Public Intelligence Blog

Gordon Cook

I am honored that Eva Waskell has entrusted me to present The Privatization of Our Democracy, a work that I regard as her Profile in Courage. For 25 years she has labored to correct what is possibly the most significant public policy failure of the computer age—the privatization of vote counting carried out under the rationale that computers are simply automatic calculators that can tabulate votes more cost effectively than old analogue machines. I have known her for 19 of those years.

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People think they know that something is wrong with the way elections are conducted in this country.  They are correct. There is. But readers only now will get access to a full history of the abuse of public trust by the elected politicians of the United States of America. That’s a large claim to make, but see for yourself.

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I believe that there are multiple publications here in what Eva has to say. The scholarly monograph. An Elections for Dummies paperback. A paperback of humorous tabby cat photos where the kitties are running elections.  Eva is a national treasure and I am proud to be able to use the Internet to make her story known. Fortunately, there are many, many public spirited citizens left.

Full Report (PDF 160 Pages)

Cook Report Home

Table of Contents and Selected Quotes Below the Line –

A SPECTACULAR Piece of Work

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Bottom line: there is an enormous amount of priceless information in the book that is the equal of Abu Ghraib but against an American citizen who was by all evidence a source if not an agent for a non-official cover officer of the CIA based in the DC area. From being ignored to being locked up without any due process to being declared mentally incompetent by people lacking all integrity to being held without trial for years, the mind just boggles. What especially troubled me was the degree to which the prisons the author was exposed to used drugs to turn prisoners who refused to confess into drug-stupored vegetables.

I remove one star because this book has not been fully developed and the author as well as all associated with the book have failed to present compelling visualizations, a timeline, snapshot biographies of the key players, etcetera. I strongly believe that this book should be reissued by a major house, with a major foreword, and tied to the Occupy Wall Street concerns about institutionalized corruption.

I RESTORE the star to a full five because the YouTube videos featuring the author are nothing short of sensational. Together with the short film Hypocrisy, this could be the “story” that breaks the back of the Empire. The author is engaging and authentic in her video appearances, I do not believe any American can understand the deep corruption in the US Government without absorbing what she has to share.

The book is TEDIOUS. It is a stream of consciousness account by the author leavened with direct quotations from testimony. If it were not so tedious it would make my blood boil with outrage, but sadly, for such an important story, what we have here is just over 450 pages of run-on text including appendices with copies of some documents and depositions.

From where I sit as a former spy who has also done counterintelligence, published books on intelligence, and generally been the leading critic of fraud, waste, and abuse in the secret intelligence and counterintelligence worlds, the following stay with me from this book:

1 CIA is using non-official cover officers to run operations within and against the Congress. Congressional staffers are both targets and sources, some may be agents (paid).

2 The author clearly had advance warning of 9/11 and communicated that warning to the intelligence community (I have written elsewhere of how nine nations warned us in advance, the FBI blew off two walk-ins in Orlando and Newark, Dick Cheney scheduled the national counter-terrorism exercise for “the day” three months in advance, etc etc.

3 Where the book excels and is easily a five star book if the publisher had shown more creative commitment, is in documenting the lengths to which the government will go to lie, cheat, and otherwise abuse the Constitution, individual citizens, and the public at large. This book is an indictment of the Department of Justice (which we have recently learned claims the right to lie to the Court when it and it alone thinks it appropriate), the FBI, the CIA, and the White House consider it useful, which turns out to be most of the time.

4 The “wild card” in this story is Andrew Card, then Chief of Staff at the White House, and a direct family relation of the author. The smoking gun in this book is its documented evidence that the White House knew full well that 9/11 was coming, and leveraged that event, overlooking the 3,000 murdered (most of them in my view by controlled demolitions planted by Larry Silverstein in a massive insurance scam that was convenient to both the political government and to Wall Street (destroying all SEC files in WTC 7, never hit by anything).

I am not at all sure why the author did not get murdered while in prison with an overdose of whatever drug of choice they use these days. I have often reflected on the schizophenic nature of some of my colleagues, honorable people who try to do their best, while also playing drone or gerbil to out and out war criminals like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, to name just three.

I recommend readers buy the book, and also search for various web options including her April 2001 YouTube (1:36:12), and the book’s website. My counsel to the author would be to post the book immediately online in full text by the chapter for ease of automated translation by Google Translate. Certainly I would be glad to do that at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. What this book desperately needs is the application of “cognitive surplus” such that timelines, visualizations, and other value-added sense-making can be integrated. I’d like to see a sharp two page executive summary of findings and implications.

We now know that Obama feared a coup if he prosecuted CIA officials and others including political appointees for their various high crimes and misdemeanors, and while this is understandable, it does not negate the need to return the US Government to the rule of law, a rule that has been so flagrantly violated so many times more under Obama than under Bush. I write this review in the aftermath of the first ever PUBLICIZED murder of a US citizen by drone without due process. We now know that the President (Obama) and the national security apparatchiks (led by Goldman Sachs lobbyist in the role of National Security Advisor) claim the right to kill anyone anywhere, including Americans, if they are deemed to be a threat to national security, where national security is left open-ended and can include any threat to the First Lady’s vegetable garden. That pretty much makes all 99% of us a threat.

I salute the author, and the publisher, for getting the book out, and below list some other books that are advancing our understanding of the depraved nature of the US Government as now owned and controlled by Wall Street through the two-party tyranny (there are 65 parties in the USA, only two gets to loot the US Treasury at will, taking 5% political payoffs for taxpayer-funded programs).

Certainly I hope that the author prospers and that over time she and the authors of the books below are recognized as righteous and more in harmony with the Constitution than the executive or legislative branches of the US Government are today.

See Also:

Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War)
The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Second Edition)
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King
The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture
Long Strange Journey: An Intelligence Memoir
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History

See Also (Owl Recommends):

Gary Null Interviewing Susan Lindauer

Gary’s Null’s 3-hour forensic investigation into the lies of the Official 9-11 Commission Report

Extreme Prejudice – CIA Whistle Blower Susan Lindauer PDX 911Truth

Amazon Page

Sheldon S. Wolin

Editorial Review:

Of the many books I’ve read or skimmed in the past seven years that attempted to get inside the social and political debacles of the present, none has had the chilling clarity and historical discernment of Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. Building on his fifty years as a political theorist and proponent of radical democracy, Wolin here extends his concern with the extinguishing of the political and its replacement by fraudulent simulations of democratic process. — Jonathan Crary, Artforum

4.0 out of 5 stars Managed Democracy, Superpower, and alas, even, “Inverted Totalitarianism”, June 17, 2008

ByJohn P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) – See all my reviews  (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is a seminal work which “tells it like it is” concerning the current power arrangements in the American political system, as well as the political leadership’s aspirations towards global empire. Prof. Wolin sets the tone of his work on page 1, with the juxtaposition of the imagery of Adolph Hitler landing in a small plane at the 1934 rally at Nuremberg, as shown in Leni Reifenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” and George Bush landing on the aircraft carrier “Abraham Lincoln” in 2003. Certainly one of the dominant themes of the book is comparing the operating power structure in the United States with various totalitarian regimes of the past: Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Prof Wolin emphasizes the differences between these totalitarian powers, and the softer concentration of power in the United States, which he dubs “inverted totalitarianism.”

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Amazon Page

John Buchanan

Gets to the very crux of our nation’s ills.,September 27, 2009

John Buchanan understands the true spirit of our nation and puts his finger smack on all the ways we’ve strayed away from that spirit. This is the first social studies volume every high school kid should read. This book is so right on it hurts. Get this book; read it; then go out there and save your nation — these United States — from those greedy insiders who have high jacked it for their own evil gains.

Phi Beta Iota:  The Occupy movement in the USA that has emerged in Sep-Oct 2011 is a manifestation of the ideas in this book, and the urgent needs identified but not assimilated in 2005 and earlier.

Vote and/or Comment on Review

Amazon Page

Joshua Rovner

5.0 out of 5 stars It Takes Two: Strategic Intelligence and National Security Policy, September 30, 2011

By Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

In the U.S., the relationship between strategic intelligence and the formulation of national security policies has been to say the least complex and often confusing. This book provides what has long been needed, an objective and scholarly review of this relationship.

Rovner provides an excellent theoretical background to guide his examination of specific case histories that he has chosen to illustrate the relationships between strategic intelligence and policy. Ideally intelligence analysts should be able to operate without interference to produce strategic intelligence reports that are honest, objective, and supported by the best information available. Again ideally policy makers should be free to challenge such reports. Finally both analysts and policymakers should be able to hold rational discussions over differences in interpretation and conclusions in which the supporting evidence is considered objectively. Unfortunately this ideal is often thwarted by what Rovner calls “the pathologies of intelligence-policy relations.” He has identified three such `pathologies’:

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Amazon Page

Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

I generally take a very jaundiced view of books that emerge from Washington Post columns I have already read, but this book surprised, engages, and out-performs the columns by such a leap that I have to rate it at six stars (10% of what I read and review), and call it a nation-changing book.

Early on the book captures me in a way the columns did not–this is a book with integrity. It is a book that sees the corruption in Washington and the inter-play of political fears of losing elections and the need to arouse public fears of the unknown. It is not just a book about the massive waste of taxpayer expenditures on a security state that harms more than it hurts, it is a book about loyal, sensible employees who are anguished at the idiocy of what they are asked to do, and in the many cases of those who broke ranks to speak to the authors, eager to have the public know the truth of the matter.

This is a book that seeks to arouse the public to do its duty, to have a conversation, to demand of the politicians in Washington a serious conversation, a serious assessment, of what it is we are about–as a nation, and with this pervasive security state program.

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Amazon Page

Dr. Colm A. Kelleher

5.0 out of 5 stars As a neurologist, I found it frightening, November 21, 2004

By Stephen Wong (Pennsylvania, USA) – See all my reviews

As a trained neurologist working at a school of medicine, I thought I had a fairly good understanding of BSE and its human counterpart, nvCJD. But clinical knowledge is only one piece of the puzzle.

Drawing upon epidemiologic, forensic, political, medical, scientific, and historical sources, the author has provided a truly chilling account of the importation of prion disease samples from the small cannabalistic Fore tribe in New Guinea for U.S. animal experimentation in the 1950′s and ’60′s, with credible links to the current epidemic of animal prion disease in North America (CWD or chronic wasting disease, TME or transmissible mink encephalopathy, and BSE), as well as the current epidemic of Alzheimer’s disease in developed countries (i.e., those eating mass-produced livestock). The author also speculates that the cattle mutiliations in North America in the past few decades may have been programs designed for the surveillance of prions within the nation’s food supply.

Some disturbing points made in the book are:

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Patrick G. Eddington (Author)

6+ Deep Moral Practical Look at Loss of Integrity Across US National Security

February 28, 2011

FINAL REVIEW

It is difficult for any intelligence book to make it to my 6+ category, or top ten percent. What brings this book to the very top of the heap is the skillful weaving of a constant appraisal of the moral in tandem with the practical. Sight unseen I knew this book would be a five, but it jumped to six when I read it from the back to the front and saw:

Page 354: The Agency has become inbred, ossified, parasitic…a prescription for the abuse of individual rights and fatally flawed analyses of the world-at-large that have plagued CIA over the past 30 years…

In the same concluding chapter he slams Congress for not demanding full access to classified information and the Congressional intelligence committees for serving as controllers of Congressional access rather than oversight bodies, with a particular disdain and disinterest in whistle-blowers; the Pentagon for infecting its own troops with alleged medicine that cause neurological problems, and for consistently covering up and lying to one and all about the causes of Gulf War syndrome; and the US Government generally for isolating “military medicine” from civilian medicine to the point that the troops are guinea pigs for bad science, and then victims of cover-ups that would not be countenanced outside the Pentagon.

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Amazon Page

• Actors: Daniel Ellsberg, Patricia Ellsberg, Tony Russo, Howard Zinn, Hedrick Smith
• Directors: Judith Ehrlich;Rick Goldsmith

Stunningly Relevant Today and Always

December 7, 2010

I completely missed the release of this film in July, and stumbled on it while picking movies for a sick son.

It opens with Henry Kissinger, since demonstrated to be a war criminal, calling Daniel Elsberg the most dangerous man in America, and lamenting the release of secret documents (that ultimately proved government perfidy). Fast forward to WikiLeaks as a sequel to the 935 documented lies led by Dick Cheney.

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