The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth by Mark Mazzetti

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Read it online here: http://en.calameo.com/read/000486388097b2f5b72b1

Audio explanation of the Book by Mark. Part 1 http://tindeck.com/listen/fxzk
An Audio explaining the Book by Mark. Part 2 http://tindeck.com/listen/ovbw

RT: CIA: from intelligence agency to killing machine
http://youtu.be/mJsb1mjdEE8

About Mazatti:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Mazzetti

In a way, it all began with the collapse of the Soviet empire. The raison d'être of the Central Intelligence Agency and American military might evaporated between 1989 and 1991. Washington and Langley might not always realize it, but one of the main reasons the United States has been uninterruptedly at war since the '40s — either officially or by proxy, somewhere in the world — is that state military spending has been a primary fuel of capitalist growth.

With the demise of the USSR, a justification had to be found to continue to fund what Eisenhower called, with such eerie prescience that it has become a cliché, the military-industrial complex. Without the pretext of Soviet threat, defense spending needed a rationale. For a while it seemed as if the so-called drug war could supply a mission (maybe 3,000 Panamanian civilians killed); then came the Bush-Clinton new world order of "military humanism" (around 100,000 Iraqi and hundreds of Serb and Albanian civilians killed).

Then on a bright Tuesday morning in late summer, Osama bin Laden handed the American military and intelligence apparatus a blank check. And the "war on terror," besides being a cash cow for defense contractors like Raytheon and private military companies like Blackwater, has altered the cultures of the Pentagon and the CIA in disturbing ways.

Since the Ford administration, the CIA had been prohibited from planting exploding seashells off the Cuban coastline or otherwise engaging in the business of assassination. That changed after 9/11. In late 2001, President George W. Bush signed a secret order restoring the agency's power to kill, and the CIA has spent the last decade blotting out the distinctions between espionage and warfare. This is the story Mark Mazzetti, national security correspondent for The New York Times, tells in "The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth." "No longer a traditional espionage service devoted to stealing the secrets of foreign governments, the Central Intelligence Agency has become a killing machine, an organization consumed with man hunting," he writes.

Mazzetti thoroughly documents this transformation — from Donald Rumsfeld's resistance to the CIA's assumption of paramilitary operations, through the invasion of Afghanistan and the American agency's queasy alliance with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, to the Iraq War, to President Barack Obama's escalating reliance on Langley to conduct his secret wars. Mazzetti is a reporter, and he stays out of the story's way. He knows there are devils in these details: CIA officials were concerned all along that its detention and interrogation program — in which suspected terrorists were kidnapped and taken to black site prisons in Thailand, Bucharest, Romania, Lithuania and elsewhere to be tortured — contravened the United Nations Convention against Torture. The prisoners were waterboarded, deprived of sleep, subjected to mock executions and confined in small boxes "with live bugs." The CIA's own inspector general wrote in 2004 that these techniques were "inhumane."

There is a certain dark comedy to some of this history, as when one prison that hosted such atrocities — familiar from reports of the worst abuses committed by the South American military dictatorships — has to be renamed because its original code name, Cat's Eye, is deemed "racially insensitive." After detours with a cast of colorful characters to Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia, and by the time the SEALS in their Blackhawks descend on a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Mazzetti's readers should be disillusioned with the sort of official triumphalism that brought celebratory mobs to the White House fence, chanting like drunken football fans because their nation had invaded a country with which it was not at war and assassinated several people, some of whom, including bin Laden himself, were unarmed when they were killed. "You're invading Pakistan," the CIA's station chief in Islamabad told Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal that night, an accurate description that otherwise seems to have been formulated only at the leftmost margins of civic discourse.

The CIA behaves like the Mossad now, hunting down its enemies and putting them to death without hearing or trial, which should invite more soul-searching than it does on the part of American citizens. The U.S. ambassador to Israel, when Israel's government was eliminating Hamas leaders during the second Palestinian Intifada, said that "the United States is very clearly on the record as being against targeted assassinations. … They are extrajudicial killings and we do not support that."