Dominic Streatfeild

Ostensibly about mind control in the round, this is, mostly, a rather confused if well written set of chapter-by-chapter case studies on various aspects of 'brainwashing' as well as an extended essay on interrogation with a fairly set 'rationalist' and sceptical view of most claims of mind control.

Certainly Streatfield has worked hard. He has done valuable independent research to add to his reasonably broad reading in the subject but what starts well as a history of Cold War fears about show more brainwashing starts to fall apart so that early promise remains unfulfilled.

It is hard to be too critical (because the work seems mostly sound) about this book yet it lacks a coherent narrative even if it has a coherent message that all the work undertaken by 'spooks' aimed at controlling our minds does not amount to hill of beans.

To a great extent, Streatfield proves his point by showing us that, time and time again, claims about the mind in society (truth serums, subliminal advertising, alleged messages in heavy metal music, cult behaviours, satanic abuse) do not stand up to much scrutiny.

But in this worthy work, where the case studies are often truly horrific and often show humanity at its most stupid as much it shows it at its most cruel, the interspersing of these tales with the 'spook' stories and history of interrogation (I prefer the term torture) adds little.

Most of the spook and drugs material is better told elsewhere although there are important new insights especially about Anglo-American 'bad psychiatry' and its links to the Western security apparat. Dr. Ewen Cameron is up there with Mengele on the 'evil doctor' lists.

But, while there is new insight into the story of Cold War evil, the book soon veers into case studies that might cause outrage and shock but are somehow not connected to make a whole. What do they tell us that is coherent - not much more than that we can be a pretty dumb and cruel species.

This has all the marks of journalistic writing . It is no surprise to find that Streatfield's main profession is as a documentary maker which lends itself precisely to his short form case study method.

Having been critical (based on expectations), we have to say that he writes well and humanely. The case studies are well reported. His judgements seem sensible. We should be horrified by these stories. And his showing how stupidity combined with lack of moral compass does harm is vital.

However, in his eagerness to demonstrate the natural scepticism of the evidence-based investigative journalist, one clearly determined to expose horrors rationally rather than emotionally, he sometimes seems not to see the wood for the trees.

He fills gaps in the data with rational extrapolation of rational expectation when an even more sceptical mind might point out that a documentary investigative journalist is scarcely going to be told everything that needs to be told.

We know how much documentation gets destroyed and we also know that sources that brief a journalist secretly will generally have an angle of some kind. If they are in office (even if not), they would have a quiet word with someone in their system on what any co-operation should achieve.

The case that mind manipulation is less than the sum of its popular cultural parts sounds at times like that determined attempt of the urban liberal intellectual to deny the existence of all conspiracies because they have been unnerved by the Protocols of the Elders of Sion fraud.

The same caution one should have in denying the possibility of conspiratorial behaviour when we know that these are sometimes, if accidentally, evidenced to rational people should apply to claims that mind control is ineffective and has been abandoned by those who rule us.

He may be looking in the wrong place since it is as convenient for those who rule us to deny socialised control of consciousness nowadays as it to deny the existence of conspiracies (of a sort). Yet he is right that interrogation has no magic bullets and is much as it was under the Inquisition.

But 'mind control' (meaning the deliberate manipulation of consciousness in the context of power relations) should not be so easily dismissed or at least should be investigated more thoroughly. After all, the vast sums being spent on psychological warfare operations require more scrutiny.

Of course, we know that ridiculous sums were spent on futile and cruel research in the Cold War and it is possible that the ridiculous sums being spent on psychological operations may be equally amoral and stupid but that is the investigation we need - not of what was but of what is.

We are in the middle of a massive global information war in which journalists are witting or unwitting combatants as much as priests or pastors in a religious war - believing themselves to be sacred, they are, in fact, players in the game and so targets.

Interrogation only happens when the manipulation of minds has failed and real war of some sort has broken out. Interrogation is the easy and material part of this game, a matter of pain and cruelty as well as fear and manipulation.

The case studies about 'spooks' and psychologists out of control - sociopaths sanctioned by a claim of existential struggle - show us 'intent', the intent to control consciousness. It is the history of this intent and its methodologies that needs its coherent history, now more than ever.

In this book, we see case after case of 'methodology' by 'bad' psychiatrists and secret warriors alongside social paranoia that sees badness where there is no badness to be seen yet we do not see much of the deep 'why' of all this except as sets of responses to specific incidents.

The deep 'why' is not the functional approach that says that such-and-such sought to get such-and-such to admit this-or-that but the question of how entire structures can exist that believe either that they can manipulate minds or are in the midst of a programme of manipulation.

It probably comes down to deep instinctive paranoia based on a fact on the ground - we cannot know other minds. Power requires that it knows the minds over which it has power. The impotent are easily led to believe that minds can be manipulated in ways that must be simple to understand.

A correct scepticism is sceptical about scepticism insofar as the urgency of power's desire to understand in order to control minds must be accepted and analysed and the fears and paranoia that lead to belief in non-existent mind control need to be understood and corrected.

Streatfield does some of what is required in exposing the absurdity and cruelty of passionate or stupid people refusing to believe that mind control is not going on or believing in too much that they have themselves unwittingly created (as in the truly shocking satanic abuse chapter).

He should get credit for exposing much. We should be horrified by the treatment of innocent Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the almost-plan for total sensory deprivation as an 'experiment' and the simple policeman destroyed by his own disturbed religious community.

But I was not persuaded that elite or state mind control has not gone beyond failed experiments to improve interrogation methods or create better agents. I may sound excessively conspiratorial to Streatfield but I suspect there is lot more to this story and that it is even darker than we think. show less

Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography by Dominic Streatfeild explores the history of cocaine starting with the chewing of coca leaves by the natives of South America. Coca's history, use, misuse, and abuse is a fascinating tale of how humans can take something good and corrupt it with just a little effort. The effects of imperialism on the coca plant and its transition into cocaine and the various forms of cocaine are scary and yet somehow felt unavoidable. I was torn between what I thought I show more knew and what the facts and evidence show in regards to the coca plant, cocaine use, and cocaine trafficking based on Streatfeild's research. The intersection of political aspirations and cocaine is incredibly disheartening leaving one to wonder just how much those in power drove or at least ignored cocaine trafficking for political benefit. As I reached the latter part of the book, the realization kept coming to me that criminalizing cocaine and other drugs created the prices that made trafficking so tempting to so many. Criminalizing the use of drugs rather than seeing it as a medical issue has created so many problems for so many places all around the world. Using drug trafficking as a control mechanism over countries dooms those countries to poverty and dependence on other countries. While Streatfeild never explicitly lays out a plan to decriminalize drugs, it was easy to imagine how a shift in perspective about the use of the coca plant could lead to viable economies for those countries where coca is easy (and in some places the only real option) to grow to trade with other countries through the interviews he shared. Cocaine showed me how easy it is to fall into a fear trap and how easily those fear traps can be released with a little information. Streatfeild demonstrates how various governments and the media worked together, sometimes wittingly sometimes unwittingly, to scare people into thinking the drug problem was much more pervasive and deadly than it actually was and to point fingers at populations that were easy to punch down at rather than addressing the real issues that lead to drug use in the first place. Cocaine is a fascinating, if sometimes tedious, look into how a harmless plant became the big, bad evil because of human interference. show less

What a painful book to read. One is catapulted from grief to anger to disbelief to fury to despair. I had to read the book slowly, a few pages a day; otherwise I would have found it too upsetting to bear. Dominic Streatfeild, a British investigative reporter, tells eight separate stories of tragic consequences of 9/11 – or rather of the xxxx response to 9/11 by the neocons of the Bush administration, and their compatriots. This is investigative reporting as it should be practiced. Each show more chapter of this book should have been a headline story in the op/ed pages of major newspapers in the US, the Times, Post, Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, LA Times.. Each chapter should have been cited by programs on major television news channels. Someone should commission Streatfeild as the Woodard and Bernstein of this era.

Kirkus Reviews provides a compelling synopsis of A History of the World since 9/11, the compendium of these eight investigative reports:

 According to Streatfeild , when the shock and confusion of 9/11 subsided, cynical American leaders seized an opportunity to rearrange the world more to their liking. Relying on erroneous assumptions and their own good intentions, abandoning democratic ideals and the rule of law, America and her allies crafted crude certainties and substituted them for the truth. The author features eight stories designed to show how they made the world decidedly less safe. He begins his parade of disasters with an account of the redneck loser in Texas, who, thinking himself an avenging patriot, shot and killed an immigrant Indian gas station attendant. More horrors followed. To help ensure its own reelection, the Australian government adopted an outrageous lie to demonize a boatload of refugees as terrorists. Believing they were striking Taliban forces, U.S. helicopter gunships strafed a wedding celebration in Afghanistan, killing 48 civilians. With too few soldiers to secure Iraq, the U.S. forces exposed the largest explosives plant in the Middle East to looting. Misidentifying an Egyptian traveler as a member of al-Qaeda, Macedonian border guards arrested the man and permitted the CIA to snatch him; he was subjected to months of incarceration and harsh interrogation before the agency acknowledged the mistake. America also overlooked Uzbekistan’s appalling human-rights record in return for access to a vital air base from which to launch strikes on Afghanistan. In Pakistan, the global polio-eradication campaign, tantalizingly close to solution, collapsed because of distrust for and rage against America. A tenacious reporter, Streatfeild packs the narrative with telling detail, instructive interviews and dramatic events . . . .

Here are just a few other brief excerpts from such synopses, gathered somewhat randomly:

• Dominic Streatfeild expertly combines history, biography and investigative journalism to show how a massacre on a clear September day in 2001 has touched the lives of millions of people around the world.

• . . . we see reason taking a back seat to atavistic impulses and also to simple confusion and paranoia. Streatfeild is grimly understanding of all this.

• Streatfeild shows how the sleep of reason and good sense in successive US administrations post-9/11 has brought forth the monsters of extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay, extrajudicial execution and wholesale contravention of international law.

• Dominic Streatfeild has now hit the mother lode of seriousness with his new work… If anger is indeed an energy, this book should have you ready to run a marathon by the time you’ve reached the final page.

No, Streatfeild is not a scholarly historian. No, he is not an unbiased observer. But he is what we need – what was envisioned as “freedom of the press.”

Granted, the Kirkus review ends with a snippy grumble:

 . . . but he reaches conclusions too sweeping. Surely, for example, incidents of good-ol’-boy racism or Muslim paranoia cannot be wholly ascribed to the War on Terror, no matter how clumsily waged. ¶ Colorfully reported, not so carefully reasoned.
If a reviewer must register such a “sweeping” objection of its own, surely it should provide more evidence that the minor one they include. In the case, the murder to the gas station manager in Texas, Streatfeild would probably agree. But he does make the point, quite clearly and validly, that the Bushie rhetoric did much to create the atmosphere that incited the murder.

Of course, the book title – A History of THE World since 9/11 – is overstated. The subtitle is more appropriate (but, of course, less catchy): Disaster, Deception, and Destruction in the War on Terror. Curiously, Streatfeild himself has been quite candid about this:

 Julian, my agent, thought for a moment. ‘That’s a bloody good title’ he said. ¶ I disagreed. I thought it was a crap title. What on earth would the book be ABOUT? Where would I start? Clearly, a real history of the world would be impossible. A snappy title with no substance inside would surely be a waste of time? The whole thing sounded gimmicky.
Perhaps a more appropriate title, one almost as catchy, would have been Disaster, Deception, and Destruction in the Wake of 9/11.

What is important is that Streatfeild exposes the deception, and the rampant deceptive in governments, especially the US government in the Bush regime, is what is most infuriating, most grievous, most discouraging, and most painful of the revelations in the book.

If I could make a required reading list for all voters in federal elections, this one (with a better title) would be among my top ten. Yes, Kirkus, it is “colorfully reported”; and its reasoning is careful enough to require a genuine public response. show less

Ultimately, this is a naysayer type of book about the war against terrorism, although Streatfeild has taken a different tack than most commentators. There are analyses of the collapse of Iraq, there are harrowing tales tracking down Bin Laden, there are think pieces on how the world has changed since 9/11 but he has chosen to write the history, somewhat of a misnomer since he is not writing a history per se, but anecdotal stories about the post-9/11 world from the perspective or ordinary show more people or events that highlight aspects of the world in the post-9/11 era. For example, he begins the work by telling the disparate stories of a racial bigot and the Sikh who was gunned down as he was attempting to live out the American dream. To this end, the author is attempting to account for the topsy-turvy world after 9/11. All told, he has eight compelling narratives that illustrate how the world is no better, and we are no closer to eradicating Islamists than we were previous to 9/11. Readers might enjoy the insightful tales whereas they may have passed on the weightier tomes purporting to relate the history of the world after 9/11.

In some ways the world has passed the work by. There are other books that are similar and relate how badly Bush and the neo-cons performed in the Middle East. Streatfield does have a unique approach and has tried to incorporate the personal stories of ordinary people and in this way weave a coherent tale of post-9/11 life by tying all these disparate individuals together. In this task he is largely successful. Where he is less successful is as an analyst and introducing anything unique about all these stories from a political perspective. In addition, the book now seems oddly dated since although of recent writing he has nothing to relate about the post-Bush, Obama regime. And yet, if anything, disaster, deception, and destruction has followed in the Obama wake in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Uganda. show less