Those Ugly Americans: 20th & 21st Centuries: The Harm They Do to Good Americans and People Worldwide Review
Rodney Stich, a former federal agent, describes some of the conduct by U.S. politicians and the CIA that makes the United States the most hated country in the world, and the source for the escalating terrorism.
Irreparable Harm: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle Over Free Speech Review
Among the last CIA agents airlifted from Saigon in the waning moments of the Vietnam War, Frank Snepp returned to headquarters determined to secure help for the Vietnamese left behind by an agency eager to cut its losses. What he received instead was a cold shoulder from a CIA that in 1975 was already in turmoil over congressional investigations of its operations throughout the world.
In protest, Snepp resigned to write a damning account of the agency's cynical neglect of its onetime allies and inept handling of the war. His exposé, Decent Interval, was published in total secrecy, eerily evocative of a classic spy operation, and only after Snepp had spent eighteen months dodging CIA efforts to silence him. The book ignited a firestorm of controversy, was featured in a 60 Minutes exclusive, received front-page coverage in the New York Times, and launched a campaign of retaliation by the CIA, capped by a Supreme Court decision that steamrolled over Snepp's right to free speech.
In the wake of Snepp's harrowing experiences, his legal case has been used by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton to narrow the First Amendment freedoms of all federal employees, especially "whistle-blowers." Such encroachments make it clear that Snepp's very personal story has a great deal of relevance for all of us and certainly for anyone who has grown increasingly distrustful of the federal government's "national security argument."
First Do No Harm: The Paradoxical Encounters of Psychoanalysis, Warmaking, and Resistance (Relational Perspectives Book Series) Review
At the outset of World War I - the "Great War" - Freud supported the Austro-Hungarian Empire for which his sons fought. But the cruel truths of that bloody conflict, wrought on the psyches as much as the bodies of the soldiers returning from the battlefield, caused him to rethink his stance and subsequently affected his theory: Psychoanalysis, a healing science, could tell us much about both the drive for war and the ways to undo the trauma that war inherently breeds, but its principles could just as easily serve the enemy's desires to inculcate its own brand of "truth."
Even a century later, psychoanalysis can still be used as much for the justifications of warfare and propaganda as it is for the defiance of and resistance to those same things. But it is in the investigation of the motives and methods behind these uses that psychoanalysis proves its greatest strength. To wit, this edited collection presents published and unpublished material by analysts, writers, and activists who have worked at the front lines of psychic life and war from various stances. Set at a point of tension and contradiction, they illustrate the paradoxical relation of psychoanalysis as both a site of resistance and healing and a necessary aspect of warmaking, propaganda, and militarism. In doing so, we venture from the home front - from the trauma of returning veterans to the APA's own complicity in CIA "black sites" - across international borders - from the treatment of women in Latin American dictatorships to the resistance to occupation in Palestine, from mind control to an ethics of responsibility. Throughout, a psychoanalytic sensibility deconstructs the very opposition that it inhabits, and seeks to reestablish psychoanalysis as the healing discipline it was conceived to be.
