Customer Reviews

World Factbook 2004: 2004 Edition (CIA's 2003 Edition)

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If you need quick, hard, reliable, up-to-date data on any nation in the world then this is the resource for you. You get political, historical, economic, sociological, religious, racial, military, educational, and geographic information in a concise, well-organised format. Even the maps are uncluttered and contain only the priciple cities and geographic features. You can quickly flip between entries for fast comparisons.

This publication has been updated yearly and made available to the public since 1975. The sections on internal political groups, conflicts with other states, internal conflicts, drug production and consumption, reported AIDS cases, and internal distribution of income are especially useful and usually resonably current.

The entry on the United States itself is an especially candid thumbnail on how the country views itself at any given point of time.

To use the word "candid" with CIA, as one reviewer has done here, is a world class oxymoron. I own the last three publications of this book, they were gifts; wouldn't have actually bought one since you can get this information free off of the CIA website. What you can't get there, however, are these facts:

Official documents from the U.S. government, formerly classified as Top Secret and Eyes Only for the President, were recently declassified, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act [...]. These documents indicate that between October 1960 and April 1961, in Cuba alone, the CIA introduced 75 tons of explosives in 30 secret aerial missions, and 45 tons of weapons and explosives in 31 Marine infiltrations. These materials were used to perpetrate 310 attacks with bombs, derail 6 trains, and set fire to 150 factories and 800 plantations. Between 1959 and 2003, more than 800 terrorist attacks were performed, including 78 bombings against civil populations and 61 airplanes hijacked. (Now you know why the U.S. government was not too keen on putting air marshals on planes. They would have been killing our own CIA agents.) These documents also linked CIA agent and Cuban exile, Luis Posada Carriles, with many terrorist attacks, including the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 that killed 73 people. As for biological aggressions, the African Swine Fever Virus was introduced, forcing the sacrifice of half a million pigs. During the "Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations", the dengue hemorrhagic fever was introduced, affecting about 344,203 persons, with the record case of 11,400 who fell ill in a single day-July 6, 1981.

I don't expect anyone to click on the helpful button--but things are changing. CIA and Bush bashers like myself, now must take care. You can get trampled under by the androids and politicians who are trying to distance themselves from Bush, Cheney and the CIA's Dachau--Abu Ghraib and the Iraqi holocaust. I'm Bob Miller, a registered Republican.