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Book SynopsisA drastic reform of intelligence activities is long overdue. The Cold War has been over for ten years. No country threatens this nation's existence. Yet, we still spend billions of dollars on covert action and espionage. In National Insecurity ten prominent experts describe, from an insider's perspective, what went wrong with U.S. intelligence and what will be necessary to fix it. Drawing on their experience in government administration, research, and foreign service, they propose a radical rethinking of the United States' intelligence needs in the post-Cold War world. In addition, they offer a coherent and unified plan for reform that can simultaneously protect U.S. security and uphold the values of our democratic system. As we now know, even during the Cold War, when intelligence was seen as a matter of life and death, our system served us badly. It provided unreliable information, which led to a grossly inflated military budget, as it wreaked havoc around the world, supporting corrupt regimes, promoting the drug trade, and repeatedly violating foreign and domestic laws. Protected by a shroud of secrecy, it paid no price for its mistakes. Instead it grew larger and more insulated every year. Taking into consideration our strategic interests abroad as well as the price of covert operations in dollars, reliability, and good will, every American taxpayer can be informed by and will want to read this book. National Insecurity is essential for readers interested in contemporary political issues, international relations, U.S. history, public policy issues, foreign policy, intelligence reform, and political science.Trade Review"The distinguished contributors to this book present a wide range of perspectives from which to assess our intelligence system. Their decades of public service command tremendous respect. Their views break new ground and demand the attention of the White House and of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. This book should be required reading by all congressional committees concerned with intelligence policy, surveillance, and appropriations, and by all Americans." -Senator Tom Harkin, from the Foreword "[A] comprehensive sweep of the disputes and principles that underlie the struggle for an ethics-grounded U.S. intelligence commitment." -Baltimore Sun "[The book] was published in 2000 but unfortunately, its relevance and importance have increased exponentially since the turn of the century... This book is a must read." The review is available on the EU Policy Network website: Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 43-46. -The Journal of European Affairs "National Insecurity is only the latest in a long line of volumes that make you think about the good and the bad all over again." -Washington Monthly "Veteran diplomats, former congressional staff members and journalists who specialize in intelligence coverage join forces in this collection of essays to call for a total overhaul of U.S. intelligence strategy." -Christian CenturyTable of ContentsCONTENTS Foreward Senator Tom Harkin Introduction Craig Eisendrath 1 After the Cold War: The Need for Intelligence Roger Hilsman 2 Espionage and Covert Action Melvin A. Goodman 3 Too Many Spies, Too Little Intelligence Robert E. White 4 CIA-Foreign Service Relations Robert V. Keeley 5 Covert Operations: The Blowback Problem Jack A. Blum 6 The End of Secrecy: U.S. National Security and the New Openness Movement Kate Doyle 7 Mission Myopia: Narcotics as Fallout From the CIA's Covert Wars Alfred W. McCoy 8 TECHINT: The NSA, the NRO, and NIMA Robert Dreyfuss 9 Improving the Output of Intelligence: Priorities, Managerial Changes, and Funding Richard A. Stubbing 10 Who's Watching the Store? Executive-Branch and Congressional Surveillance Pat M. Holt Conclusions Craig Eisendrath Selected Bibliography About The Center for International Policy About the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisA drastic reform of intelligence activities is long overdue. The Cold War has been over for ten years. No country threatens this nation's existence. Yet, we still spend billions of dollars on covert action and espionage. In National Insecurity ten prominent experts describe, from an insider's perspective, what went wrong with U.S. intelligence and what will be necessary to fix it. Drawing on their experience in government administration, research, and foreign service, they propose a radical rethinking of the United States' intelligence needs in the post-Cold War world. In addition, they offer a coherent and unified plan for reform that can simultaneously protect U.S. security and uphold the values of our democratic system. As we now know, even during the Cold War, when intelligence was seen as a matter of life and death, our system served us badly. It provided unreliable information, which led to a grossly inflated military budget, as it wreaked havoc around the world, supporting corrupt regimes, promoting the drug trade, and repeatedly violating foreign and domestic laws. Protected by a shroud of secrecy, it paid no price for its mistakes. Instead it grew larger and more insulated every year. Taking into consideration our strategic interests abroad as well as the price of covert operations in dollars, reliability, and good will, every American taxpayer can be informed by and will want to read this book. National Insecurity is essential for readers interested in contemporary political issues, international relations, U.S. history, public policy issues, foreign policy, intelligence reform, and political science.Trade Review"The distinguished contributors to this book present a wide range of perspectives from which to assess our intelligence system. Their decades of public service command tremendous respect. Their views break new ground and demand the attention of the White House and of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. This book should be required reading by all congressional committees concerned with intelligence policy, surveillance, and appropriations, and by all Americans." -Senator Tom Harkin, from the Foreword "[A] comprehensive sweep of the disputes and principles that underlie the struggle for an ethics-grounded U.S. intelligence commitment." -Baltimore Sun "[The book] was published in 2000 but unfortunately, its relevance and importance have increased exponentially since the turn of the century... This book is a must read." The review is available on the EU Policy Network website: Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 43-46. -The Journal of European Affairs "National Insecurity is only the latest in a long line of volumes that make you think about the good and the bad all over again." -Washington Monthly "Veteran diplomats, former congressional staff members and journalists who specialize in intelligence coverage join forces in this collection of essays to call for a total overhaul of U.S. intelligence strategy." -Christian CenturyTable of ContentsCONTENTS Foreward Senator Tom Harkin Introduction Craig Eisendrath 1 After the Cold War: The Need for Intelligence Roger Hilsman 2 Espionage and Covert Action Melvin A. Goodman 3 Too Many Spies, Too Little Intelligence Robert E. White 4 CIA-Foreign Service Relations Robert V. Keeley 5 Covert Operations: The Blowback Problem Jack A. Blum 6 The End of Secrecy: U.S. National Security and the New Openness Movement Kate Doyle 7 Mission Myopia: Narcotics as Fallout From the CIA's Covert Wars Alfred W. McCoy 8 TECHINT: The NSA, the NRO, and NIMA Robert Dreyfuss 9 Improving the Output of Intelligence: Priorities, Managerial Changes, and Funding Richard A. Stubbing 10 Who's Watching the Store? Executive-Branch and Congressional Surveillance Pat M. Holt Conclusions Craig Eisendrath Selected Bibliography About The Center for International Policy About the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisMaya Gods of War investigates the Classic period Maya gods who were associated with weapons of war and the flint and obsidian from which those weapons were made.

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Book SynopsisUnmanning studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone—including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness—are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to “man” and the paradoxes at their basis. Trade Review"This book makes a much-needed intervention into the popular discourses that surround drone warfare today. Drawing on extensive archival research, Unmanning offers detailed histories that deconstruct the most persistent mythologies of air war in general and automated and distance weaponry in particular to offer completely new perspectives on one of the most significant technological trends in contemporary warfare." -- Caren Kaplan * author of Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above *"In Unmanning, Katherine Chandler offers a compelling history of the drone that complicates and deepens our understanding of what is at stake in the performative rhetoric that fuels the automation of US military air power. This book is an invaluable resource for everyone concerned with the erasures of human agencies that enable claims for technical autonomy in contemporary warfighting." -- Lucy Suchman * author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations *"Drone theory tends to replicate the god’s eye view enjoyed by its object. Katherine Fehr Chandler bucks this trend, grounding her new theory of 'unmanned' aerial vehicles in their wayward and failure-ridden history as human–machine–media assemblages. The effacement of that history, Chandler argues, is what allowed drones to assume their current role: as sleek, agential means for disavowing both the responsibility of their wielders and the humanity of their targets. Unmanning is a timely and fascinating book." -- Paul K. Saint-Amour * author of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form *"As the iconographic technologies of drone warfare become history and more secretive, varied, and autonomous technologies take their place, critically examining the long history of failure that led to the unmanning of war is an urgent task that Chandler’s book meets head-on and with an accuracy and efficacy that her objects of analysis fell far short of achieving." * Cultural Studies *"While focused primarily on drone warfare, Chandler’s book – in its investigations into failure, human/machine relations, and threat production – points perhaps also to ways of thinking about how politics is denied and disavowed in other techniques of state violence like policing." * Security and Dialogue *"Unmanning makes a useful contribution by dispelling the illusion of unmanned warfare. Central to this illusion are the 'politics of disavowal.' The very term 'unmanned' is a disavowal, or an attempted negation, that separates the human, machine, and media components of drone technology. Moreover, it disconnects machine action from political accountability to create a veneer of deniability and non-attribution." * Technology and Culture *"[I]f there is a lesson to be learnt from Chandler’s brilliant book it is that the arc of the drone bends not toward justice, but failure, and contemporary experiments in drone warfare that fail do not so much crash, go haywire, or plummet into the sea. Instead, they maim, kill, and destroy, and disavow these acts as techno-mechanical progress." * Antipode Online *"Chandler’s book both invites the wider geographical deployment of this approach and reminds us that while contemporary drone development and discourse so often appear future-orientated, much can be learned from the platform’s plural histories." * Law, Culture and the Humanities *"This book makes a much-needed intervention into the popular discourses that surround drone warfare today. Drawing on extensive archival research, Unmanning offers detailed histories that deconstruct the most persistent mythologies of air war in general and automated and distance weaponry in particular to offer completely new perspectives on one of the most significant technological trends in contemporary warfare." -- Caren Kaplan * author of Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above *"In Unmanning, Katherine Chandler offers a compelling history of the drone that complicates and deepens our understanding of what is at stake in the performative rhetoric that fuels the automation of US military air power. This book is an invaluable resource for everyone concerned with the erasures of human agencies that enable claims for technical autonomy in contemporary warfighting." -- Lucy Suchman * author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations *"Drone theory tends to replicate the god’s eye view enjoyed by its object. Katherine Fehr Chandler bucks this trend, grounding her new theory of 'unmanned' aerial vehicles in their wayward and failure-ridden history as human–machine–media assemblages. The effacement of that history, Chandler argues, is what allowed drones to assume their current role: as sleek, agential means for disavowing both the responsibility of their wielders and the humanity of their targets. Unmanning is a timely and fascinating book." -- Paul K. Saint-Amour * author of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form *"As the iconographic technologies of drone warfare become history and more secretive, varied, and autonomous technologies take their place, critically examining the long history of failure that led to the unmanning of war is an urgent task that Chandler’s book meets head-on and with an accuracy and efficacy that her objects of analysis fell far short of achieving." * Cultural Studies *"While focused primarily on drone warfare, Chandler’s book – in its investigations into failure, human/machine relations, and threat production – points perhaps also to ways of thinking about how politics is denied and disavowed in other techniques of state violence like policing." * Security and Dialogue *"Unmanning makes a useful contribution by dispelling the illusion of unmanned warfare. Central to this illusion are the 'politics of disavowal.' The very term 'unmanned' is a disavowal, or an attempted negation, that separates the human, machine, and media components of drone technology. Moreover, it disconnects machine action from political accountability to create a veneer of deniability and non-attribution." * Technology and Culture *"[I]f there is a lesson to be learnt from Chandler’s brilliant book it is that the arc of the drone bends not toward justice, but failure, and contemporary experiments in drone warfare that fail do not so much crash, go haywire, or plummet into the sea. Instead, they maim, kill, and destroy, and disavow these acts as techno-mechanical progress." * Antipode Online *"Chandler’s book both invites the wider geographical deployment of this approach and reminds us that while contemporary drone development and discourse so often appear future-orientated, much can be learned from the platform’s plural histories." * Law, Culture and the Humanities *Table of ContentsContents Introduction 1 DRONE 2 American Kamikaze 3 Unmanning 4 Buffalo Hunter 5 Pioneer Conclusion Nobody’s Perfect Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisUnmanning studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone—including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness—are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to “man” and the paradoxes at their basis. Trade Review"This book makes a much-needed intervention into the popular discourses that surround drone warfare today. Drawing on extensive archival research, Unmanning offers detailed histories that deconstruct the most persistent mythologies of air war in general and automated and distance weaponry in particular to offer completely new perspectives on one of the most significant technological trends in contemporary warfare." -- Caren Kaplan * author of Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above *"In Unmanning, Katherine Chandler offers a compelling history of the drone that complicates and deepens our understanding of what is at stake in the performative rhetoric that fuels the automation of US military air power. This book is an invaluable resource for everyone concerned with the erasures of human agencies that enable claims for technical autonomy in contemporary warfighting." -- Lucy Suchman * author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations *"Drone theory tends to replicate the god’s eye view enjoyed by its object. Katherine Fehr Chandler bucks this trend, grounding her new theory of 'unmanned' aerial vehicles in their wayward and failure-ridden history as human–machine–media assemblages. The effacement of that history, Chandler argues, is what allowed drones to assume their current role: as sleek, agential means for disavowing both the responsibility of their wielders and the humanity of their targets. Unmanning is a timely and fascinating book." -- Paul K. Saint-Amour * author of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form *"As the iconographic technologies of drone warfare become history and more secretive, varied, and autonomous technologies take their place, critically examining the long history of failure that led to the unmanning of war is an urgent task that Chandler’s book meets head-on and with an accuracy and efficacy that her objects of analysis fell far short of achieving." * Cultural Studies *"While focused primarily on drone warfare, Chandler’s book – in its investigations into failure, human/machine relations, and threat production – points perhaps also to ways of thinking about how politics is denied and disavowed in other techniques of state violence like policing." * Security and Dialogue *"Unmanning makes a useful contribution by dispelling the illusion of unmanned warfare. Central to this illusion are the 'politics of disavowal.' The very term 'unmanned' is a disavowal, or an attempted negation, that separates the human, machine, and media components of drone technology. Moreover, it disconnects machine action from political accountability to create a veneer of deniability and non-attribution." * Technology and Culture *"[I]f there is a lesson to be learnt from Chandler’s brilliant book it is that the arc of the drone bends not toward justice, but failure, and contemporary experiments in drone warfare that fail do not so much crash, go haywire, or plummet into the sea. Instead, they maim, kill, and destroy, and disavow these acts as techno-mechanical progress." * Antipode Online *"Chandler’s book both invites the wider geographical deployment of this approach and reminds us that while contemporary drone development and discourse so often appear future-orientated, much can be learned from the platform’s plural histories." * Law, Culture and the Humanities *"This book makes a much-needed intervention into the popular discourses that surround drone warfare today. Drawing on extensive archival research, Unmanning offers detailed histories that deconstruct the most persistent mythologies of air war in general and automated and distance weaponry in particular to offer completely new perspectives on one of the most significant technological trends in contemporary warfare." -- Caren Kaplan * author of Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above *"In Unmanning, Katherine Chandler offers a compelling history of the drone that complicates and deepens our understanding of what is at stake in the performative rhetoric that fuels the automation of US military air power. This book is an invaluable resource for everyone concerned with the erasures of human agencies that enable claims for technical autonomy in contemporary warfighting." -- Lucy Suchman * author of Human-Machine Reconfigurations *"Drone theory tends to replicate the god’s eye view enjoyed by its object. Katherine Fehr Chandler bucks this trend, grounding her new theory of 'unmanned' aerial vehicles in their wayward and failure-ridden history as human–machine–media assemblages. The effacement of that history, Chandler argues, is what allowed drones to assume their current role: as sleek, agential means for disavowing both the responsibility of their wielders and the humanity of their targets. Unmanning is a timely and fascinating book." -- Paul K. Saint-Amour * author of Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form *"As the iconographic technologies of drone warfare become history and more secretive, varied, and autonomous technologies take their place, critically examining the long history of failure that led to the unmanning of war is an urgent task that Chandler’s book meets head-on and with an accuracy and efficacy that her objects of analysis fell far short of achieving." * Cultural Studies *"While focused primarily on drone warfare, Chandler’s book – in its investigations into failure, human/machine relations, and threat production – points perhaps also to ways of thinking about how politics is denied and disavowed in other techniques of state violence like policing." * Security and Dialogue *"Unmanning makes a useful contribution by dispelling the illusion of unmanned warfare. Central to this illusion are the 'politics of disavowal.' The very term 'unmanned' is a disavowal, or an attempted negation, that separates the human, machine, and media components of drone technology. Moreover, it disconnects machine action from political accountability to create a veneer of deniability and non-attribution." * Technology and Culture *"[I]f there is a lesson to be learnt from Chandler’s brilliant book it is that the arc of the drone bends not toward justice, but failure, and contemporary experiments in drone warfare that fail do not so much crash, go haywire, or plummet into the sea. Instead, they maim, kill, and destroy, and disavow these acts as techno-mechanical progress." * Antipode Online *"Chandler’s book both invites the wider geographical deployment of this approach and reminds us that while contemporary drone development and discourse so often appear future-orientated, much can be learned from the platform’s plural histories." * Law, Culture and the Humanities *Table of ContentsContents Introduction 1 DRONE 2 American Kamikaze 3 Unmanning 4 Buffalo Hunter 5 Pioneer Conclusion Nobody’s Perfect Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book Synopsis

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