An eye-opening, if occasionally meandering, account of intelligence work.
A debut memoir of a memorable 27-year career as an intelligence officer in the Canadian military.
Fletcher entered the Canadian Armed Forces as an infantryman in the late 1970s and was later recruited to join the intelligence section, partly on the basis of his artistic prowess, as he served both as an intelligence operator and the unit’s graphic artist. He would spend the remainder of his impressive career working in intelligence in all three of its principal disciplines, which he calls the “Holy Trinity”: imagery (reconnaissance photography), human intelligence, and signals intelligence. Over the course of this book, the author’s remembrance is an admirably candid one; he concedes that he was wholly unprepared for his appointment as a Middle East analyst,“an admittedly somewhat pretentious designation in both title and capability, considering my qualifications.” He served in Germany and Afghanistan, among other places, and was uniquely positioned within the intelligence community to master its internal machinations; his memoir is brimming with astute aperçus about NATO, the problematic interrogation of “uncooperative” people, such as prisoners of war, and the Canadian Armed Forces’ particularly difficult experience during the 1990s. Along the way, he provides an astute insider’s peek into a world in which, the author says, a few of the people he met “should have been issued a straightjacket instead of a uniform.” He never overdramatizes his experience and instead offers an unvarnished, realistic view of military bureaucracy: “The overarching lesson here was that if anyone still believed that the military was a wholly selfless organization, free from the political machinations and self-interest that is encountered in other government departments, they were in for something of a shock.” Fletcher’s narrative can get lost in a haze of professional detail, though; he often detours into territory that won’t arouse casual readers’ interest, such as the politics of naming units or the “contentious politics and policies surrounding health and fitness.”
An eye-opening, if occasionally meandering, account of intelligence work.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5255-5716-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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