5 comments about The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders.

1. This book removes the mask from those who deny the horror and terror of the Holocaust. An engrossing work that strikes the sensibilities of its readers. The records, letters, and photos, all forbidden, but taken with pride to show their loved ones how much they enjoyed/hated/performed their sinister tasks, leaving behind mass graves for us to find.



2. The most jarring aspect of this book is the casual, flippant remarks that are made about mass-extermination. Some of the German quotes in this book were taken from diaries and letters to loved ones, and much of it is casual. There is a convenient language spoken. For instance, few people say that they were "killing Jews." The most common phrase was, "special actions."
   
   There are dry reports of incidents written by SS men that could be interchanged with a unemotional report of wheat production on any farm. Only, these reports are about numbers of Jews murdered, or bodies liquidated.
   
   It is the casual nature of these comments that makes this book so surprising. It's all so "matter-of-fact." It's all so horrifyingly mundane.
   
   I bought this as a compliment to other books I own about the Holocaust, and few books have matched the surreality of the Nazi "Final Solution" than this book. It is highly recommended, but only for those who want to see the atrocities described from the cold, heartless eyes of the Nazi murderers themselves.



3. To truly appreciate how ordinary people could commit such evil acts as were committed in the Holoucast, we would do well to remember that none of those who tortured and murdered in the concentration camps were any different than you or I.
   They had families. They managed to reduce the importance of their victims as human beings.
   There is a parallel between what happened in Nazi concentration camps and what is happening now to innocent people incarcerated and dehumanized in Iraq and elsewhere.
   As someone once said, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it."



4. When Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil," she was writing about Eichmann.But after reading this compilation of personal stories,she could have been writing about anyone and everyone who bowed to worship hitler,and blithely went on about their lives,pre-war,when they knew full well what hitler and his monstrous henchmen and women were doing.
   This is a hard read because it is infuriating.They knew what they were doing and didn't give a damn.True,there were observers who were initially shocked by the torture and murders they were seeing,but they just went away quietly,and did nothing to broadcast what was happening in Germany during the time the persecutions of the Jews was just beginning on a large scale.Pogroms were the forerunner of mass murder.
   Reading this made me sick,but I felt I owed it to the legions of the dead and suffering.
   There really isn't much else to say about this book. It is meticulously researched and presented in a straight-forward manner.Neither of which makes it any easier to read.But read it. It needs to be read,and you will be stronger for it.



5. This book is depressing and very difficult to read for very long. The benefit of the book is to get a first hand glimpse of the atrocities committed by those following Hitler in WWII. It outlines how savage people can become in their feelings toward a religion.

5 comments about American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us.

1. This is a great book; an eye opener. As a antiterrorism program manager with the U.S. Military Police I have witnessed the chilling issues as stated in the book. Unfortunately, political correctness stops action against those who use America's freedoms against her.



2. The book was informative. Everyone needs to read it. Mr. Emerson has his facts and presents them in a way we all need to think about.



3. An awesome very up to date information. An easy reed, well writtten book explaining in detail of how JIHAD works within our (USA) borders. It brings to light what is actualy happening right now!



4. This book was a good reader, it was very informative and an real eye open'er! Apparently, there are forces within our own government that want to see our demised! "A must Read"



5. This book will make your blood run cold. We should all take our heads out of the sand and read this one. The writing is well done, although the foreign names can get kind of tedious but that is no fault of the author.

1 comments about The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qaeda.

1. I like this text in that it sets historical and moral context for today's conflicts.
   Chaliand and Blin, the editors, lay out the text in chapters on eras and specific conflicts. The text is notable in that it delves into the evolution of the moral debates concerning the targeting of civilians in times of warfare. Few today realize that much of today's terrorism evolved from the guerilla warfare in Occupied Europe of WWII, and the partisan civil conflicts that often followed after Nazi Germany was defeated. The editors draw these connections well, while maintaining a balanced academic-style approach. It is indeed difficult to discuss this field of study without taking sides or pontificating on the morality of "who is a legitimate target." Chailiand and Blin walk this line well.
   -CLW

5 comments about Rogue Warrior.

1. For those looking for info or accounts of escapades and adventures a la The Unit, look no further. Richard Marcinko lived the life, lead the life, and ultimately had to deal with that life. From it all he is able to capture an image and accurately convey this to us, and to it is a style all his own.
   
   Right from the first page you are drawn into Marcinko's life and you want to cheer for him. He is fighting for our country and protecting us. Of course there is the gruesome side of the necessity of killing, of the almost joy of killing that underlies Marcinko's writing, not only within himself but within his fellow Seals as well. Alas, to those not in the field this may be hard to understand, but putting yourself in their shoes with enemies all around you, the only course of action is to shoot to kill, and who better to have do this than those that live on that thrill? Gruesome? Yes. Necessary? Yes, in real life and in Marcinko's writing of his life.
   
   We follow him from when he was a Frogman to joining the Seals and going to Vietnam. His personality is very strong and this flared to life in Vietnam and ultimately started his move up the ranks. Then there is the creation of Seal Team Six, which to the laymen is only fathomable on the television, so to hear Marcinko describe what he and his men were up to was absolutely fascinating. Further on his deployment to test the nation's most "secure" facilities... This was a hoot and I loved reading about this. Granted, I don't want to see that our tax paid facilities are as vulnerable as they were, but I would rather have our experts discover these flaws than some other bad guy.
   
   All in all, a great read. We are able to see Marcinko's life with a flare of writing to accurately convey his personality. I would recommend this to anyone.
   
   5 stars.



2. An old pants crapping hippy from the 60s will probably tell you about tripping on LSD for the first time, well Richard Marcinko tripped on Cobra venom in Cambodia. Yes he eats an entire Cobra piece by piece, eats the venom sacs and starts seeing bizarre checkerboard patterns in black n white.
   Wearing tire tread sandals on his feet dressed in black gym shorts Marcinko hunts down VC, shoots, dismembers, blows away and cusses out anyone in his path. Inbetween that he drinks a lot and screws a ton of women.
   
   This book rules, thats about all I can say. I read it in a day, passed it to some friends who also finished in one day. A classic, if you have any desire to check it out, check it out, its like used for 1 cent.



3. I really enjoyed this book Marcinko was one of the last of a dying breed in the military. I have spent most of my adult life in the armed forces and can definitely relate. Oddly enough his story ring true when now more then ever our military is so riddled with political correctness and politics you can't even do your job.



4. This book is an exciting roller coaster ride throught the life of Marcinko. It was hard to put down.
   
   I'm amazed that Marcinko as able to reach the rank and levels of authority he did. He was truly a "rogue" warrior. Amazing man, but clearly one who operated outside the norms of the military.
   
   My only exposure to SEALs was during 3 weeks of Airborne training over 25 years ago. A team was in my class and in many ways they fit the image portrayed in this book. They were extremely close knit non-conformist who could do so many push-ups that the drill sergeants (black hats) had to take turns yelling at them because their voices would go out before they even broke a sweat.
   
   To paraphrase a familiar quote - these are the "rough men" who allow us to sleep soundly in our beds because they are ready to visit violence on those who would do us harm.



5. A good book for military buffs. It's hard to say what is real or fiction in next book,
   but he says he did it all in this one. Made me laugh out loud more than once.
   Marcinko goes into great detail of characters.

5 comments about Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

1. Murakami's analysis of the Tokyo Sarin Attack is exactly the kind needed to understand all terrorism occuring in the world today. A great antidote to main-stream media's simplistic "us vs. them" morality tale description of terrorism. For concerned citizens of the post-9/11 world, I strongly recommend this book, together with Erich Fromm's "Fear of Freedom".



2. This book could have been good, but it's too long and too repetitive, the subject matter is very interesting, but the story gets retold a thousand times and it's just not very entertaining or insightful for that matter.



3. This easy-to-read book is unique in Murakami's own catalog. First of all, its his most true to life `documentary-style' book, consisting as it does of interviews, recollections and observations of selected people who were affected by the deadly gas attack in the Japan Metro in the 1990s. The book is not a `novel' - instead it breaks new ground for the author, and at times makes you wonder if this is the same man who gave us fantasy novels such as "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle" and "Kafka on the Shore".
   
   "Underground" is an easy book to read, but its also maddeningly difficult to finish in one sitting. It took me about two weeks to actually make it through the entire thing. Its quite long, and there is no clear narrative structure. I found the beginning of the book very odd. The actual restructured train incident has been pieced together by Murakami from newspaper reports, and he relies completely on eye witness reports to describe the shock and horror of the actual crime scene. He also does away with niceties, and is uncompromising in his criticism of Japanese society, the government, and Japanese mass media itself. In fact, through much of the book it did seem at one point that Murakami himself was sort of anti-Japanese (a fact that reaffirmed itself to me when I discovered he actually was sick of his fame in Japan and fled overseas instead to live in peace). But at other times, Murakami gives us a portrait of families who dealt with the disaster with great nobility and tenderness, and he empathizes whole-heartedly with all the victims of the incident.
   
   Murakami is more successful at entering the minds of the terrorists and giving us various plausible explanations as to why they did it. The most telling reason (pretty much "my boss told me to do it") is shocking at how it managed to sway so many young and even successful young men (and women) into joining the cult and falling for its' very twisted message. Murakami dispenses with casual observations here and attempts to create the portrait of a killer. In the end, his chilling depiction of the Cult is reason enough to buy this book, because its evident that this sort of psychopathic mentality exists in some form in every country. Japan is no exception.
   
   For all the horror here, there are also passages of great beauty and grace. One particular story of a woman who is a `living vegetable' because of the gas attack is endearing because Murakami sets the story up so well - we feel we know this person, and by the time tragedy strikes her, we are totally sold on reading a whole book only about her. Then you remind yourself that this is not fiction. Every word in this book is true, and Murakami's attempts at tracking down and scheduling interviews with some very unwilling participants (who still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder) are to be commended. Though thousands were affected on that day, the author seemed to have trouble pinning down even a tiny percentage of people who wanted to approach him and talk about it.
   
   That such an honest and superb account of that fateful day exists, is gift enough for me. Though I was aware of the incident when it occurred, I was possibly too young or engrossed in my studies to really pay it much attention. As I grew older and gravitated toward Japanese music and literature, I discovered Murakami. I only read this because I wanted to finish everything that Murakami had ever written, but as I went along I found myself lost in the story and the brilliant work contained therein. Surely, this is a topical book and not for everyone - in fact, I would prescribe it more for research scholars and students of history - but if you adore the works of Haruki Murakami, you will surely want to pick this up. Its revived in me an interest in world affairs and geopolitical events, and if one single book can do that, well, then more power to that book.
   
   Five Stars. Highly Recommended.



4. Some reviewers (including Murakami, writing on himself) have asserted that after Murakami`s long stay abroad, this book was primarily written by Murakami for himself as the author sought to come to grips with Japanese society again. Whatever Haruki Murakami`s rationale, `Underground` is worth a read, particularly to anyone who seeks to understand topics ranging from our new `postmodern` existence, to Japanese society and modern life, or just the nuts and bolts of the future of terrorism.
   
   A great deal emerges from these telling interviews; information that takes the form of insights which subtly impress themselves on the reader. `It made me realize all the more how frightening [mass media`s control] is` --victim Masanori Okuyama. `People raised in happy families probably wouldn`t join Aum` -- Harumi Iwakura, former Aum member. `The local police might not have any experience, but they were practically useless... they only showed up after the rescue operation was over,` --Naoyuki Ogata, victim. `People were foaming at the mouth... that half of the roadway was absolute hell. But on the other side, people were walking to work as usual` --Kiyoka Izumi, victim. Some of what came out of the interviews was information that came completely out of the blue, probably even to the author, such as the mention (in the book`s Japanese edition) that half the women interviewed suffered regularly from sexual assault while riding on Tokyo`s legendary so-packed-you-can`t-breathe trains.
   
   And it all emerges because Murakami`s strength is his intense focus here-- `I intentionally set up my camera at one fixed spot,` he writes. Outlines of events are sparse; the narratives are front and center. His wide approach (34 interviews from victims alone) allows for sweeping perspective on a number of topical issues and permits the reader to take from the book what they may. A more in-depth look at the inner workings of Aum, the socioeconomic background of terror, or the disconnect of modern digital life are all natural follow-up reads-- the reader need only choose their path. While keeping it simple, Murakami has written and complied a work, a look at the dawn of the modern urban age of terror, that will be read for years.



5. I read both in Japanese before this English translation. It was several years ago that I first read the original of "The Place That was Promised" (Part 2), and I have just read that of "Underground" (Part 1), which is the first time.
   What I tried to do in rereading them in English was to know what had to be changed when they were introduced to other countries and if the language might change how I felt reading the text.
   The impressions I got from the originals were still so vivid, though, even graphic, that the latter of my trying would be failed.
   I even had a nightmare at the night I had just read how the interviewees described the incident at Kodenmacho station.
   When the gas attack happened, I was a student and lived in a different area of Tokyo. Though I sometimes used the subway lines and went to the area which was attacked, the news, either live broadcasts or videos, gave me nothing much but feeling "Something quite weird happened".
   In a few years, even when I went to work in the very same area using the very same lines at almost the same time of the day, I didn't remembered the attack at all.
   The method Murakami used in "Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche" reminds me of a documentary film, "Capturing the Friedmans"(2003), which is "just kind of peels the onion and shows the unspoken contradictions and the difficulties" (said by the filmmaker, Andrew Jarecki), but the words captured by Murakami visualizes "what the truth is" more vividly in your mind.
   In "The Place That was Promised", the writer (Murakami), who it is said that "Underground" (Part 1) gave a new understanding of his mission as an author, sometimes seemed to be being struck or at a loss.
   He must have recognized himself as "Catcher in the Rye", and looking back at his works, he would have thought most of his way had been on the right track.
   Through the interviews for "The Place That was Promised", though, he seemed to have just found that his works might have totally failled to catch people who he thought he could and had to catch, and that it might be much harder to reach such people than he thought.

5 comments about America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11.

1. America Between the Wars tells the story of 11/9 to 9/11 through informative, behind-the-scenes stories that illustrate the dynamic and contentious foreign policy debates from the fall of the Berlin wall to the fall of the twin towers. If you like the stories behind the history, you'll love America Between the Wars. And if you usually prefer novels, you may find Chollet and Goldgeier's narrative voice appealing. Rather than writing a wonky, boring foreign policy book as so many unfortunately do, the authors present a relevant and relatable book. Especially for those who lived through this period, America Between the Wars reveals critical elements of our past and our future.



2. An excellent read for someone who wants a non-partisan approach to history's impact on international relations and foreign policy. Additionally, Chollet and Goldgeier postulate how our current state of affairs will shape tomorrow's. This is a perfect book for someone who wants to understand where we were and where we are going.



3. This is a tremendously important book that explains what happened when the Berlin wall fell and America's foreign policy establishment was forced to confront a world that was no longer organized by the US/Soviet rivalry. As it becomes increasingly clear that the "war on terrorism" is only a part of the broader foreign policy needed to protect our nation in a complex and multi-polar world, this is the book to read if you want to understand how the next generation of policymakers will draw on the lessons of the recent past to set a new course. Chollet and Goldgeier know what they are talking about. They have done exhaustive research, and each of them has hands on experience in the foreign policy business. It's a bonus that the writing is lively and engaging. Don't miss this book.



4. I was in Jr. High and High School during the 90s and so wasn't very familiar with this period before reading this, and while interested and somewhat familiar with policy, am certainly no expert. After years of thinking I knew who neoconservatives were and what both parties "stood for", this book really put things into perspective and contextualized things for me. And though it's a "history", it draws extensively on interviews with leading policymakers & insiders during the period, so the text ends up reading more like a narrative (great for a novel-reader like myself).
   
   In sum, this was really informative, interesting, and a quick read - perfect for anyone looking for a genuinely nonpartisan, nuanced look at how we got to where we are - both domestically and abroad. Definitely a must for your summer reading list.



5. This book is the first account of US foreign policy in the 1990s that treats the decade as genuine history. I mean that it does not simply offer a chronicle of the period, or a set of newspaper clippings and individual events - it offers a guiding historical interpretation that sets those years in relation to the Cold War before and 9/11 and beyond. It is very convincing that there is far more continuity today with the foreign policies of those years than many people, left or right, give credit for. It is a highly persuasive interpretation of the period and I believe will remain the standard account of its foreign policy for a long time to come.

1 comments about The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God.

1. In "The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God", author Jonathan Kirsch makes no pretense of cool, detached objectivity. He very obviously loathes the very notion of the Catholic Church's Inquisition (which formally existed from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth centuries), and he displays open disdain for those revisionist historians who have sought to excuse or minimize the actions of the Inquisition in rooting out and destroying heretics, Jews, and Muslims.
   
   "The Grand Inquisitor's Manual" abounds in vivid tales of the cruel excesses perpetrated by agents of the Catholic Church in the name of defending an ideal of a single orthodox faith, leaving no doubt that an appalling toll of fear and pain was levied against anyone suspected of deviating in the slightest manner from a narrow definition of what constituted a true Christian.
   
   Kirsch's book is perhaps too anecdotal with too few detailed statistics to serve as a definitive history of the Inquisition; even after reading "The Grand Inquisitor's Manual" I do not feel I have a good grasp of how many people suffered directly in the hands of the Inquisition. Furthermore, the last section of the book, seeking to establish a relationship between the Inquisition and the activities of the Nazi Holocaust, Stalinist purges, the American "witch hunts" of McCarthy era, and the presentday excesses of the "War on Terror", seems to me to set awkwardly with the rest of the book.

5 comments about Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World..

1. Most people think that they think rationally about security decisions.
   
   Most don't even know when they're making security decisions.
   
   Fewer know what those decisions really entail.
   
   Only Bruce Schneier knows how to make those decisions sensibly, and he's passing that information along to the world.



2. The content of this book slightly overlap the content of the author previous book Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World but presents the material with a different angle. An angle with the perspective of a security expert that witness security measures taken by governments in reaction of the 9/11 terrorism attack and wants people to understand the absurdity of some of these measures.
   
   It is not technical at all and does not necessitate any particular background to understand and enjoy. The author explains clearly how to make a risk assessment of something that you want to make more secure and then evaluate the cost of the security measures. Only when you have that data, you can evaluate if the added security is worth it.
   
   These explanations are backed up with concrete examples such as evaluating the risk to make purchase with a credit card over the internet. Other examples include the absurdity of securing a lunch in a company refrigerator because the potential loss if having a lunch stolen does not justify securing it. The author also explains that even with technologies that looks very accurate such as facial recognition with an error rate of, let's say, 0.0001 % are totally ineffective when they have to control a huge number of persons like a stadium crowd because even with this accuracy, they would create an unmanageable amount of false positive alerts.
   
   The author also elaborate about why you should question the motivation of a security provider when it is a third party and link this with how people fears can be exploited to introduce invasive, excessively expensive and inefficient security measures. I think that the goal of the author was to make people more critics about security questions and my opinion is that his goal has been successfully achieved.



3. Beyond Fear is a well-written book on the fundamental concepts and applications of security theory. In the first chapter, he proposes a sequence of five questions that should be asked about any suggested security system.
   1. What assets are you trying to protect?
   2. What are the risks to those assets?
   3. How well does the security solution mitigate the risks?
   4. What other risks does the security solution cause?
   5. What costs and trade-offs does the security solution impose?
   
   He spends the rest of the book discussing various aspects of security, and talking about various implementations of security both historical and modern. He finished writing this book in 2003, so there are many references to the 9-11 incidents and the security activities implemented because of them.



4. I was pretty excited to read Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear, I have enjoyed hearning him speak and like his blog. I will say that the book could have said what it says with a lot less pages, possibly even an essay. However, there are lots of great stories and a fantastic word picture called "Security Theater". His illustration is that after 9/11 no one knew what to do to combat air terrorism, so they gave the appearance of action by doing things like confiscating nail files. Oh do I agree that much of what we see is security theater!
   
   Bruce has a five step process he tries to illustrate, especially in the second half of the book:
   
   * What assets are you trying to protect?
   * What are the risks to these assets? ( I think threats is a more correct word than risks )
   * How well does the security solution mitigate those risks?
   * What other risks does the security solution cause?
   * What trade-offs does the security solution require?
   
   This is a nice implementation of threat vector analysis and he tells great stories. I am not sure the book teaches that much, but it might be a valuable awareness tool for executives.



5. Nutshell review - A great read. Entertaining and informative. So well written and very useful at the same time.

5 comments about The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration.

1. Jack Goldsmith's book about his eight months at the Department of Justice is gracefully written, historically informed, and filled with great Washington vignettes. (For example, his job interview at the White House began with hostile questions about why he once gave money to a Democratic candidate for Congress.) Goldsmith has an entertaining knack for sticking a knife in people in understated prose. Alberto Gonzales comes off as out of his depth. John Yoo is gently chided for writing laughably sloppy (but convenient) legal memos. David Addington seems like Darth Vader, intent on expanding Presidential power while crushing his bureacratic foes. (Of all the book's characters, Addington is the only one whom Goldsmith really seems to dislike. He calls Addington's legal views "idiosyncratic" and "crazy".)
   
   Helpfully for citizens, Goldsmith documents case after case where proposals to put the war on terror on a sounder legal and political footing were rejected because the White House didn't want to share power with Congress or be seen as heeding European concerns about human rights. It's clear that the goal of "never weakening the Presidency" was at least as important to Cheney et al as the goal of fighting al-Qaeda. Long-suffering State Department and military lawyers were vindicated (and the White House was horrified) when the Supreme Court finally ruled that core humanitarian requirements of the Geneva Conventions apply to the war on terror.
   
   Goldsmith confirms that many Administration officials -- from cabinet secretaries to CIA agents -- were worried about being prosecuted once the emergency was over and calm was restored. Goldsmith does insist that no one knowingly broke the law, but you get the feeling that no Administration since Nixon's has been so filled with litigation-dread. Goldsmith also confirms that everyone saw Yoo's memos as get-out-of-jail free cards for torturers. He keeps up the pretense that Yoo was an honorable official who buckled under the stress of wartime service in Washington. However, you don't have to be too cynical to see what was really going on. Goldsmith didn't think that the military ever authorized illegal acts on the strength of Yoo's warped memos. He wasn't so sure about the CIA.
   
   Goldsmith himself is a bit of a mystery. It's hard to believe he wasn't some kind of operator. (Why is it a convention of Washington memoirs that top jobs always fall in the lap of the author?) That said, his writing is balanced and calm, and he comes across as an open-minded, rather philosophical conservative who was out of place in the screw-all-enemies atmosphere of the Bush/Cheney Administration. Maybe the picture is accurate. He did quit Justice after eight months to take a job at Harvard, which is hardly the behavior of a political animal.



2. I found this to be an extremely valuable book on a radioactive topic--the purported legal justifications for the Bush Administration's "war on terror" and its treatment of detainees. The book takes an unique perspective--the author served for 9 months as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel ("OLC") at the Department of Justice. Those of us who are "alums" of DOJ know how critical the work of OLC is, since it lays down the Department's "rulings" in its opinions as to what is legal and what is not legal. These opinions bind the entire government and so are of great significance.
   
   It helps that this hot topic is addressed by someone who worked in the Bush administration and is of rather conservative temperment, rather than an outside critic. The book offers remarkable insight into the role of OLC in the Bush administration strategy, the interplay of law and military action, competing conceptions of presidential power, and the role of International Law (such as Geneva conventions) in placing limits on American freedom of action. We learn that administration officials were terrified of being pursued once out of office by Independent Counsel, Inspectors General, and foreign governments for their actions involving detainees. Such laws as the "War Crimes Act," the "War Powers Act," the Torture Statute, and so forth caused some officials to feel they were being "strangled by law."
   
   The author discusses and critiques the key OLC opinions, many authored by John Yoo, which authorized the "treatment" accorded to detainees, at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. For those really interested in details, it is handy to have a copy of "The Torture Papers" edited by Greenberg and Dratel handy, since it contains almost all the key documents then available. The author could not discuss in detail the key March 14, 2003 memo which was then classified; recently, it has been released and is easily available on the internet. The author, who withdrew several of the OLC opinions by Yoo, presents the reader with several interesting questions: (a) are lawyers making terrorism policy and, if so, what are the consequences? (b) what is OLC, independent and court like, or a legal apologist?; and (c) most importantly, why did the Bush administration not seek to consult with Congress and secure authorizations rather than pursue its "go it alone" policy. After all, Congressional consultation and authorizations were good enough for Lincoln and FDR--why not this time around?



3. In the book "The Terror Presidency" by Jack Goldsmith, the author gives the best reasoning for allowing torture that I have ever seen. He has also written opinions that give the widest latitude to the government to suspend habeas corpus and trial by jury. Mr. Goldsmith is a conservative lawyer and a college professor, according the book's jacket. (Obviously not of the "originalist" school of thought since it is clear the makers would be appalled by these opinions which are exactly the opposite of their intentions.) Mr Goldsmith's idea is to stretch the Constitution as far as possible in order to deal with the danger of terrorism.
   
   There are other opinions that, according to Mr. Goldsmith, are necessary for the United States. For instance, he states that the US should never recognize the International Criminal Court and uses Rumsfeld's explanation that weak nations could use it to protect themselves against powerful nations. The current administration calls the use of laws as a substitute for "traditional military action," "Lawfare."
   
   One hardly knows what to say to these logical arguments. They certainly do not agree with the notions about this country that I learned at my father's knee. He taught me that we were a nation of laws. The poor and the weak were as important as the rich and the strong. I can't imagine that the founding fathers would say use of military action is preferable to using the courts.
   
   There has been a lot of conversation about using torture "in an emergency." The only rule a civilized nation should have is that torture is illegal period. If one of our agents gets hold of someone who is planning a terrorist attack and knows in his heart that torture would uncover the plot, that agent should be willing to go to jail for ignoring the law. His sentence would likely be short if this torture saved a lot of lives. Civil disobedience to save the nation should also mean taking the penalty for that disobedience. Think how many people have sacrificed their very lives for this country. Secret agents presumably are willing to put their lives on the line for their country.
   
   The depressing thing is that we used to be the "good guys." In the past, if our government was doing something shameful, it tried to keep it a secret. These days we don't even try to hide it.
   
   Everyone should read this book even if it is depressing. Mr. Goldsmith seems to have no clue that he has written a treatise on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and completely ignored morality, principle, law, and the Founding Fathers.



4. I thank Mr. Goldsmith for sharing his experience in the Bush Presidency. The account was informative on the workings of government and the men involved. Well done!



5. The grand irony of the (early - pre-2004) Bush administration's counterterrorism policies, Goldsmith observes, is that although the Bush administration lawyers sought "to leave the presidency stronger than they found it", in fact they "seem to have achieved the opposite". The reason is simply that the American constitutional system really does have three branches of government. Although the judiciary in principle has little constitutional role to play in matters of war or foreign policy generally, the fact that the war on terror has been conceived by the administration as a global war - in which the whole world is the battleground, in which even American citizens on American soil could be named as enemy combatants and indefinitely detained solely on the say-so of the executive - ensures that the Supreme Court cannot be left aside.
   
   The administration's tunnel vision has thus left it blind to the fact that, by seeming to go it alone and refusing to go to Congress for such things as limits, but also authority, to hold detainees at Guantánamo, or specific rules on interrogation that confine, but also legally protect, interrogators, the administration has tied itself in marriage to a far more exigent spouse - the Court. The message of successive detainee cases from the Supreme Court - Hamdi and Hamdan, particularly - has not so far been that the constitution forbids much of what the executive proposes to do. After all, most of this pertains to non- citizens detained outside the United States; and until the Bush administration's spectacularly overreaching legal theories blew up in its face, no one thought the constitution applied to them at all. The message is, rather, that the administration should seek Congressional assent for what it wants to do. The Court has signalled provisionally that it will accept at least some extraordinary rules in the war on terror - provided, however, that the political branches have together given those departures democratic legitimacy. The Court's limits, following the just argued Boumediene case, to what the political branches might do even together are not yet firmly drawn.
   
   But there is no going it alone in a system of divided constitutional powers. If not Congress, it will be the Court - or more exactly, as Benjamin Wittes has noted, the inconstant Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court's swing vote - that endorses policy. In pursuing unfettered executive power to act alone, the administration has made Justice Kennedy its five-star general, its very own Douglas MacArthur in the war on terror. On the infrequent occasions when the administration has been forced by the Court to go to it for authority, it has been denied practically nothing. It has not so far mattered that the Bush administration is a lame duck, or whether Congress is in Republican or Democratic hands.
   
   The administration seems not to have understood that what lives by executive discretion dies by executive discretion. If the Bush administration took counterterrorism as seriously as it took the abstraction of executive power, it would have thought ahead to its own departure from office. If it truly believed that its approach to counterterrorism was correct, then from the first day of its second term it would have engaged with Congress to create institutions to outlive any particular Presidency. It would have thought about the example of the Cold War and how a democracy deals with a genuine threat to a whole way of life. In retrospect, the democratic institutions of the Cold War did a remarkable job of balancing safety and liberty over decades; pure executive discretion cannot possibly promise the same. The administration having undertaken none of these things, US counterterrorism policy today flails without long-term strategic guidance or institutional stability.
   
   Yet any future institutional settlement for counterterrorism inevitably bumps up against the contradictory impulses of government officials who confronted Goldsmith on his entry into the OLC and impelled his departure not many months later. The Terror Presidency says repeatedly that government policy after 9/11 was Bush's instruction to the then Attorney General, John Ashcroft: "Don't ever let this happen again". For Goldsmith, every Presidency for the foreseeable future will be characterized by an "unremitting fear of devastating attack, an obsession with preventing the attack, and a proclivity to act aggressively and preemptively to do so". No matter what might get said in the course of an election campaign, a Democratic administration once in office, "will be even more anxious than the current President to thwart the attack". In order to act as aggressively as the spirit of the age demands, however, government officials in the CIA and elsewhere must have confidence that apparently authorized aggressive actions that turn out to be mistaken, unnecessary, excessive or cause collateral damage to innocents will not be judged after the fact by a different set of standards than those going in. The criminal laws now in place make it very difficult, however, for operational officers of government, whether in detention, interrogation, surveillance or other covert activities, to have such confidence. The criminal laws use vague terms such as "inhumane", "degrading" or "humiliating" that practically invite after-the-fact revisionism, creating legal uncertainties that become insurmountable obstacles to action. Congress and the administration, in the seemingly perverse desire to have it both ways - encourage action but have the option to prosecute it afterwards - refuse to be specific as to what is actually permitted and not. Operational officials therefore respond rationally to the disincentives to act created by legal uncertainty.
   
   Understanding the raison d'être of the torture memos issued by OLC in 2002, prior to Goldsmith's arrival, is nearly impossible without understanding their relationship to the vagaries of these criminal laws. The role of the OLC for some fifty years has been to give authoritative advice to the executive branch on legality and constitutionality. As Goldsmith notes, of necessity its opinions are often secret and not reviewable by any court. This is not as strange as it sounds. It is a part of the executive's obligation to "faithfully execute" the laws; to do that, the executive must know what the laws are and what they mean - a function always delegated, however, to the Attorney General, constitutionally obliged to give advice on "questions of law when required by the President of the United States". In practice, however, this might easily tempt lawyers in the OLC to write tendentious briefs to justify what the executive already intends to do, under circumstances in which judicial review may not be possible.
   
   The OLC has so far insulated its lawyers from pressure by the executive. In matters of national security law, those OLC opinions operate as immunity against criminal prosecution of officials who act in good faith even if, ultimately, wrongly. It is almost impossible for the Justice Department to prosecute an official when that same department's OLC has blessed the conduct. The torture memos therefore purported to define torture for purposes of guiding what the executive might lawfully do. From the standpoint of CIA agents and other officials, these opinions offered immunity for their actions if they acted in reasonable reliance on them. The OLC in 2002 offered opinions on the definition of torture that certainly fulfilled this function; but they did so in ways that Goldsmith could not sustain, drafted as tendentious and conclusory briefs.
   
   Worse, they did so not within bounds of what actual administration interrogation policy might be - waterboarding, for example - but instead within the maximal legal bounds offering the most iron-clad protection possible against criminal liability for anything. Goldsmith says that he was not disturbed by the exploration of the outermost limits of the law against torture as such, but these memos had a purpose fundamentally different from simply setting out boundaries. They more or less authorized anything short of Saddam's infamous meat grinder, and then, for good measure, added that in any case the President was not bound by any of this. The memos were disastrous because they left the understanding that these hypotheticals at the outer orbits of law constituted a statement of the government's actual policy proposals. Goldsmith observes that although the charge is frequently made that the Bush administration is "lawless", it is better understood as the most over-lawyered in US history.
   
   Goldsmith was pilloried in press articles suggesting that he had authored the torture memos. Only later did it emerge that he had in fact withdrawn them. This has caused Goldsmith to be treated in the media as a kind of hero, a whistle-blower, though Goldsmith himself feels uncomfortable with "the Manichean tone . . . one sees so often when press and intellectuals criticize the Bush administration's attempts to balance liberty and security". His discomfort is evident from the fact that he is contributing his profits from this book to charity and that he has refrained from wholesale criticism of the Bush administration. As custodian of the OLC, Goldsmith believed he had a constitutional obligation to offer opinions that were not merely briefs in support of a preordained position. Withdrawing the torture memos also meant, as he well knew, withdrawing immunity upon which mid-tier government officials and agents had relied in good faith. Goldsmith's exit from government was not on account of his being fired; indeed, the Attorney General or the President could have overruled him and did not. No one stopped Jack Goldsmith from withdrawing the torture memos; but having "reversed or rescinded more OLC opinions that any of my predecessors", he writes, many people "lost faith in me. What else might I withdraw and when?"
   
   Many people believe that the terror threat is overrated, the problem is to "manage" rather than defeat it. Goldsmith acknowledges this emerging view, and while rejecting it does not seek to refute it. America will live the Terror Presidency, Goldsmith says, with its dense moral ambiguities unfolding deep within a democracy's many necessary bureaucracies and institutions. The moral uncertainties, lest anyone mistake his meaning, are captured with brutal precision by Goldsmith's own last words on the torture memos:
   
   "Some people have praised my part in withdrawing and starting to fix the interrogation opinions. But it is very easy to imagine a different world in which my withdrawal of the opinions led to a cessation of interrogations that future investigations made clear could have stopped an attack that killed thousands. In this possible world my actions would have looked pusillanimous and stupid, not brave."
   
   (This is taken from my review of this book in the Times Literary Supplement, December 24, 2007.)

3 comments about The Islamist.

1. This is truly a must read for every Westerner. The basic story is engaging enough--how a peaceful Muslim becomes a radical Islamist and then becomes disillusioned and returns to true Islam. But the real value in the book is the education you get about the origins of radical Islam, how it is spread and why it is dangerous. I learned more by reading this book than anything else I have ever heard or read. I don't know why it isn't published in the USA. It should be required reading for all.



2. This book clarified for me the difference between being a Muslim and being an Islamist and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a better understanding of the difference. All too often, it's difficult to separate the actual religion from what this group of people who are called Islamists practice but I can now say that after reading this book I will never ever just lump the two together.
   
   Read this book and you will be given a lesson on the origins of radical Islam and how it is spread. In contrast, you will also be given a glimpse into how Islam is practiced and learn that the religion has a number of teachings and beliefs which are both beautiful and peaceful.
   
   Ed Husain is also a gifted writer. His words manage to convey enough details that allows me to almost visualize what he is expressing. Highly recommended.



3. Don't buy this book expecting to learn anything about radical Islamic beliefs. All this book offers is a daily account of the tasks the author performed while a member of different radical movements (distributing fliers, holding meetings). I did not find any deeper meaning within the book. Yes, the author does state that he adapted more peaceful Islamic teachings, but once again not very much about those teachings is explained to us, besides an enormous list of names of scholars and educators the author has studied. I picked up this book hoping to learn about the mentality and teachings of radical Islam, but all I learned was how the author spent his youth organizing meetings and distributing fliers.