A worthwhile contribution to our ongoing national debate about the balance between national security and privacy and about...
Who poses the greater threat to the United States: the spymasters and their “enormous power” or the leakers “who occasionally expose them?”
Add still another blow to Woodrow Wilson’s tottering historical reputation. As a World War I security measure, Wilson proposed the Espionage Act of 1917—he tried vainly to get press censorship into the law—and used it instead to suppress dissent, most notoriously against Eugene Debs, Socialist Party leader, imprisoned for giving anti-war speeches. With the rise of the national security state during and after World War II, succeeding administrations have persisted in using the act not so much to punish foreign agents but rather to go after protestors and leakers, most famously Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 for supplying the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Since 9/11, intelligence agencies have accrued even more power and have employed the act and other laws to pursue the likes of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, to ensnare journalists—Glenn Greenwald, James Risen, and Michael Hastings, among others—who convey classified information not to the enemy but to the public. Near the end of his well-written, tightly argued discussion of these and other cases, Gardner (Emeritus, History/Rutgers Univ.; Killing Machine: The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare, 2013, etc.) declares that the intelligence community has become “the unacknowledged supreme master of the federal government.” By threatening aggressive investigatory journalism, by shielding government malpractice, by violating the separation of powers doctrine, intelligence agencies have done more, he writes, to undermine our democracy than to make us safe. Adding to Gardner’s credibility is his willingness to be as harsh on Barack Obama as on George W. Bush and his accommodation of such voices as Sean Wilentz, Michael Kinsley, and George Packer, all of whom have been critical of either the methods or character of the whistleblowers.
A worthwhile contribution to our ongoing national debate about the balance between national security and privacy and about the line between sedition and dissent.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62097-063-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Retired FBI agent Ressler, who again teams up with Schactman (Whoever Fights Monsters, 1992), reveals here that modern American justice is served very, very slowly. When Ressler moved to the Cleveland office in 1974, he was handed an ``old dog,'' FBI slang for a hard case to close. Cleveland's king of X-rated motels, Owen Kilbane, was suspected of violating racketeering laws by moving his prostitutes between states. But Ressler was less interested in the prostitution ring than in Kilbane's lawyer, Robert Steele. Five years earlier, Steele's wife had been shot dead in her suburban home while she slept. Almost immediately, the police had suspected Steele, then a prominent judge who'd been having an affair and was known to have inquired about finding someone to murder his wife. Steele resigned from the bench when details of his adultery emerged, but no witnesses came forward, and because of a celebrated case in which the conviction of a doctor for killing his wife had recently been overturned on appeal, the police hesitated to push for an indictment without iron-clad evidence. Gradually, Ressler gathered information about Kilbane's criminal activities and cultivated informants. With tips from disgruntled prostitutes and a confession from the shooter, who was jailed for another murder, Ressler built a case. After three years of dogged pursuit, Kilbane and his brother Martin, as well as Steele were convicted of arranging Marlene Steele's murder. The problem here is that, while Ressler's detailed account of his pursuit is the sign of a dedicated agent, it's not necessarily the sign of a good writer. This reads like a case file—a litany of details spiced with pinches of bravado but without any real surprises. The moral of this true crime tale is, if there's a will, there's a way, which may be needed encouragement for readers plowing through Justice Is Served.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11295-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Roberti, a former Hong Kong correspondent for AsiaWeek, has followed the convoluted negotiations between China and Britain over the last few years and has produced a formidable narrative of high diplomatic deception and expediency. Britain took Hong Kong from China on a 99-year lease due to expire in 1997. But China has always tolerated this high-powered capitalist outpost not so much because of the technicalities of a lease as for the huge quantities of hard currency she derived from it. Roberti, like many, seems to think that the British had a shot at keeping Hong Kong out of China's clutches. But Britain wanted good relations with the Communist giant and was not prepared to sour them over Hong Kong. He also points the finger of accusation at Hong Kong's own commercial elite, who, he claims, wanted a no- fuss complicity with Beijing at the price of suppressing democracy: ``an unholy alliance of capitalists and communists.'' A colony lawyer named Martin Lee, however, had misgivings, aroused by the treaty signed by Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang in 1984. ``One country, two systems,'' the promise of a democratic Hong Kong allied with mainland China, seemed unlikely. Giving a voice to Hong Kong's ordinary people, Lee organized vociferous protest against the British sell-out. In the process, he became ``more recognizable than the governor and more popular than many pop stars.'' But the pro-democracy movement has made no difference to the eventual outcome. And here there are unpleasant truths that Roberti seems reluctant to face. Were the British really ``forcing'' Hong Kong to live under a dictatorship? The reality, surely, was that the territory's residents no longer had the power to back their wishes up. The notion of a conspiracy, though, always makes for a better read, and Roberti is certainly deft in showing us one. A shame only that he could not come up with a better villain than poor old knock-kneed Britain.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-02621-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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