Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America by Robert Scheer
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(Hardcover)
- Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
- Pub. Date: June 2008
- ISBN-13: 9780446505277
- Sales Rank: 41,338
- 272pp
Synopsis
In the course of his forty-year-career as one of
Scheer examines the expansion of our military presence throughout the world, our insane nuclear strategy, the immorality of corporations profiting in
The views of libertarians, liberals, and pacifists are often overlooked or ignored by America's mainstream media. The Pornography of Power is the culmination of a respected journalist's efforts to change the terms of debate
Publishers Weekly
Veteran journalist Scheer (With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War) takes aim at America's defense policy and bloated military budget in this pugnacious and rigorously researched polemic. "Tragedy can be opportunity," Scheer writes, and 9/11 provided the defense industry with the opportunity it had long been seeking. Unable to persuade the first Bush and Clinton administrations to invest in expensive, state-of-the-art weapons, the defense industry found fresh life as the current President Bush launched his "war on terror" and military expenditures swelled to the highest level in history. Scheer argues that war cannot defeat terrorism. What's required is simple police work-dogged, boring and not terribly expensive-not trillion-dollar bombers, submarines and nuclear arsenal-expenditures he contends are unrelated to defeating terrorists and of little use in Iraq. He soberly reminds readers that Americans have never objected to wasteful defense budgets, and antiwar elected officials fight as viciously as neoconservatives to bring money to their district's defense industries. Scheer's prose is as clear as his evidence; readers will be galvanized by his incendiary account. (June 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Robert Scheer is currently Editor-in-Chief of Truthdig.com, 2007 Webby Award winner for best political blog.
Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Scheer can be heard on the political radio program "Left, Right and Center" on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif. He has written seven books, including "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War."
He is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.
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Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened Americaby Anonymous
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June 30, 2008: Robert Scheer?s The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America, takes as its thesis President Eisenhower?s warning against the ?military-industrial complex? on his retirement from the presidency and provides succinct analyses of how, particularly in the eight presidential years of Bush II, Eisenhower?s worst fears have been realized. Scheer generously acknowledges that Bush, Cheney and the defense hawks may believe otherwise, but he leaves no doubt that America?s war in Iraq, like so much of its foreign relations, is motivated not by the nation?s defense, the spread of democracy or resistance to tyranny, but by the desire for power and profit. Scheer has documented how the close relationship between the defense industry and the Defense Department has resulted in many billions of dollars in contracts to build weapons for which there can be no rationale use in a war against terrorist forces that do not control large armies or navies. He spells out how individuals move from high positions in private weapons corporations to high positions in government that contract to buy those weapons, and then move back to higher positions, and back again to the highest government posts, making ever greater profits for the weapons makers and themselves. The Pornography of Power is a frighteningly persuasive account of their success in creating a wartime environment without end and without real war, but at a terrible cost to America?s ability to respond to crises in economic opportunity, health care, education, and infrastructure repair, none of which can be confronted as long as literally trillions of dollars are wasted in a false pursuit of national security.
Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened Americaby Anonymous
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June 22, 2008: Robert Scheer?s powerful new book, The Pornography of Power, examines what happened after an inattentive and largely apolitical public, led by a poorly prepared, intellectually insecure, and petulant president was confronted by deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It?s a frightening story, but it is crisply told, well researched, and convincing. After decades of incisive investigative reporting, including extensive interviews with five presidents, Scheer is unrivaled in his ability to explain the complex interactions that have created this perfect 'political' storm. As Scheer tells it, the Cold War probably began to unravel with Richard Nixon?s policy of d?tente, but the definitive end had to wait until the disappearance of the Soviet enemy. Unfortunately, what was seen as an opportunity for most was perceived as a disaster by others, especially defense executives and neocon ideologues. No Cold War meant no superpower enemy and that meant the end of unlimited military spending. Then came 9/11 and, as Scheer observes, unlimited military spending was back stronger than ever. Thus the focus of the book: the unlikely and illogical linkage between terrorist attacks accomplished by hijacking commercial airliners with box- cutters and annual military spending that has exceeded that spent during the Cold War. In the aftermath of 9/11 the neocons were ready with a fully developed theory for a 21st century Pax Americana. They had a fully developed answer for whatever problems Bush saw emerging in the wake of 9/11. Scheer meticulously lays out how Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle ?went to work on an untutored president.? Their agenda had clearly been laid out in the 1997 founding statement of the Project for a New American Century which, as Scheer illustrates, was to boost military spending to create a world ?favorable to American interests.? At its center were plans for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Never mind that there was no connection between Hussein and al Qaeda. Scheer?s convincing evidence demonstrates that little attempt was made, by Bush and company, to identify the nature of the problem presented by the attacks on 9/11. Instead, the President and his neocon advisors used 9/11 as justification for ?solutions? that featured expensive weapons originally meant to counteract technical advances by the old Soviet Union. If you wonder why the United States continues to build the F-22 Raptor 'at $65 billion' or the F-35 joint fighter 'at $300 billion' Scheer explains in precise detail. Never mind that the terrorists have no air force. Never mind that the F-16 flys perfectly well. If you wonder why the Congress has funded new Virginia class submarines 'at $2.5 billion each' to fight terrorists who don?t have a navy Scheer makes it distressingly clear. But the executive branch cannot spend all this money without congressional approval and, from the beginning, congress was cooperative. A critical mass of Republicans and Democrats alike are shown to be open to the influence of the likes of Lockheed, Halliburton and Boeing. Such influence, Scheer shows, does not stem from campaign contributions alone, but from the promise of jobs. It is not for nothing that the various facets of military production are spread into as many congressional districts as...
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