How can an author describe all the pre-911 movements and the post-911 actions without knowing that the same people facilitated the triggering event? Without 911, what would be the reasoning to spark a war that had been meticulously planned? Bamford said he had no evidence to to support that the Bush White House knew about the attack beforehand, but where is the evidence to support (other than from the White House) that al Qaeda had the capacity to train the hijackers on Boeing aircraft, calculate the tactical plan and make billions of dollars worth of insider trades? Mr. Bamford, you're so close to unlocking the real truth--- all you have to do now is read Philip Marshall's False Flag 911: How Bush, Cheney and the Saudi Created the Post 911 World.

Your investigation is incomplete.

James Bamford only writes a book every so often, when he feels like he has information so important that the nation needs to know it. Thankfully so. This book is no exception. However, consider skipping Part I, which consists of the first four chapters (This is just a repeat of the party line myths about the way 19 cavemen, under the command of a guy in a cave half-way around the world, were able to do miraculous things and wreak massive destruction).

Then, we get to the meat, in Part II where Bamford finally begins telling us what we need to know. Here, he writes about the largest terrorist training camp in the world, located on 1,200 acres in North Carolina, USA, ran by the US military. Bamford writes that the training here involves blowing up busses using fertilizer and fuel oil (yes, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was educated in North Carolina). Coupled with the revelations of Part III of the book, where Bamford talks about the Office of Special Plans set up by the neocons to deceive the masses, any critical thinker can figure out what really took place on 9/11.

a MUST READ for every American...chronological facts laid out for you so that you can't ignore!

One has to wade through quite a maze of disinformation in order to arrive anything of real value in this palimpsest. But, for those with extraordinary patience, there is some small modicum of value.

Bamford bores the reader at first with a very detailed, and absurd, recapitulation of the government's ridiculous tale relative to the "911" disaters, complete with impossible "cell" phone calls from high up in the atmosphere and implausible reactions on the part of government agencies that simply failed to act. Most of this seems to be intended to portray George Walker Bush as the bumbling fool that he is. We didn't need all this evidence, Mr. Bamford. That case has already been well made.

Finally, near the end, Bamford gets to the thesis: that the "911" disaster was nothing more than a pretext for the Iraq War. One wonders why the reader was taken on such a convoluted path to arrive at such an obvious conclusion. More than anything else, this book appears to be a partisan attack on the absurdity of the Bush administration and its foreign policy. A more factual account would have been more efficacious. We cannot, in good conscience, recommend this book.

It seems to me that Hans Blix and Muhammed al-Baradei correctly reported to us the likely state of Iraq's strategic weaponry and warned us against a preemptive war. The republicans are also using an incorrect definition of weapons of mass distruction. The correct definition of weapons of mass distruction only counts as WMDs those weapons which have at least the potential of killing millions of people. Using this correct definition most chemical weapons and some biologicals are NOT WMDs.
I would also point out that the american attempt to produce a "shock and awe" effect was THEIR use of a terror tactic.

The cover of the hardbook advertises "9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America's intelligence agencies" yet a lot of the book feels like a history lesson. The author has a tendency to provide extensive backgrounds and histories for each and every person, organization, and agency involved in his book. It becomes rather tedious after the first couple of chapters. I can't swear to it but portions of this book appeared in Mr. Bamford's other books. The chapters and sections that mention the NSA are an example.

Overall, I am disappointed with the book and probably will skim the remainder of it.

This book contains the analysis of two events: the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq. In both cases the evaluation of the intelligence community is devastating: the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq could eventually not be prevented; the first one because of incompetence, and the second one because of the cowardice of the CIA chief, who didn't fight or resign in protest, but chose simply to go along with all the lies.

The step by step description of the 9/11 events follows the official version. E.g., the collapse of Tower 7 of the WTC is due to blown debris which set the steel building on fire. Some official sources spoke of 'demolition'.
For a more critical evaluation of the events I recommend the works of N.M. Ahmed and D.R. Griffin.

Concerning the war in Iraq, the intelligence community knew that Saddam had no WMD and that there was absolutely no link between Saddam, Al-Qaeda and 9/11. But the Bush administration put the CIA under tremendous pressure to find 'something' that could justify a preemptive war. The administration didn't need serious intelligence reports. They wanted the CIA to serve their own agenda: rearrange the map in the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam and put a pro-Israel regime in his place.
When the bogus evidence became available, a massive disinformation campaign was launched in the gagged media in order to deceive the Americam people.

The author's description of the Iraq quagmire is a horror story.
Militarily, the poor, the young, those with the least education, those from small and rural towns paid with their lives, although they tended to vote for Bush.
In Iraq, the use of cluster bombs in residential neighbourhoods is leaving ten of thousands of live bombs in the backyards. 'The US military were killing and maiming the very people it had come to liberate.'
For the author,the regime change in Iraq is not the solution: (quoting T. Hamad) 'For all people in the Arab world, the Palestinian problem is the only problem they have with the US.'

The conclusion of the author is also a question mark: 'It is now clear that the original justification for the Iraq invasion was fraudulent. It was simply a pretext for war long advocated by a small group of hard-line neoconservatives'. 'The question mark to be answered is: How much of a factor support for Israel played in the ultimate decision?'
Quoting N. Guttman in Haaretz:'(there is) new life into the assertion that Israel and not American interests lead to the war in Iraq.'

James Bamford has written a courageous, but immensely sad book full of cynical behaviour.

A must read.

Tendentious is the word for James Bamford's newest book. Selective and slanted are other good ones. Overall, his conclusions - presented as fact - can best be characterized as bad analysis. This doesn't mean he has failed to consider facts that are, indeed, facts. What it does mean is that he has both ignored other facts, believed his sources' assertions that may not stand up as fact, and extrapolated unnecessary conclusions from the facts he likes, based not on the facts themselves, but on his neon-sign-obvious political bent. Don't be surprised that this is precisely what he accuses the Bush administration of doing. Bamford will never be held accountable for the vacuity of many of his conclusions; intelligence professionals ARE, every day of the week. This is a fact that makes a difference.

Bamford has mastered the art of provoking reaction in his reader, which is then used to carry the reader lightly over what is often quicksand. He does this by hyperventilating, and throwing pieces of information into proximity for the apparent purpose of implying that they are related, even though he doesn't draw a credible link between them. Examples abound in the book; here's one: on pp. 33-34 he launches a multi-paragraph discussion of the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center (DEFSMAC), which he erroneously characterizes as "among [the National Security Agency's] most secret units." He introduces this excursion from the baseline story by lamenting that NSA finding out about the 9/11 attacks from CNN "was not the way it was supposed to be." Bamford's discussion of DEFSMAC seems to imply that the intelligence community was under the impression DEFSMAC would provide it warning when terrorists hijacked commercial airplanes with the intention of flying them into buildings in New York and Washington.

Bamford knows enough about DEFSMAC to "get" that it relates in some way to air early warning, and breezily tells the reader how the cognoscenti pronounce its acronym ("deaf-smack"). But he either doesn't know or doesn't care that the 9/11 intelligence problem was not one of air early warning, but of knowing the intentions in the minds of terrorists. The intelligence community has known for decades that DEFSMAC is not a tool for deciphering that. It's weird to even mention it in this context.

Bamford in fact ignores information that has been available to the public for years on the whole community's effort to improve its collection and analysis capabilities against terrorism (primarily as a result of the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996). Both Bush II and Clinton increased antiterrorism intelligence funding every year after 1996, and both Congress and the executive agencies were well aware that better forms of intelligence were needed to interdict terror plots - and labored to cultivate them. No one in the federal government thought DEFSMAC was either appropriate or adequate to provide warning against a non-military terrorist attack. One cannot deduce anything complimentary to Bamford from the "free association" drive-by perpetrated here.

Perhaps I just got tired of hearing over and over again how individual X or agency Y "didn't bother" to perform action Z that is now obvious in hindsight. These are the exact words used repeatedly: "didn't bother"; applied with equal dismissiveness to politicians, intelligence personnel, and senior government staffers. The words cheapen and distort the fact that we do indeed have shortcomings in our national intelligence collection and analysis; and one of these shortcomings is, indeed, agency parochialism and poor information sharing. Perhaps there were, indeed, policy missteps in the Bush administration's handling of intelligence and decision-making. But in neither case is the problem that people "didn't bother." That sanctimonious shorthand is highly misleading and unhelpful; it certainly throws suspicion for me on the case Bamford is making against Bush's senior advisors.

So many, many questionable assertions or genuine errors. On p. 210: "All along [Osama bin Laden's] goal, and that of his top leadership, was to draw the United States deeper and deeper into the sinkhole of a war in the Middle East." On the contrary, bin Laden's goal all along has been to get the US, and other Western nations, OUT of the Middle East. On p. 301, apropos of an informant report that 500 tons of uranium were to be shipped from Niger to Iraq: "Then it was supposed to be 'transshipped in international waters.' Apparently this meant that somehow, while two ships were bobbing alongside each other more than a dozen miles out in the ocean, five hundred tons of metal would be moved from one ship to another - an amazing feat." Well, er, yeah. It happens every day, actually. The report was erroneous, but not because it's impossible to transfer cargo at sea.

On p. 313, Bamford implies that the following report from an Israeli intelligence informant was false: a report that Iraqi mobile weapons labs were labeled as "Tip Top Ice Cream" trucks, and that they transferred items to tractor trailers labeled "Segada Transportation Co." His basis for suggesting this is the same as that of the UN inspectors who first received the information: "it was found that neither company, in fact, existed in Iraq." It never seems to have crossed his mind (or even the UN inspectors') that Saddam's Iraq was not a place where a company had to be registered in order for a government entity to paint its name on the side of a truck. There are, however, plenty of intelligence analysts throughout the world who could have told them that.

I won't bore you with further iterations. It goes on and on. Bamford uses a loose footnoting scheme that gives him a lot of latitude in attribution, and of course does not name some unrevealed number of his sources (whose motives in giving him classified information ought to figure as a big block of salt perched on top of this book). Overall, he does a lot of things that a career Naval intelligence officer, like me, would have been fired for. You won't know any more about WMD in Iraq after reading this book - you might read some things you haven't read before, but any belief that therefore you KNOW any more would be unfounded.

Bamford eviscerates the excuses -- nay, LIES -- of the administration that they were only following "bad intelligence", and that they hadn't been planning or decided on the Iraq war except as a last resort. The gruesome details about the long campaign to invade Iraq -- as well as half the Middle East -- in a hard RW "neocon" effort to rewrite the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East (to the advantage of the extreme RW in Israel) is detailed in this book and is "must" reading for anyone who wonders how the Iraq war could have been bollixed up so badly. There weren't any "mistakes"; they did what they had wanted to do all along ... but they couldn't even manage to do what they wanted right.

Read it. And weep.

Bamford eviscerates the excuses -- nay, LIES -- of the administration that they were only following "bad intelligence", and that they hadn't been planning or decided on the Iraq war except as a last resort. The gruesome details about the long campaign to invade Iraq -- as well as half the Middle East -- in a hard RW "neocon" effort to rewrite the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East (to the advantage of the extreme RW in Israel) is detailed in this book and is "must" reading for anyone who wonders how the Iraq war could have been bollixed up so badly. There weren't any "mistakes"; they did what they had wanted to do all along ... but they couldn't even manage to do what they wanted right.

Read it. And weep.

National Geographic itself recently referred to Saddam as one of the four worst mass murderers in 20th century history (others are Hitler, Mao Zedong and Saddam's proven idol Stalin)so deadly was Saddam's butchering of the Kurds of Iraq. After reading Bamford's book I don't feel he was in touch enough with how inhuman Saddam is. And for those who pounce on the idea that Bush just protected Israel by his Iraqi invasion remember how Saddam invaded Kuwait some years before. He (Saddam) could've just been waiting in the wings for a weak US leader (like (former president? hah!) Jimmy Carter) so he coulld have a field day attacking mideast countries again. Good Bush acted when he did in 2003.

A critical reader should ask: "How does Mr. Bamford, an outsider, know details about highly-classified discussions and documents?" He previously wrote two solid works on the highly-secretive NSA, the organization for code breaking and intercepting communications. This book draws on his network of contacts within the NSA and CIA. "But how did he get access to people inside the U.S. intelligence community and why would they talk to him about sensitive issues?"

Perhaps trust plays a large part in Bamford's access. His writings have possibly earned him the intelligence community's trust to present a relatively objective picture of events. We'll never know Bamford's secret to gaining access, nor how representative his contacts are. A reader would do well to keep this issue in mind while following his story.

The book's title is its thesis. The United States had no real cause for invading Iraq. Our declared reasons - seizing Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and striking a blow against Al Qaeda - were just a pretext, a ruse used to conceal the true purpose.

For Bamford, oil plays no role in going to war against Iraq, nor does 9/11. He cites former Secretary of Treasury O'Neill's account of a January 30, 2001 cabinet meeting to establish that the Bush Administration's interest in invading Iraq predated 9/11. For President Bush, Saddam Hussein's attempted assassination of his father proved that the dictator represented a danger to our country. In addition, a small group of rabidly pro-Israel officials in the U.S. Defense Department wanted a war to revolutionize Mid-East politics and protect Israel.

Would Americans believe that an assassination plot against an ex-president represents an imminent danger to their country? Would they support an abstract foreign policy goal aimed principally at improving Israeli security? President Bush and a small group of pro-Israel zealots were convinced they wouldn't; so, according to Bamford, they created a pretext for war.

This thesis is not new. Pieces of it, as well as much of Bamford's account of 9/11 recounted in the book's first hundred pages, have made it into our public discussion of the war. So why read the book? What does Bamford add to the discussion?

While Bamford repeats many familiar facts and assertions about why U.S. troops were sent to Iraq, he also weaves new materials from intelligence insiders to buttress his thesis. He especially uses interviews with mid- to lower-level intelligence officials, many of whom are now retired. Much of the material uncovered is critical of senior management, especially at the CIA, whose leadership is presented as bending too easily to political pressure. Other material aims at mid-level CIA officials whose personal ambition overwhelms their work and undermines the agency's goals. Readers should judge for themselves how well he makes his case.

Several other aspects of Bamford's book caught my attention.

First, buried within his story is an appeal for young, patriotic Americans to develop skills desperately needed by the U.S. intelligence community. According to Bamford, acquiring the basic language and cultural skills useful in intelligence work requires 3 to 8 years. That's not easily done in a retraining program. He also suggests that U.S. clandestine services need a drastic overhaul, dropping their macho, "I dare you to jump out of a plane," approach. Several times Bamford notes that John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban member, penetrated Al Qaeda; George Tenet, spending hundreds of millions and running thousands of spies, couldn't.

Second, Bamford briefly describes the network of bunkers set up during the cold war to shelter U.S. government officials. His details were new to me. What struck me was how these bunkers seemed foremost aimed at protecting people rather than institutions. Our republic was founded on the notion that the rule of law and democratic institutions are far more important than any one individual. While the tragic death of a leader is to be lamented, more important is that our institutions survive so that leaders can be legitimately replaced. As George Tenet was purported to say, "Never take yourself too seriously."

Finally, Bamford teases with some casual comments about controversial issues. He notes that the CIA was already given the authority to engage in renditions under President Clinton (pp. 205-206) and that torture sometimes produces important intelligence information (pp. 137-138).

This book was not edited as tightly as earlier ones. The "dodgy dossier" humorously becomes the "doggie dossier" and William McKinley is oddly cited as George Bush's alter ego. Still, it's engagingly written and there's plenty of material here for readers to reflect upon.

Poignant, informative, and well-written, Bamford's book takes us deep into the world of US intelligence agencies. From an extremely effective retelling of the events occuring accross the world on the morning of September 11th, to the explanations of top security agencies' locations and operations, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the security of the US.

This book was assigned to me for a college course and Vietnam and Iraq, and I couldn't put it down.

James Bamford opens his book with 92 pages of recounting of what happened on Sept 11, 2001. Then come a handful of chapters on such things as shelters the govt has built against a nuclear attack. In the wake of 9-11 even the govt's best source of information was CNN. So not knowing any better, the elite of the federal govt headed for nuclear bunkers. Most of this is background information that can be gleaned from news reports or public records. So why does Bamford spend so many pages recounting it? It goes to credibility.

In a few short pages, Bamford tells us that at five minutes past noontime on Sept 11, George Tenet passed a note to Donald Rumsfeld that said that at 9:53 AM that morning a message from a Bin Laden operative in Afghanistan to to co-operative in the former Soviet republic of Georgia had been intercepted. The message said that there was yet a fourth target. Rumsfeld dismissed the intelligence. At 2:40 PM an aide to Rumsfeld jotted down notes from conversations Rumsfeld had had. The notes describe the Secretary of Defense as wanting the best information in a hurry which could be used to attack Saddam Hussein.

The American public may forget how quickly the current administration diverted our attention from Bin Laden to WMD's which it assured us were there, were a threat, and knew exactly where they were. It's hard to accept the idea that our govt might lead us into a meaningless foreign war. So who's credibility does one believe?

Pretext for War is a book which at first sight reads like a hastily compiled Pre Text for the final version, which is still due for print. But what a shattering info and facts are inside this Book! The Chapter called "Warroom" contains all the essential background info needed to understand what went on with the forged yellow cake documents, leading to SISMI in ROME and back to the Douglas Feith deception operation on intelligence.

In fact this book is so amazing full of revealling facts that it's almost unbelievable. We recently heard about president Bush admitting bypassing the FISA law and in effecting committing a Federal Crime on a routine basis : Inside the next chapter "Langley" Bamford writes "Blix suspected that the NSA was monitoring his secure fax and had deciphered his encryption algorithm." So anyone who wants to delve into intelligence issues should have this book on its shelf.

A better comprehensive source than the 9-11 report or Richard Clarke's book, Bamford's book is deeply informed on just about every angle of the 9-11/Iraq war issue. Bamford's contacts in the intelligence community are unmatched by anyone else reporting on these issues, and it pays off in the book.

This book is not a partisan screed - Bamford brings the same professionalism to this book that he brought to his earlier ones about the NSA. He's not out to get Republicans, or George W. Bush - as he expressed in his earlier books, he believes that excessive secrecy corrupts democracy and leads to abuses by those holding offices of public trust. People who abuse the public's trust are the targets of Bamford's criticism, not any particular political party.