CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME - DOUGLAS VALENTINE

Back at it, more 20th century history/CIA stuff. The most obvious comparison would be with the other Valentine I read recently, The Phoenix Program, which I would say is a much better book. While The Phoenix Program is very detailed and focused on a series of government actions, this book is much more sprawling and would serve as a good introduction to these topics. In some ways it reminds me of Understanding Power, which is a good intro to Noam Chomsky but doens’t go as deep into any one particular topic. Also, like Understanding Power, some of the chapters in this book are interviews with Valentine. He’s got an impressively wide range of knowledge about CIA history and a pretty good overarching theory of how the CIA and various intelligence agencies work, his theory is in the title itself, but I was most interested when he gets into the nitty-gritty of a particular topic. To me, the most compelling parts were when he was tracing the legacy of Phoenix and showing how it shows up in other actions. Basically, it’s developed in Vietnam, as outlined in his other book, before being perfected in South and Central America during the 70’s and 80’s and before being used as the template for the GWOT. The number of folks, like terrorism advisor David Kilcullen or former Delta Force Commdander (and then Family Reserch Council goon) Gen. Will Boykin, he’s able to quote as outright stating that we need to model our counter-insurgency strategy on Phoenix is extensive. The number of powerful people, from John Negroponte to Governor and Senator from Nebraska Bob Kerrey to Congressman Rob Simmons to San Quentin assistant-warden turned senior advisor to the Iraqi Director General of Corrections where he closed down Abu Ghraib Prison (in a huge suprise,he found no evidence of wide-spread torture) Donald Bordenkircher, who are literal Phoenix alums is also astonishing and chilling. Excited for Eddie Gallagher to be elected to congress in our era. Second to the Phoenix stuff, there’s an interesting throughline about the nature of drug enforcement and America’s (tho, especially the CIA’s) use and manipulation of these markets going back to, at least, the KMT (and to the Opium wars if you want to throw in British history). Valentine has written a few books that I haven’t read on those topics in particular that I’ll have to check out, we only get a sort of overview here. The tone is a bit more polemic and it’s a bit less scholarly and focused than I would prefer but it would make a good overview of these topic for a neophyte. I learned a lot of interesting stuff. REX84 organized crimes.