Within 48 hours of taking office, President Obama eliminated our most effective weapon in the War on Terror: the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. Several months later he released sensitive documents detailing our interrogation methods of high-value terrorists.
By eliminating proven tactics and exposing our secrets to the enemy, Obama not only opened up the door to the next 9/11, but unleashed a flood of recrimination against the intelligence officers who have protected us for the past nine years.
“Barack Obama did arguably more damage to America’s national security in his first 100 days of office than any president in American history,” says author Marc Thiessen in his shocking new book, Courting Disaster: How The CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack.
Courting Disaster reveals–as no other book has–just how close we’ve come to the next 9/11 and how enhanced interrogation techniques (including waterboarding) have saved us from numerous would-be terrorist attacks.
Offering a behind-the-scenes look at the CIA’s “black sites,” Thiessen also provides substantial evidence to prove the tactics used by the CIA were not only effective, but lawful and morally just.
As former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush and author of Bush’s famous 2006 speech defending the CIA program, Thiessen was given unprecedented access to some of the most sensitive intelligence our government possessed on the interrogation of al Qaeda terrorists. And he is acknowledged as knowing more about the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program than almost anyone outside the interrogators themselves.
Courting Disaster reveals:
Why the CIA tactics were NOT torture and not even close to those used in Nazi Germany or the Spanish Inquisition
The unique tenet in Jihadist ideology that releases terrorists from withholding information during interrogation
Why detainees actually thanked CIA officials for using the enhanced techniques
How the Obama administration won’t even let our intelligence officers use interrogation methods that police officers use every day to question common criminals.
New evidence that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about and approved CIA waterboarding
An urgent call for renewing the programs that are essential for protecting America, Courting Disaster exposes the myths surrounding “enhanced interrogation techniques,” defends the brave intelligence officials who kept us safe, and shows how President Obama is inviting the next attack.
Related Reading:
What Barack Obama Meant to Say (Political Quotation Translation)**#1 Amazon Bestseller in Political Humor****#1 Amazon Bestseller in Leadership**
From the introduction:
One of the reasons Obama is a great speaker is because his messages are clear. As you read through these quotes and translations, you will notice how there, in actuality, very little verbiage to translate. Instead, the translation will focus on the intent behind the words. There will be technique discussed, points to be made, and hidden thoughts and motivations revealed. If you are a political junkie like me, I think you will find this book, overall, to be stimulating, at times funny, and fully thought-provoking.
My Twenty Years as a CIA Officer: It's All About The MissionThis book details the author's experiences, both good and bad, while working as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Officer for over twenty years. The book begins with how the author was hired by the CIA to include the grueling polygraph test. Details on the author’s first day at the CIA transports the reader’s mind into what it must be like to walk through the halls of the world’s premier intelligence agency and one of the most secretative buildings in the world.
Insights about living in a foreign country abound throughout the book, as are reflections on what it's like living and working "under cover" and having to lie to friends and family about the true nature of his work.
The inner workings of the CIA are detailed from an insider point of view and no punches are pulled in the chapters "Victims of Power" "Leadership (or lack of it)" and "Diversity (or lack of it)".
The chapter on Gulf War I – 1991 finds the author a year and a half after being hired immersed in supporting war operations and becoming a victim of an exploding landmine. In 2003 the author again finds himself in the Middle East in the midst of Gulf War II.
Chapter "9/11" details what occurred at the CIA on September 11, 2001 and how the CIA reacted to these terrible events.
Poignant stories of the death of friends and colleagues provide an understanding to the reader that being a CIA Officer is oftentimes dangerous and can be deadly.
The chapter "Special Project", which was heavily redacted by the CIA, provides the reader an insight into covert operations.
Humorous aspects of living overseas, interacting with people of different cultures and eating exotic foods are interspersed throughout the book's twenty-eight chapters.
Most other books written by former CIA Officers detail one or two specific events; this book is different in that the author provides insight into a whole career, from hiring to retirement, from the mundane to the exciting, to give the reader the full experience of what it’s like to be a CIA Officer.
This book is a "must read" for anyone considering applying for a job with the CIA - and for anyone who really wants to know the "inner workings" of the CIA.
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on TerrorismIn his explosive New York Times bestseller, top CIA operative Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides startling evidence of how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA’s efforts to root out the world’s deadliest terrorists, allowing for the rise of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the continued entrenchment of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.A veteran case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in the Middle East, Baer witnessed the rise of terrorism first hand and the CIA’s inadequate response to it, leading to the attacks of September 11, 2001. This riveting book is both an indictment of an agency that lost its way and an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism, and includes a new afterword in which Baer speaks out about the American war on terrorism and its profound implications throughout the Middle East.
“Robert Baer was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field
officer in the Middle East.”
–Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker
From The Preface
This book is a memoir of one foot soldier’s career in the other cold war, the one against terrorist networks. It’s a story about places most Americans will never travel to, about people many Americans would prefer to think we don’t need to do business with.
This memoir, I hope, will show the reader how spying is supposed to work, where the CIA lost its way, and how we can bring it back again. But I hope this book will accomplish one more purpose as well: I hope it will show why I am angry about what happened to the CIA. And I want to show why every American and everyone who cares about the preservation of this country should be angry and alarmed, too.
The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead. Americans were making too much money to bother. Life was good. The White House and the National Security Council became cathedrals of commerce where the interests of big business outweighed the interests of protecting American citizens at home and abroad. Defanged and dispirited, the CIA went along for the ride. And then on September 11, 2001, the reckoning for such vast carelessness was presented for all the world to see.
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and InheritanceNine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego. Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.
Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.
Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.
A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader—a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.
Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).
