Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild [Paperback]

Greg Palast (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 24, 2007

In his most provocative and caustically funny book yet, Greg Palast, author of the national bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, once again gives us the straight scoop on the stories that Big Media won?t report. Digging up reams of documents marked ?secret? and ?confidential,? Palast provides the latest lowdown on Bush?s secret plans to seize Iraq?s oil, the fix planned for the 2008 election, who drowned New Orleans, and the horror and the humor of the War on Terror. With diligent detective work, moral outrage, and a keen sense of the absurd, Palast takes on the ?armed and dangerous clowns that rule us? as only he can.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Upsets all the right people. (Noam Chomsky)

Courageous reporting. (Michael Moore)

Gripping, provocative, inspiring. (John Perkins, the New York Times bestselling author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man)

The type of investigative reporter you donÆt see anymoreùa cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes. (Jim Hightower)

I urge you: read PalastÆs latest book, Armed Madhouse. The story is like a spy thriller. (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on Air America Radio)

A Truth Hound . . . . PalastÆs stories bite. TheyÆre so relevant they threaten to alter history. (Chicago Tribune)

Palast, a tough-talking, fedora-wearing corporate fraud investigator turned intrepid journalist, has a habit for finding actual documents and then using them in edgy exposTs. (Los Angeles Times)

About the Author

Greg Palast’s writings have appeared in The Washington Post, Harper’s, and The Nation. He’s been a guest on Politically Incorrect, C-Span’s Washington Journal, and does regular investigative reports for BBC Nightline.  Winner of Salon.com’s 2001 “Politics Story of the Year,” Greg Palast is a legend among his colleagues and his devoted readership worldwide. He divides his time between New York and London.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 402 pages
• Publisher: Plume (April 24, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452288312
• ISBN-13: 978-0452288317
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #85,129 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

When Greg Palast, an investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering, turned his skills to journalism, he was quickly recognized as, 'The most important investigative reporter of our time' [Tribune Magazine] in Britain, where his first reports appeared on BBC television and in the Guardian newspapers.

Author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast is best known in his native USA as the journalist who, for the Observer (UK), broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George. His reports on the theft of election 2004, the spike of the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq's oil fields have won him a record six 'Project Censored' for reporting the news American media doesn't want you to hear. 'The top investigative journalist in the United States is persona non grata in his own country's media.' [Asia Times.] He returned to America to report for Harper's Magazine.

Palast's Sam Spade style television and print exposes about elections manipulations, War on Terror and globalization, as seen on BBC 's Newsnight and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!

Penguin releases his new book, Armed Madhouse, on June 6th 2006.

Palast, who has led investigations for government on three continents, has an academic side: the author of Democracy and Regulation, a seminal treatise on energy corporations and government control commissioned by the United Nations based on his lectures at Cambridge University and the University of Sao Paulo.

Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance studying under Milton Friedman and free-trade luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers' coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide. As an investigator for the Chugach Natives of Alaska, he uncovered the oil company frauds which led to the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. His racketeering probe of a nuclear plant operator led to one of the largest jury judgments in US history.

In 1998 Palast went undercover for Britain's Observer, worked his way inside the prime minister's inner circle and busted open Tony Blair's biggest scandal, 'Lobbygate,' chosen by Palast's press colleagues in the UK as 'Story of the Year.' As the Chicago Tribune said, became a 'fanatic about documents especially those marked 'secret and confidential' from the locked file cabinets of the FBI, the World Bank, the US State Department and other closed-door operations of government and industry which regularly find their way into Palast's hands. The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain's top business journalist.

Palast, Guerrilla News Network's Guerrilla of the Year, is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. His writings have won the Financial Times David Thomas Prize and inspired the Eminem video, Mosh. 'An American hero,' said Martin Luther King III. In the BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes, Palast exposed George Bush Jr.'s dodging the Vietnam War draft. Greg Palast, says Noam Chomsky, 'Upsets all the right people.'

Palast won the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award for his BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tough truths, April 24, 2007

By 

Robert Adler "science writer & author" (Santa Rosa, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (Paperback)

If you really want to know how Bush got to be President, the real reasons we're in Iraq, the details of the infighting that made our occupation such a disaster, and the manifest and nefarious electoral machinations that the right inflicted on the democratic process in 2000 and 2004, and is putting in place for the elections of 2008, READ THIS BOOK. Palast has the interviews, the documents, and the facts that never get reported in the mainstream U.S. press. It's the first thing I've read that makes sense of how the battle for power between the Pentagon, the State Department, the neocons, Big Oil, and the Saudis played out on the ground in Iraq. It's a complex but fascinating sequence of events that explains the revolving-door administrations we put in place there and the flip-flopping approaches we tried to use, especially dealing with Iraq's oil. True, Palast comes across as an arrogant, in-your-face know-it-all. But I'm more than willing to put up with his abrasive style, given that he's willing to track down the real stories behind the most important events of our times and lay them out for us. I learned more per page of this new edition of _Armed Madhouse_ than almost any book I've read. If you're sick of the pap that passes for news, and eager to understand what's really going on, this is a crucial book. Robert Adler, author of Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome and Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How Gore and Kerry Won, Squabbling Over Iraq's Oil, Taking Away the Social Safety Net, and Enriching the Richest, June 7, 2007

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 110,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (Paperback)

Armed Madhouse is a Jon Stewart-like take on the George W. Bush administration. These are the political stories that you didn't see on the nightly news, the morning news, or the talk shows. If you want to know more about the causes and effects of American politics, this book is essential reading.

The best part of the book is the detailed description of how you can get rid of over 3 million votes, over 80 percent of which were cast for Kerry, and deny millions of others from voting . . . with a little help from your friends. In the new book, Brothers, there's the observation that there's so much voting fraud that goes on that you have to plan to indulge in the same if you want to be elected. After reading Armed Madhouse, I'm convinced.

My mother and sister have been telling me for years about how their electoral supervisors seem to be organized to create a lack of voting rather than voting in their rock-rib Democratic area. Now, I can see the hand behind their many tales of electoral incompetence . . . which I can now see as perhaps simply electoral competence in a partisan cause.

Based on this book, you can assume the next president will be a Republican. The Democrats are over ten years behind in dealing with election fraud . . . and falling further behind. Why? The Republican manipulations often help local Democratic officials get rid of their rivals within the party of the people.

The next most interesting part of the book comes in the behind-the-scenes battles between neo-cons and the oil industry to reap an economic windfall from Iraq, the true agenda behind the invasion in 2003.

Those who care about equal opportunity will be shocked by the section on class warfare. Most people haven't been paying attention since 2001 and don't realize how many of the basic safety net features for the poor and hurting have been permanently dismantled.

The section on the so-called war on terror is at its funniest where President Bush is quoted: In the final warning to Saddam Hussein on March 17, 2003, we are reminded that the president sternly said, "Do not destroy oil wells." At the time, I thought that statement was very puzzling. But now, I can see it was just a very interesting clue.

Those who don't know that political influence can be up for sale will be shocked by the reports of corruption in the book, but to me it wasn't anything new. The names just change, but politics by donation is a well established policy in the United States. It's an inevitable, and undesirable, feature of having two parties rather than people who primarily look out for the public interest.

A lot of the "economic" arguments in the book aren't well developed and will probably strike you as demagogic. That's too bad. Good arguments are available about how a different approach is more desirable for everyone, but you won't find those arguments in this book.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WOW!!, May 29, 2007

By 

Kevin Courcey (Sarasota, FL) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (Paperback)

"Ok, what is it? Read it to me." Apparently, I had just uttered one of my rather frequent expletives as I was reading Armed Madhouse, and my wife wanted to know what it was THIS time that I found so incredulous.

And that's what it is like to read Greg Palast's new book. I mean, I'm someone who basically keeps up with Palast's reporting via his emails online, but this book is just chock full of "Holy Mackerel!!" moments. It is a revelation. It is great investigative journalism.

Palast aims his investigative team like a spotlight onto the dark corners of our times: whether it is the Iraq war and how we really got there and why it looks like nobody knows what they're doing and why Ahmad Chalabi is sitting next to the first lady at the state of the union one moment, and the next thing you know he's being arrested and charged with being a spy for Iran; or the 2000 election results, and how the touch screen machines are the least of our problems in 2008; or the Katrina debacle, or the real goal of No Child Left Behind, or why Harriet Miers got the Supreme Court nomination, or why we co-sponsored a coup against Hugo Chavez.

This truly is essential reading for an informed electorate. I can't endorse it highly enough.