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Review of book from Amazon
Posted by Pile on 2006-01-29 11:02:50 | Here's a detailed review of the book:
Anyone who attempts to dismiss the information in Rogue State as "common knowledge" either has not read the book or is intentionally trying to deceive. And anyone who could read this book without being horrified and enraged has some serious psychopathological problems.
The bloodthirsty genocides, war crimes, and appallingly sadistic state terrorism of the United States government and military revealed in this book are totally unknown to average Americans. If these crimes were common knowledge there would be total revolution and our oppressive dinosaur of a government would be forced into extinction at last.
But no, Americans are always the last to know about what our evil government and military are really up to. Why? Because most Americans are abject fools who can't kick their mentally and morally retarding addiction to the mainstream mass-media drug.
The U.S. government knows this very well, encourages it and exploits it for all it's worth. As William Colby, former Director of the CIA, once admitted:
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
In "Rogue State" William Blum points out that the corporate mass-media and PR propaganda campaigns have done a superlative job of covering up, distracting from and just plain lying through their teeth about America's ongoing crimes against humanity.
Fortunately the U.S. government hasn't gotten total control of the book publishing industry. Not yet. So, for now, we still have access to books like William Blum's, wherein he summarizes the American holocaust very well:
"From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."
Common knowledge? I don't think so!
"Rogue State" is divided into three parts. Part 1 is titled "Ours and Theirs: Washington's Love/Hate Relationship with Terrorists and Human-Rights Violators." There are chapters which detail how the U.S. government has trained and equipped terrorists all over the world, from the anti-Castro Cuban exiles of Miami to the Afghan mujahedeen. Another chapter reveals that, like the mafia it truly is, the U.S. government has committed brutal assassinations of political leaders all over the world, from Patrice Lumumba of the Congo to Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. And it has attempted many more, sometimes repeatedly, as in the case of Fidel Castro and Muammar Qadhafi.
CIA officials think this is all very funny. They like to joke that their assassinations are "suicides involuntarily administered," to be carried out by the Agency's "Health Alteration Committee."
The most disturbing chapters in this section detail how the CIA and the U.S. Army use torture against our fellow human beings. If CIA officials think assassinations are funny they must find torture absolutely hilarious. The U.S. government not only routinely practices torture, it trains torturers all over the world. The "School of the Americas" in Ft. Benning, Georgia, for instance, is devoted to the training of torturers from all over Latin America.
In chapter five there is a quote from a Honduran torturer named Jose Barrera in which he says of his victims:
"They always ask to be killed. Torture is worse than death."
Americans need to face up to the fact that the U.S. government and military are on more than friendly terms with evil people like this. The U.S. government trains them, pays them, equips them and supports them in every way. Nothing proves more conclusively that the United States government and military are thoroughly evil.
Part 2 is titled: "United States Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction." The first chapter here details the bombing campaigns with which America has slaughtered people with all over the world from Korea to Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia and many more places. The remaining chapters in Part 2 describe American use of Depleted Uranium weapons, cluster bombs and chemical and biological weapons. Also mentioned is the fact that the U.S. has sold chemical and biological weapons to other countries -- Iraq being one of the more outstanding examples.
Part 3 is titled: "A Rogue State versus the World." Chapter 17 gives brief summaries of every major U.S. government/military campaign of genocide, state terrorism and subversion, from China in 1945 to Yugoslavia in 1999. Mr. Blum's earlier book, "Killing Hope," goes into more detail on many of these countries, but "Rogue State" lists a larger number of cases.
The remaining chapters describe how the U.S. government has destroyed democracy by perverting elections around the world; been involved in the kidnapping of numerous people and the looting of various countries; how the CIA is the world's greatest drug smuggling organization (heroin and cocaine); how the U.S. government has the technological ability to keep the entire planet under permanent surveillance; how the U.S. has routinely voted against and vetoed many good U.N. resolutions that virtually every other country in the world has supported.
What nation is the greatest, most ruthlessly predatory "Rogue State" on the face of the planet? The public, historical record, compiled in William Blum's extensively researched book, makes it very clear. |
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Many may have heard the news report last week of the latest recording of Osama Bin Laden offering the United States a truce, but what the news media didn't report much, was he recommended a book by an American author that people should read. As a result