A United for Peace of Pierce County study circle

DIGGING DEEPER XIX: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ROBERT BAER

WHAT: "Digging Deeper XIX: The World according to Robert Baer" -- UFPPC's Monday evening book discussion group
WHEN: July 24, & 31, 2006 -- 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
WHERE: Mandolin Café, 3923 South 12th Street, Tacoma, WA

Since July 2004, United for Peace of Pierce County has been conducting “Digging Deeper,” a Monday-night book discussion group, often in the form of a study circle. Topics have included peak oil, climate change, the corporation, and Iran, as well as abiding themes of war, peace, politics, and social change. Occasionally, we have spent several weeks reading longer works, like Daniel Yergin’s The Prize or Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation.  --  On July 24, 2006, Digging Deeper XIX begins its third year of existence with a two-week discussion of a books by Robert Baer, a former top CIA operative.  --  Baer was a case officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations from 1976 to 1997, and according to ace investigative reporter Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, he was “considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East,” handling agents who infiltrated Hezbollah PFLP-GC, PSF, Libyan intelligence, Fatah-Hawari, and al-Qaeda.  --  The film “Syriana” grew out of meetings between Baer and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who was intrigued by reading See No Evil, and the character Bob Barnes is loosely modeled after Robert Baer.  --  Join us for two weeks of discussion of these and other questions: What is it like to work for the CIA? To whom is it accountable? How has the organization evolved over the years, and how is it connected to other power centers of the U.S. national security state? What sort of work does it do in the Middle East?

—Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism (Three Rivers Press, 2002; paperback 2003). “In See No Evil, one of the CIA's top field officers of the past quarter century recounts his career running agents in the back alleys of the Middle East. In the process, Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides compelling evidence about how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA's efforts to root out the world's deadliest terrorists. . . . A twenty-one-year veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Operations who had left the agency in 1997, Baer observed firsthand how an increasingly bureaucratic CIA lost its way in the post-Cold War world and refused to adequately acknowledge and neutralize the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalist terror in the Middle East and elsewhere. A throwback to the days when CIA operatives got results by getting their hands dirty and running covert operations, Baer spent his career chasing down leads on suspected terrorists in the world's most volatile hot spots. As he and his agents risked their lives gathering intelligence, he watched as the CIA reduced drastically its operations overseas, failed to put in place people who knew local languages and customs, and rewarded workers who knew how to play the political games of the agency's suburban Washington headquarters but not how to recruit agents on the ground. ” —Publisher.

—Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude (Three Rivers Press, 2003; paperback 2004). “In his blustering second book, former CIA officer Baer targets Saudi Arabia's corrupt leadership and cozy relationship with Washington. He argues that because the Saudis pay vast sums to powerful Americans, often in the form of lucrative defense contracts, those U.S. agencies that could help stop terrorism are thwarted by their own side. For example, CIA superiors tell Baer that they have no operating directive to look into Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia in the early '90s. He is deeply disappointed in both the CIA and the State Department. . . . While Baer's attacks on Washington's "consent of silence" sometimes beg for clarification, his many working years in the Middle East and Central Asia give him great believability, and he makes a strong case that Saudi Arabia -- with skyrocketing birth rates, growing unemployment, a falling per capita income and a corrupt ruling family draining the public coffers -- is a powder keg waiting to explode. . . . Baer's radical solution is guaranteed to stir debate and make many skittish: "An invasion and a revolution might be the only things that can save the industrial West from a prolonged, wrenching depression.” —Publisher's Weekly.

MEETING SCHEDULE — Mondays from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on July 24, 31 at the Mandolin Café, 3923 S. 12th St., Tacoma, WA. No charge for participation. Books available for borrowing or purchase. Contact: Mark Jensen (jensenmk@plu.edu; 253-756-7519).

Digging Deeper, UFPPC’s book discussion series, has been meeting weekly since July 2004. We have considered these books bearing on matters related to UFPPC’s mission statement: "We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy": Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (Viking, 2004); Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties (Scribner, 2004); Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004); Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War (Putnam, 2004); Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies (Free Press, 2004); David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Interlink, 2004); James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (Viking, 2004); Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military (Norton, 2003); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books, 2004); Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, 2004); Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Beacon, 2001); Robert McChesney, The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2004); Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Columbia, and Indochina (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Rahul Mahajan, Full Spectrum Dominance: US Power in Iraq and Beyond (Seven Stories Press, 2003); Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (Brassey's, 2004); Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (Simon & Schuster, 1991); Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (Metropolitan Books, 2004); Ross Gelbspan, Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis -- and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster (Basic Books, 2004); Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation (Three Rivers Press, 1999); Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society, 2003); Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton UP, 2001); Amory Lovins et al., Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profit, Jobs, and Security (Rocky Mountain Institute, 2005); Mark Lynas, High Tide: The Truth about Our Climate Crisis (Picador, 2004); Brian M. Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (Basic Books, 2004); Patrick J. Michaels, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media (Cato Institute, 2004); Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton University Press, 2002); T.E. Graedel and Paul J. Crutzen, Atmospheric Change: An Earth System Perspective (W.H. Freeman, 1992); Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Harvard University Press, 2003); Douglas V. Hoyt & Kenneth H. Schatten, The Role of the Sun in Climate Change (Oxford University Press, 1997); Jim Wallis, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2004); Ted Nace, Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (Berret-Koehler, 2001); P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell University Press, 2003); Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (University of California Press, 1998); Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Back Bay Books, 2000); Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, The Selling of Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (University of Illinois Press, 1994); David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 2nd ed., (Berret-Koehler, 2001); Elliott D. Sclar and Richard C. Leone, You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Cornell University Press, 2001); Ezra N. Suleiman, Dismantling Democratic States (Princeton University Press, 2003); Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador, 2002; orig. ed. 1999); John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler, 2004); Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (Broadway Books, 2002); Paul Roberts, The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World (Houghton Mifflin, 2004); Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (South End Press, 2004); Lester R. Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (W.W. Norton, 2005); Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2005); Ron Hira & Anil Hira, Outsourcing America: What's Behind Our National Crisis And How We Can Reclaim American Jobs (AMOCOM, 2005); Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (University of Chicago Press, 2003); Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002; paperback edition by Perennial, 2005); Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Anchor, 1995); Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge -- And Why We Must (Perennial, 2000); Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe (Chelsea Green, 2004; orig. ed. 2002); Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell in Burma (Penguin, 2005); Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005); Matthew R. Simmons, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (Wiley, 2005); Andrew Gumbel, Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America (Nation Books, 2005); George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate—The Essential Guide for Progressives (Chelsea Green, 2004; orig. ed. 2002); V.S. Ramachandran, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers (Pi Press, 2004); William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, revised ed. (Pluto Press, 2004); Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Anchor, 2002); Chris Hedges, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America (Free Press, 2005); Richard Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (Columbia University Press, 2004); Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Harper Perennial, orig. ed. 2001); George Packer, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005); Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979); Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Knopf, 2005), Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2006), Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford University Press paperback, 2005; orig. ed. 2004), Cornel West, Democracy Matters (Penguin, 2004), Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books 2004), Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Viking, 2006); Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2003); Afshin Molavi, The Soul of Iran: A Nation’s Journey to Freedom (W.W. Norton, 2005); Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (John Wiley, 2003); David Harris, The Crisis: The President, the Prophet, and the Shah—1979 and the Coming of Radical Islam (Little Brown, 2004); Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Harvard University Press, 2004); Christopher de Ballaigue, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran (HarperCollins, 2004); Nasrin Alavi, We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (Soft Skull Press, 2005); Sandra Mackey, The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation (Dutton, 1996); Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (Simon and Schuster, 1985); Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003); Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict between Iran and America (Little Brown, 2004); Kenneth R. Timmerman, Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran (Crown Forum, 2005); Michael Byers, War Law: Understanding International Law and Armed Conflict (Grove Press, 2006); Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2006); Robert Jay Lifton, Richard Falk, and Irene Gendzier, eds., Crimes of War: Iraq (Nation Books, 2006 paperback).