Customer Reviews

Lying for Empire: How to Commit War Crimes With a Straight Face

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Ok, the # of stars this book should get is conditional upon how much you have already looked into U.S. foreign policy. If you are just getting into this sort of stuff, then I would give this book 4 stars. However, if you have already read most of the standard texts (Herman, Blum, Chomsky, etc.) then you will basically be getting recycled versions of that. In fact a huge portion of the book is in text quotations from such authors.

Now, the book puts forth a dual thesis. Model sets out to prove that all the U.S. presidents covered willfully committed war-crimes, crimes against humanity and/or other breaches of international law. In regards to this, Model saves the end of each chapter to show exactly which International Laws, treaties, etc. were violated, as well as documenting the specific lies told by the administrations. These sections are done very well, giving you the exact wording of the International Agreements.

The other claim Model makes is that these actions were perpetrated with the intent of expanding the American Empire. Well, he basically forgets about this for most of the book. He will usually pay lip-service to this a few times per chapters, but he never actually delves into this.

In conclusion, this book is good if it is serving as your introduction to such matters, providing good historical context and quotations of seminal works on the subject. However, you might feel a bit cheated if you are well-read in this genre because of the lack of new revilations and the amount of recycled material.

Everything was great. The author seems a little biased towards liberal thinking but deals equally with LBJ, Truman, and Slick Willy and the so-called conservatives. This book can go a long way to exposing the single party system that we really have in this country. The false left/right paradigm that our media constantly reinforces is one of the biggest weapons of the global elite. A worthwhile read. \\\9/11 was an inside job/// [...]