A Pretext For War
by James Bamford
Hardcover: 432 pagesPublisher: Doubleday (June 2004) ISBN: 0385506724 / 978-0385506724
Publisher’s Description
... a sweeping, authoritative, and fearless account of the failures of America’s intelligence agencies and the Bush administration’s calculated efforts to sell a war to the American people.
...
From the mishandling of the pre-9/11 threat to the unproven claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Bamford argues that the Bush administration has co-opted the intelligence community for its own political ends, and at the expense of American security. Bamford makes the case that the Bush administration’s Middle East policy decisions, from overthrowing Saddam to ignoring the situation of the Palestinians, are driven by long-held beliefs and goals of an elite group of [neo]conservatives inside and outside of government.
A Pretext for War homes in on the systematic weakness that led the intelligence community to ignore or misinterpret evidence of the impending terrorist attacks of 9/11—a failure rooted in the refusal to acknowledge the central role of the Palestinian cause in igniting Arab rage against the United States. Compounding the errors, the Bush administration’s immediate response to 9/11 was to call for an attack on Iraq, and it subsequently invented justifications for the preemptive war that has ultimately left the United States more vulnerable to terrorism.
...
Contents
Part I Destruction
1 Rome
2 Dulles
3 Cleveland
4 Site R
Part II Detection
5 Florence
6 Potomac
7 The Farm
8 Kandahar
9 Alec Station
Part II Deception
10 Situation Room
11 Capitol Hill
12 War Room
13 Langley
14 Security Council
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index