The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda

by Edward S. Herman

Book Overview

A devastating expose of U.S. foreign policy which separates the myth of an "international terrorist conspiracy" from the reality. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0896081346
• ISBN13: 9780896081345
• Release Date: July 1999
• Publisher: South End Press
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

U.S. State Terrorism (minus the British role)

Twenty-four years have elapsed since Herman exposed U.S. state terrorism and the CIA moles inside the corporatist media that camouflage it. In 1982, William J. Casey and George Bush were lighting up Central America while Reagan was on the mend after being shot by George Bush's friend's son - John W. Hinckley Jr. At the same time in the Middle East, CIA-installed authoritarian regimes in Iraq and in Iran were pitted against each other and lighting each other up. War seems not only to be the health of the state, but its `raison d'etre'. Today the Bush Crime Family still remains at the helm of what Daddy Bush called "a new world order" in 1989. Never before has American liberty been so threatened as it is now in 2006 by the Bush-n-Blair Crime Alliance. There are dangerous parallels between the United States and Nazi Germany in the way power and rights are systematically being taken away. The United States is sliding fast down the slippery slope to Nazi Germany. Under Bush-n-Blair's War on Freedom, Congress has acquiescently stood by and allowed the executive branch of the federal government to wield the power to: 1) send the whole nation to war on behalf of British interests without a Congressional declaration of war; 2) arrest any American citizen as a suspected terrorist and have the military incarcerate him or her without charge - denying fundamental rights that go back longer than the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or the Declaration of Independence all the way to Magna Carta (this is what the Jose Padilla case is all about); 3) monitor your telephone conversations, email, and bank records without court-issued warrants - while you may NOT monitor the government's telephone conversations, etc in kind; 4) issue secret summonses under the USA (anti)Patriot Act for people's personal and business records, with harsh punishments for those who exercise their right to freedom of speech and tell about the issuance of said summonses; 5) detain people in jail for indefinite periods as "material witnesses"; 6) ignore habeas corpus for people held at Guantanamo Bay and at CIA secret prisons elsewhere, and 7) bomb, shoot, or otherwise kill foreigners at home in their countries. Herman's book is a chilling account of how corporatist media camouflages U.S. state terrorism and how Hollywood and other media including professional sports distract the American public through entertainment while the U.S. government goes around the globe killing and terrorizing people in its aim to install puppet regimes in other peoples' countries. He said "In short, we have been living not only in an age of escalating `terrorism' but in age of Orwell, where words are managed and propaganda and scholarship are organized so that terror means the lesser terror - the greater terror is defined out of existence and given little attention" (p13). George Orwell, who wrote a futuristic novel based on his WWII experiences at the BBC about state terrorism and the propaganda that di

Excellent and very timely book

I was interested in this book some years back, read parts of it, never finished it. One of those sortsof books, the kind that would be one of 10 - 20 I would have out at any one time while trying todiscover and better understand the world in which we live. Now it is November 28, 2001 andAmerica has been victim to one of the largest terrorist attacks in history. I decided to look again into some of the writings on the war on terrorism which actually began long before 9/11/2001. The Real Terror network is a chilling book. Ed Herman is an expert on terrorism if ever there wasone. Problem is he is not judgmental in his use of the term, as the media then and today tend tobe, so he is brushed aside from the mainstream (certainly have not seen him interviewed on TVduring our newest crisis!). Early on in the book he describes terrorism as the use of violence toachieve political goals. With this as his starting point, he goes on to examine various activities ofwhat he calls retail terrorists (ie. small Soviet sponsored, the PLO, Libya etc) vs wholesaleterrorism (ie state terrorism). Herman's basic premise is that the terrorism carried out with US support in South Africa, Angola,Cuba, and by Israel far outweigh that carried out by the folks actually branded as terrorists, theones we are in the process of "smoking out" today. He goes on to provide a wealth of examplesof US support for terrorism which is documented in a very scholarly way. There is also a veryeffective chapter examining the role of the media in defining who we generally think of asterrorists, by downplaying or completely ignoring our own actions while repeatedly runningstories on enemy terrorism. Basically he is describing the propaganda model he later flushes outwith co-author Noam Chomsky in "manufacturing Consent" I would suggest that this book be dusted off and read by anyone who has the stomach. It is not apretty picture, or an easy read for that matter. It is not overly long book, and I think that if morepeople were exposed to truths like the ones Herman outlines, more people would protest, andlikely the world would be a better, at least safer place.

Iconoclastic and brilliant scholarship

Edward Herman, famous for his iconoclastic studies (e.g. Manufacturing Consent)with Noam Chomsky, published this book in 1982, though its themes very much apply today. Herman shows that the U.S. mass media almost always accept the U.S. government version of events without question, especially in foreign affairs and cater to its propaganda needs. Herman explains why it is that fascist military regimes in the third world from Indonesia to Brazil to Guatemala to Uraguay to the Philipines to Chile that have often been installed and given heavy aid by the United States and murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people, often in extremely gruesome fashion, and yet very little coverage has been given to their abuses, despite massive evidence presented by church groups and human rights organizations, refugees and many others, in contrast to the massive daily coverage of the injustices suffered by dissidents in the Soviet block, the official enemy of the U.S. government and much of big business. He examines why it is that, to give one of many examples, Brazillian labor leader Luis De Silva can be referred to at one point by a New York Times editorial as "the Lech Walesa of Brazil" and yet that same paper can devote very little coverage to the gross injustices he suffered at the hands of a U.S. client government and yet devoted massive daily coverage to the injustices suffered by Walesa in Communist Poland. He examines why it is that while unions were being eliminated and union leaders and members being executed by the thousands in Colombia, Guatemala, Chile and elsewhere, the United States government and its allies and the U.S. media, can launch into a hocus pocus of holy horror at the far less murderous repression of the Solidarity union in Poland. He examines why it is that the media, when they deign to look at the terror in the U.S. backed client states at all, almost never attribute its source to U.S. training and supply of the military officials who conduct it, instead asserting that the client state government is unfortunately unable to control the death squads or rogue segments of the military, despite massive evidence that these elements are firmly under the control of the client government and being directed by it, or perhaps implying that the U.S. is an innocent bystander looking helplessly over a country that has no history of democracy, is prone to violence, etc; he examines why it is that the media rarely focus on the nature of the massive U.S. training of the Latin American militaries where not much emphasis is placed on military training but much emphasis is placed on ideological training, ingraining the idea in these already reactionary forces that any sort of reform movement, however mild, that seeks to help the oppressed peasantry, establish union rights, and so on, is by definition part of a hellish conspiracy of the Soviet Union and Cuba to overthrow Western Civilization, and so on. They

An essential work for truth-seekers

I read this book six years ago, so I write this review based only on distant memories. After sitting in a train station and reading the first sixty pages, my life has never been the same. It is methodical, extremely well-documented, and never sensational. I recommend it as a fundamental building block for anyone looking to develop their understanding of the way the world really works.