… The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.

Solid three-bone material, and a must-read for anyone interested in that dark nexus of the CIA, politics and drugs.

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Reagan doubled the Pentagon budget between 1981 and 1985, and by 1991 Bush had increased the “black” portion to 25 percent. Born from the Manhattan Project, described by Weiner as a “mutant chromosome in the American body politic,” this secret operation is now a full-blown parallel government.

Weiner shows the secret government at work in diverting funds illegally, creating military units outside the chain of command, conducting covert wars, and transforming Star Wars into a system for the control of space. This book is a solidly-documented description of how the U.S. responded to atomic weapons and the Cold War by giving birth to, nurturing, and ultimately succumbing to a national security state.

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Joseph Wilson’s book is centered around the following events: in 2003, Dubya claimed in his State-of-the-Union address that Saddam Hussein had recently sought to obtain uranium from Africa. What the public did not know at the time was that Joseph Wilson, a former US Ambassador to Iraq and Niger, had months earlier been sent on a secret mission to Niger to investigate these claims. He went, he investigated, he returned and reported that there was not a shred of evidence to substantiate the rumors.

In July of 2003, following the US invasion of Iraq under the pretext of “disarming” Saddam and his mythical WMDs, Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed piece, describing his report on the Niger uranium story and how it had been specifically ignored by a Bush administration in a rush to war.

Retribution was not long in coming. The Bush Administration quickly leaked the fact that Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent to the press, shopping the info around to a number of journalists. One on the right-wing, Robert Novak, suffered no crisis of conscience, publishing Plame’s name, along with the subliminal Republican message to all those in government employ: “Shut thy mouth or we will kill you.”

Unfortunately for Dubya, what his people did was a crime, under a law that his own father had helped to enact. And in the ultimate irony, Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was working undercover in the realm of WMDs.

It is amazing the naivety of many Americans. They can watch The Godfather, understand how the mafia operates, and yet still believe all their politicians are honest, all their votes get counted, only criminals end up in jail and only terrorists dare to attack those bringing democracy their way.

Let me connect some dots: Dubya talks about protecting Americans from WMDs, but simultaneously outs an intelligence official whose job is to do just that because her husband rained on his “Iraq WMDs” charade. Dubya supported Vietnam, but his daddy made sure he didn’t have to risk his own life in that country. Dubya tells America’s enemies to “bring it on,” but his own military-age daughters are doing anything except enlisting. Notice a pattern here?

For Dogskinreporters, Wilson’s book offers no revelations, simply confirmation of what we have long known: there are certain people who are not in politics because of idealism, but simply for the power — the power of ego and the power to add to their bank rolls.

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