Bloodless Coup

Bamford's "A Pretext for War"

A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies by James Bamford. (Amazon link: Pretext for War (2004))

Brief Review: Nothing anyone hasn’t seen before. Neo-cons push US into war, force intel community to go along. Other authors have done this better. Skip this book and read his other ones.

James Bamford is a very good writer, and one who writes about an area that is covered rarely: the bureaucratic operations and activities of the nations intelligence services, specifically the National Security Agency. The NSA is the agency charged mostly with securing our own communications (making sure no one can read our mail) and penetrating other state’s communications (making sure we can read their mail). The NSA operates under the Pentagon (the head of the NSA is always a military general, who rotates back to active duty when his tour is finished), and has the largest budget of any intelligence agency (far larger than the CIA’s). Bamford has written two books on this subject before: Puzzle Palace (1983) and Body of Secrets (2002). These two books lay out in great detail how the NSA works, what it does, and what its successes and failures were/are. They are very good books, describing how the NSA fits into the overall intelligence community, who it reports to and where the money goes. Both of those books are far superior to Pretext for War.

As I noted, Bamford is a good writer, who clearly has sources in this (fairly closed) community. When I heard he was writing about this topic, I figured I would get as close to the real story as someone could come up with. Bamford's facts may be right, but his writing suffers in this book (it feels rushed - maybe he pushed to get it out before the election? I'm speculating.) This is a short, somewhat disconnected book. It begins with a long story of what happened on the morning of Sept. 11th, 2001 (a story told in greater detail by the 9/11 commission). The book then fills us in on how we missed the hijackers as they moved into this country (again, something the 9/11 commission report details). Finally, Bamford describes the shift in emphasis away from Al Qaeda/Afghanistan to Hussein/Iraq. He argues that the leadership of the defense department pushed the intelligence towards the idea that Iraq was a clear and present danger when in reality the intelligence said nothing of the sort. Bamford is very angry, and while anger can help some authors speak with a clearer voice, I do not think that is the case here. The book is short, and contains no real detail (not already known from other sources) about the failure of the intelligence community to accurately portray the state of Iraq. Bamford thinks this is because of a deliberate deception on the part of various neocons in the administration (partisans of the right, or course, would disagree). His anger shines through, but the story does not. Skip. (Though, as noted, if you have an interest in this subject, read his other books, which are very good.)