Oh, what bitter disappointment.

I picked this book up on the cheap, and I admit: I put a lot of stock in the cover. Just look at it, asking:

"Has the CIA become a rogue agency?"



Fuck yeah, it has. They launder drug money so they can fund their operations free of Congressional budgetary scrutiny. They classify every damn thing they do with such high security requirements, Congress isn't even allowed to know about it! Former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt even admitted on his deathbed that the Kennedy assassination was a CIA operation. How can you get more rogue than that?

Look at the cover again: America's Enemies Within the CIA.

About damn time somebody wrote about that. Look at how much Middle East ire has been raised by CIA interference in the region. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammud Mosaddeq in Iran, in 1953. They overthrew the Guatamalan government of Arbenz in 1954. The rest of us have to live with blowback from those ops (operations). It's a rogue agency, pursuing its own agenda, and putting ordinary Americans in harm's way as a result. That sounds like an enemy to me.

GOOD! Finally somebody is writing about it!

Right?

No, not right. This book is a psychotic, foaming-at-the-mouth neoconservative diatribe whose central thesis is that the CIA is a far left-wing instrument which (among other things) waged open war with the George W. Bush administration from 2001-2008.

Huh? Left wing??!?

Yeah! You heard me right: fun just busted out at the crazy house!! Rowan Scarborough would have you believe the CIA- that infamous sub rosa, black ops agency, responsible for secret renditions, operating a gulag of phantom prisons on foreign soil- far from the protections of due process and habeas corpus - is run by a bunch of effete, blue-blooded, pot-smoking, hackeysac-playing, Harvard hippy, draft-dodging dope fiends!


This is how Rowan Scarborough sees the CIA
(imagine Crosby, Stills and Nash's "Woodstock" playing here)

Has anybody told Mr. Scarborough that one of the former Directors of the CIA was George H. W. Bush, who went on to become a REPUBLICAN Vice President and then President? Was he part of this left wing conspiracy too? ...or wasn't the CIA always left wing? If not, when did it become left wing? Scarborough never says.

Oh, I just used the "C" word intentionally! You know why? Because with one breath, Scarborough berates former CIA agent and 9/11 Truther Ray McGovern (who declared that 9/11 was an inside job) as a crazy conspiracy nut... but with the next breath, Scarborough describes a vast, decades-long elaborate left wing conspiracy to use the CIA to destroy the Republican party. So typical. I've seen this before: somebody makes fun of conspiracies as unbelievable, implausible schemes which only dupes and fools believe in... until you mention a conspiracy he happens to believe in, then suddenly conspiracies become plausible, reasonable, even sacrosanct and unassailable. Despite their protests to the contrary, most people don't seem to actually think conspiracy theories are crazy at all; they just think other peoples' conspiracy theories are crazy.

Well, it's the same way with 9/11, isn't it? Speculate that it's an inside job, and people line up to say how you oughtta be locked up on the funny farm... but then look at the official story: Osama Bin Laden? Al Quaeda?? the 19 hijackers?? The official story of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory! ...but that's okay, because it's one shrouded in the legitimacy of press and official endorsement. Feel better about it now? Can you say "Cognative Dissonance"?

So... it didn't take long reading this book to figure out that it was a bunch of partisan crying-in-the-coffee. Scarborough drops a lot of dubious quotes in this book: (page 31) Senator Jay Rockefeller declares "I just had the most magnificent shit."


"I just had the most magnificent shit."
- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (p.31)

Wow! I'm no fan of the Rockefellers, but it seems weird to hear a Senator commenting so openly about his bowel movements. Did Scarborough hear him say that, or was it second-hand information, and if so- who said the Senator said this? We don't know, because there are almost no attributions in this whole book.

Let me restate that for clarity. THERE ARE ALMOST NO FUCKING ATTRIBUTIONS IN THIS ENTIRE BOOK!! NOT A SINGLE FOOTNOTE! NOT A SINGLE ENDNOTE! IT IS A BUNCH OF WILD CLAIMS, WHICH ARE EITHER SIMPLY NOT ATTRIBUTED TO ANYBODY AT ALL, OR WHICH ARE ATTRIBUTED TO UNNAMED, SECRET SOURCES!!

A few more examples of unattributed statements:

- former NSA intelligence expert (page 39) Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski supposedly claimed "to have a sharp ear for conspericies".

That's a weird claim. Is that really what she said about herself? Who did she say it to? In what context? Was that supposed to make her seem more credible, or was this something Scarborough said to make her seem wierd?

- (page 151): "To the Rove camp, there were two villains in the Plame fiasco: the CIA and Richard Armitage."

Really? Was this how an insider explained it to Scarborough? Did Rove say this to somebody?

- (page 117): "Another hit to CIA morale was the Clinton administration's lax approach to security."

Hmmmm. Did somebody inside the CIA tell Scarborough that their morale took a hit in this way? Was Scarborough in a position to make these assessments (CIA morale officer?) during the Clinton administration? This seems like a pretty subjective thing; can he show the alleged decline in morale had some effect on the agency's performance?

-(page 38): "Levin voted against the October 2002 Senate resolution authorizing Bush to oust Saddam. It was not because he did not believe Saddam had weapons. It was because he believed the administration was hiding the best sites from UN inspectors in order to press for war rather than further inspections."

Huh. Did Senator Levin explain the rationale of his vote to Scarborogh, or to somebody who then told Scarborough? How does Scarborough know what was going through Sen. Levin's mind?

More fun: at the end, Scarborough includes a "Cast of Characters" section.

"Cast of Characters"? What the fuck is this, a play? This is ostensibly a work of nonfiction about current events (of 2007). It is telling to note that Scarborough thought his readers would need explained to them who Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Valerie Plame, and Dick Cheney are. On some level, this must be an admission that Scarborough knew only braindead partisan yahoos would take his shitty book seriously.

So how the fuck does drivel like this even get published? Well, it isn't exactly Simon & Schuster, Random House, or Penguin putting this out... it's Regnery Publishing. That's Ann Coulter's publisher, among others, so... not the largest fact-checking budget, if you know what I'm saying.

Reading on a bit (because I'm a glutton for punishment), it became humorous to see how undisguisedly biased and partisan the writing is:

-Donald Rumsfeld's team at the Pentagon does melancholy soul-searching (! page 36) wounded by the words of a Democratic senator who questioned their motives.

-(page 10) poor George W. Bush's enemies include "the terrorists", the Democrats, and the CIA!

-Dick Cheney is portrayed as a victim (page 60) of CIA deceptions.

- (Democratic Senator) Carl Levin is described as "combative" (p. 37), for vigorously arguing a point in debate; but when Donald Rumsfeld does the same thing later in the book, he's called "feisty".

- (page 47): "The defense secretary [Donald Rumsfeld] went out of his way to get along with CIA director Tenet." (yeah, right)

- (page 47; Donald Rumsfeld in an interview): "I'm not the kind of guy who who's going to say bad things about my colleagues. I just don't do it."

- (page 114; subchapter heading): "The Clinton Disaster".

This book is FOX News, for people who can read!

The most generous thing I can say about this book is that it set out to show how extreme partisanship is fucking up our government, and in its own twisted way, it actually succeeded. Scarborough's mindset, completely absorbed in the false left-right paradigm, has become pathologically obsessed with an "us vs. them" view of Democrats and Republicans in Washington DC. This completely distracts Scarborough from ever identifying the larger and more destructive forces in our system. On page 41, Scarborough calls the treasonous Council on Foreign Relations an "august" body! Scarborough never puts together that all the partisan bickering he's fomenting is just a distraction from the larger issue of globalist banking oligarchs pushing the country into unnecessary wars and constructing a domestic police state.

"Only a fool fights in a burning house."
-Klingon proverb
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