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Title: Piercing the Veil of Secrecy: Litigation Against U.S. Intelligence by Janine M. Brookner ISBN: 0-89089-221-0 Publisher: Carolina Academic Pr Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Piercing the veil of secrecy
Comment: This book certainly did not repeat not unveil anything new and interesting. I found the book to be very one-sided and the opinion(s) and alleged crimes were not fairly presented nor represented. Brookner may have been a fine case officer but she too probably has some skeletons to unveil. She managed to garner information based on hearsay and opinion and not the facts.
I regret that she has not given the legal institutions and professionals anything but blah blah as she tries to embark on her new legal career. Luckily I did not purchase this book but instead borrowed it...and returned it too.
Rating: 5
Summary: John 8:32, Ye Shall Know the TRUTH...
Comment:
Disclosure: I knew and served with Janine Brookner as a case officer overseas. I liked her then and I like her now even through I have not heard from her since we ran into one another in the halls near SOG Maritime in the late 1980's. She deserved to win her case against the white-boy wanna-be-preppy bubbas that are destroying the Directorate of Operations today, and now, with the modest sum she got after paying her lawyer, she has--after law school and substantive experience taking on US Intelligence Community lawyers--*nailed it* with a book that is both a lawyer's dream and every intelligence professional's awakening.
I have myself had experience with security morons (these are the guys that got to their high ranks after twenty years of checking safes at night), and I have also had experience with the very high quality people that CIA has in the Office of the General Counsel and in some positions in security. Interestingly, when I had my problem with morons, the Deputy Director of Security was a woman, she got it, and she fixed it. On balance, from experience, I give CIA as a whole and the US Intelligence Community over-all, very very high marks for being good to its people and bending over backwards to avoid harassment. If anything, as the Ames case showed, the Agency has been too tolerant of aberrant behavior (alcoholism, adultery, divorce, and suicide are too high in the DO, although this has improved in the past ten years). I also have to give the Agency's publications review process an A+. Tough love critic of the CIA/IC that I am, I have *never* felt abused by the righteous and correct process that I signed a lifetime deal on.
There are, however, with the above as context, two major problems that this book addresses, and Janine Brookner has earned my "beyond five stars" for the service she renders with her methodical and documented endeavor. This book is an instant classic and reference manual in two ways:
1) When "management" decides to railroad someone, they have unlimited power to do so, and most people cannot fight back. I was myself rail-roaded by a man named Ted Price, a real mediocrity, a small man with a Napoleon complex, and it took me years to get the system to clean up the mess he made. I was not smart enough to fight back legally. This book empowers the many people who have been set to "Fitness for Duty" physicals (emphasis on showing them to be nuts, or scaring them into resigning for fear of being officially classified as nuts and barred from further federal employment). I know several such people, both analysts and operators, and in every single case it was management that was nuts or derelict in its duty, not the officers. The officers were all out-spoken, deeply in love with their profession and proud of their work, and loath to see the system break down as it has (and as we all knew it would from about 1985 onwards). Had the "nuts" been listened to in the 1980's and 1990's, 9-11 would not have happened and George Tenet would not be making excuses for having faired to unscrew the Directorate of Operations in the past seven years. Now he needs another five years, with the same fools in charge? Please.
2) The other area where this book is vital is in outlining in terms that any Senator or Representative (most of them lawyers) can understand--there needs to be a legal section in the National Security Act that is inevitably making its way toward passage. I used to think that a FISA Court Ombudsman--someone we all trust, like Ken Bass, one of the twelve masters of the court, or Janine Brookner herself, was the solution. What this book had demonstrated to me is that there are both too many problems (and more remedies than I realized), and someone has to codify a body of law that remediates the dysfunctionality of personnel protections within an archipelago of secret fiefdoms.
This book is relevant to both the lawyers and the serving professionals in each of the seven tribes of intelligent work: national, military, law enforcement, business, academia, NGO-investigative journalism, and citizen-labor-religions, because all organizations in the last ten years have been moving toward what one early critic of the CIA called "the cult of secrecy." Credit card companies and other vendors are including binding arbitration on their terms as a condition of the sale, and those not reading the fine print are trapped into giving up all of their existing rights under due process law, including rights to a jury trial. Secrecy goes hand in hand with corruption and bad practices that desires concealment, so this book is relevant as a guide to what happens when secrecy and corruption are taken to their nth degree.
Bravo, Janine. Sushi on me anytime.
Rating: 1
Summary: Piercing the Veil of Secrecy
Comment: I found the book very bias and the more I read, the more I realized that the author truly has taken a superficial view of the Agency. In short, waste of money and time.
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Title: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll ISBN: 1594200076 Publisher: The Penguin Press HC Pub. Date: 23 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror by DAVID FRUM, RICHARD PERLE ISBN: 1400061946 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Amicus Humoriae: An Anthology of Legal Humor by Robert M. Jarvis, Thomas E. Baker, Andrew J. McClurg ISBN: 0890894108 Publisher: Carolina Academic Pr Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Partners at the Creation: The Men Behind Postwar Germany's Defense and Intelligence Establishments by James H. Critchfield ISBN: 1591141362 Publisher: Naval Institute Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
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Title: A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country by Benjamin Weiser ISBN: 1891620541 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 20 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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