Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was raised to believe in the American dream, and I had lived through World War II with its clear black-and-white heroes and villains. I had been dedicated to doing my best for myself, my family, and my country. #2 I was called to Washington, D. C. , in January 1952. I was excited to be part of the fight against communism, and I was happy to be on my way to help my government. #3 I arrived at Washington’s Union Station mid-morning. I took a cab from the station up Constitution Avenue. On the right stood the National Archives building with its towering Corinthian columns and its huge bronze doors. On the left was the glorious Capitol. #4 The he detector test was the most frightening test we had to take. It was a lie detector test, and the CIA found out nearly everything about the private lives of its employees.

A veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency unmasks its culture of lethal lies in this devastating exposé, now with a new foreword by David MacMichael. Ralph W. McGehee was a patriot, dedicated to the American way of life and the international fight against Communism. Following his graduation with honors from Notre Dame, McGehee was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952 and quickly became an able and enthusiastic cold warrior. Stationed in Southeast Asia in the mid-1960s, he worked to stem the Communist tide that was sweeping through the region, first in Thailand and later in Vietnam. But despite his notable successes in reversing enemy influence among the local peasants and villagers, McGehee found himself increasingly alienated from a company culture built on deceit and wholesale manipulation of the truth. While his country was being pulled deeper and deeper into the Vietnam quagmire, McGehee awoke to a chilling reality: The CIA was not a gatherer of actual intelligence to be employed in a legitimate war against dangerous enemies, but a tool of the president’s foreign-policy staff designed solely to stifle the truth and fabricate “facts” that supported the agency’s often immoral agenda. With courage and candor, Ralph McGehee illuminates the CIA’s dark catalog of misdeeds in his stunning, no-holds-barred memoir of a life in the service of deception. Startling, eye-opening, and infuriating, Deadly Deceits is an honest and unflinching insider’s look at a toxic government agency that the author cogently argues has no useful purpose and no moral right to exist.

Congress has become increasingly assertive in the exercise of its war powers. No longer content to write the President blank checks such as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that helped lead to intervention in Vietnam, Congress has revived and constructed a variety of mechanisms to control America's use of force abroad. This is the first sustained, focused analysis by America's foremost historians and policy analysts of how Congress directs U.S. foreign policy on aggression.

Before 9/11, films addressing torture outside of the horror/slasher genre depicted the practice in a variety of forms. In most cases, torture was cast as the act of a desperate and depraved individual, and the viewer was more likely to identify with the victim rather than the torturer. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, scenes of brutality and torture in mainstream comedies, dramatic narratives, and action films appear for little other reason than to titillate and delight. In these films, torture is devoid of any redeeming qualities, represented as an exercise in brutal senselessness carried out by authoritarian regimes and institutions. This volume follows the shift in the representation of torture over the past decade, specifically in documentary, action, and political films. It traces and compares the development of this trend in films from the United States, Europe, China, Latin America, South Africa, and the Middle East. Featuring essays by sociologists, psychologists, historians, journalists, and specialists in film and cultural studies, the collection approaches the representation of torture in film and television from multiple angles and disciplines, connecting its aesthetics and practices to the dynamic of state terror and political domination.

This compassionate book describes the making of enemies in our personal, social, and national lives. It goes on to outline a nonviolent approach to resolving enmity wherever it arises. It taps the rich resources of Jesus' two-thousand-year-old formula, Love your enemies, with the help of our contemporary understanding of Gandhian active nonviolence. The author offers a life-changing, habit-breaking approach of understanding, focusing, and negotiating as a positive alternative to the usual flight-or-fight response to enemies. The book sketches an informative portrait of the Soviet Union that includes insights into its communist ideology, its political structures, and the practice of religion in the country. The book stresses that the USSR is a nation of real people who are interesting, sometimes colorful, yet always struggling.

In a tempestuous narrative that sweeps across five continents and seven centuries, this book explains how a succession of catastrophes—from the devastating Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders. During the long centuries of Iberian and British imperial rule, the quest for new forms of energy led to the development of the colonial sugar plantation as a uniquely profitable kind of commerce. In a time when issues of race and social justice have arisen with pressing urgency, the book explains how the plantation’s extraordinary profitability relied on a production system that literally worked the slaves to death, creating an insatiable appetite for new captives that made the African slave trade a central feature of modern capitalism for over four centuries. After surveying past centuries roiled by imperial wars, national revolutions, and the struggle for human rights, the closing chapters use those hard-won insights to peer through the present and into the future. By rendering often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.

Ordinary citizens the world over have long paid the price for the swashbuckling behavior of the corporate and political elite. We've seen the reigning establishment widen the gap between rich and poor, champion endless growth on a finite planet, wreak havoc on developing nations, and ravage ecosystems in a mad race for natural resources. Now, as demonstrators worldwide demand change, Occupy World Street offers a sweeping vision of how to reform our global economic and political structures, break away from empire, and build a world of self-determining sovereign states that respect the need for ecological sustainability and uphold human rights. In this refreshingly detailed plan, Ross Jackson shows how a handful of small nations could take on a leadership role; create new alliances, new governance, and new global institutions; and, in cooperation with grassroots activists, pave the way for other nations to follow suit.