Bøger af Douglas Valentine

Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a non-fiction book about what writer William Burroughs called, "the backlash and bad karma of empire." Set against the author's month-long trip to London, Vietnam and Thailand in early 1991, it tells how the American empire was created by rapacious businessmen backed by a murderous military establishment, media moguls who designed a relentless psychological warfare campaign that glorifies warriors who are programmed to kill on command, and clerics who contrived a religious justification for imperialism, the subordination of women, and the establishment of chattel slavery. Pisces Moon shows how these mythmakers, led by CIA drug traffickers after World War Two, destroyed much of Southeast Asia. It also tells how the myth of American greatest has come home to roost and is now manifest as the vainglorious, militant Christian nationalist movement that wishes to establish a right-wing dictatorship. Pisces Moon argues that the survival of American democracy, and the world, depends upon people being able to distinguish between material evidence and substantiated facts on the one hand, and conspiracy theories, religious beliefs, and supremacist myths on the other.

This novel by Douglas Valentine, author of the nonfiction bestseller The CIA as Organized Crime, is based on a true story, one told to him by a Vietnam veteran and barely, yet grippingly, fictionalized here. In early 1967, a bored, adventurous photojournalist on an Air Force base in Texas is offered a Temporary Duty (TDY) assignment somewhere overseas. The mission is steeped in secrecy, but Pete is promised a large bonus and hazardous duty pay. So he agrees. He and a small group of photojournalists, each with a special skill, are isolated on a Special Forces base where they are kept under constant surveillance by a group of highly trained and menacing soldiers. The small band of twelve men is flown overseas on a transport plane large enough for 120 men. They are never told where they are going, until they arrive. And when they finally reach their destination, the mission that unfolds is terrifying beyond anything Pete ever imagined. The secret would haunt him for the rest of his life. TDY shows how "black operations" are organized and conducted. Meticulous in detail, and accurate in every aspect of "over the fence" missions deep into enemy territory, it reveals for the uninitiated the skill, determination, and self-sacrifice of American soldiers. In stark contrast to the honor and commitment of these soldiers, TDY reveals the unimaginable duplicity and corruption of powerful men for whom American soldiers and civilians are pawns in a ruthless game. Written in sparing prose, TDY is a story of Pete's journey through the underworld and his awakening to the reality of the Vietnam War and the CIA role in Southeast Asia.

The Strength of the Wolf is the first complete history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1930-1968). Working undercover around the globe, the FBN's charismatic "case-making" agents penetrated the Mafia and its French connection. In the process, however, they uncovered the national security establishment's ties to organized crime. Victims of their freewheeling methods and unparalleled success in hunting down society's predators, the agents were ultimately targeted for destruction by the FBI and CIA. Based largely on interviews with case-making agents, The Strength of the Wolf provides a new, exciting, and revealing chapter in American history.

The Strength of the Pack documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement, from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968 through the early years of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Picking up where The Strength of the Wolf left off, the book shows how successive administrations expanded federal drug law enforcement operations under the pervasive but hidden influence of the CIA. The "wolf pack" is a metaphor for the multitude of agencies and their offshoots that comprise the labyrinth system currently waging the eternal war on drugs. Once upon a time, the "lone wolf" federal narcotics agent, last of the noir detectives, hard-boiled and streetwise, stalked his prey: vicious Mafia drug dealers and their international connections. But the rise of the American Superpower and the opium-infused Vietnam War saw the lone wolf replaced by a dehumanized bureaucratic system more suitable to empire: the wolf pack, secretly led by the CIA and designed specifically for using the war on drugs as a covert means of advancing the interests of the U.S. ruling class at home and abroad. Based largely on interviews with former federal narcotics agents and CIA officers, as well as the influential politicians and government bureaucrats they worked with, The Strength of the Pack focuses on the CIA's steady infiltration and corruption of federal drug law enforcement for the purpose of waging political and psychological warfare against the American public. Many books have focused on the public policy aspects of federal drug law enforcement, but no book to date has plumbed as deeply into the secret policies, or taken as comprehensive a view of them, as this one.

';An important work.' John Prados, author of President's Secret Wars ';This definitive account of the Phoenix program, the US attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution, remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America's Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians.' Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade