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A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies Hardcover – June 8, 2004

by James Bamford (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 105 ratings
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The bestselling author of Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace presents his most hard-hitting book to date—a sweeping, authoritative, and fearless account of the failures of America’s intelligence agencies and the Bush administration’s calculated efforts to sell a war to the American people.

In The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford revealed the existence of the NSA, the largest, most secretive, and best-financed intelligence organization in the world. In Body of Secrets, he took readers inside the ultrasecret agency, charting its deeds and misdeeds from its founding in 1952 to the end of the twentieth century. Now Bamford applies his relentless investigative drive and unparalleled access to intelligence sources to produce a headline-making book about the most pressing issues of the present day.

From the mishandling of the pre-9/11 threat to the unproven claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Bamford argues that the Bush administration has co-opted the intelligence community for its own political ends, and at the expense of American security.  Bamford makes the case that the Bush administration’s Middle East policy decisions, from overthrowing Saddam to ignoring the situation of the Palestinians, are driven by long-held beliefs and goals of an elite group of conservatives inside and outside of government.

A Pretext for War homes in on the systematic weakness that led the intelligence community to ignore or misinterpret evidence of the impending terrorist attacks of 9/11—a failure rooted in the refusal to acknowledge the central role of the Palestinian cause in igniting Arab rage against the United States.  Compounding the errors, the Bush administration’s immediate response to 9/11 was to call for an attack on Iraq, and it subsequently invented justifications for the preemptive war that has ultimately left the United States more vulnerable to terrorism.  

A Pretext for War is an unprecedented, utterly convincing exposé of the most secretive administration in history.  

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  1. Print length
    432 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Doubleday
  4. Publication date
    June 8, 2004
  5. Dimensions
    6.46 x 1.3 x 9.54 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0385506724
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0385506724
  8. See all details
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4.4 out of 5 stars
105 global ratings

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Customers find the book provides good intelligence content and is well-researched. They find it an inspiring and informative read with clear writing style. Many consider it a worthwhile purchase, especially for Chapters 11-14.

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5 customers mention "Intelligence content"5 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's intelligence content. They find it well-researched and engaging. The book provides inspiration and knowledge, and is praised for its independent analysis.

"...I give this book a five star for the powerful indictment of W that it is and partially to counteract the idiots who cannot embrace something that..." Read more

"...Bamford is excellent on intelligence activities and the tracing of Al Qaeda's tranformation of being an ally of the U.S. into an enemy...." Read more

"As always James Bamford's efforts are thoroughly researched and engagingly written. This book is still timely...." Read more

"A good book. Well written and contains plenty of material related to intelligence that tends to hold my interest...." Read more

4 customers mention "Writing style"4 positive0 negative

Customers find the writing style clear and engaging. They say it's well-written and a great read.

"As always James Bamford's efforts are thoroughly researched and engagingly written. This book is still timely...." Read more

"A good book. Well written and contains plenty of material related to intelligence that tends to hold my interest...." Read more

"Bamford's work is always masterful and clear! TWS" Read more

"This is a great read." Read more

3 customers mention "Value for money"3 positive0 negative

Customers find the book offers good value for money. They say it's worth buying just for Chapters 11-14. The book is well-written and contains plenty of material.

"This book is worth buying just for Chapters 11-14 alone...." Read more

"A good book. Well written and contains plenty of material related to intelligence that tends to hold my interest...." Read more

"Good companion book to "Fool's Errand"" Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Isaac
    5.0 out of 5 stars Whose foreign policy is it, anyway?
    Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2004
    Verified Purchase
    This book is worth buying just for Chapters 11-14 alone. If anyone has any doubts that the Iraq war is massive fraud perpertrated by a neocon cabal of mainly Jews (see "The Israel Lobby," by Mearsheimer and Walt online in the London Review of Books for 23 March 2006 for more detail) in the interests of Israel's security, then all the insiders Bamford quotes in support of this view are in some giant conspiracy. Not possible. As Bamford discusses at great length with copious quotations from people on the inside, not one reason given by Bush and the cabal for going to war was true. Not one. No WMD's, no connection to Al Qaeda, no nuclear, biological or chemical threat to anyone, no pilotless drones launced from ships, no uranium purchases from Niger. Nothing. In fact, the war was planned before 9/11. 9/11 provided the 'pretext for war,' as Bamford has it in his title.

    Now what? How do we get out of this mess? Is Israel any more secure because Saddam Hussein is gone? I doubt it. How many dead Jews because of the war? None, as far as I know. How many dead American soldiers? As of 3/15/06, about 2300. How many dead Iraqis? According to the British medical journal, The Lancet, between 60,000 and 100,000. All for what?

    If you don't believe these guys--Bamford, one of the world's experts on surveillance and intelligence, and Mearsheimer and Walt, professors at the Univ of Chicago and Harvard, respectively--then nothing will persuade you that the war in Iraq is a cruel fraud perpetrated on America by a group of people more loyal to Israel than to the US.
    16 people found this helpful
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  • Will MacPheat
    5.0 out of 5 stars The naysayers are lost
    Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2012
    Verified Purchase
    Those who critcize this book for what it is not - more conspiracy theory, are making a HUGE mistake by failing to appreciate it for what it is - a powerful indictment of W without using a single fact that can be disputed. Was I disappointed at times? Yes. I bought this book because of Bamford's "The Puzzle Palace," which to me was a much better book. I give this book a five star for the powerful indictment of W that it is and partially to counteract the idiots who cannot embrace something that supports their cause because it does not fit their version of reality. Believing 9-11 was a US Government conspiracy is one thing. Evaluating useful material based on that belief (and there is NO proof, just a lot of coincidence that may or may not support the conspiracy theories) is a LOST cause.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Siegfried Sutterlin
    4.0 out of 5 stars courageous and independent analysis
    Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2004
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    This book must be read in conjunction with many others such as Halper and Clarke's more scholarly study of the same topic entitled "America Alone" as well as Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire" and the less important books by Richard Clarke, John Dean, Paul O'Neill, Kevin Philips, etc.

    While Halper and Clarke place the topic of going to war into an historical scholarly framework, Bamford, a journalist, gives us a contemporary account of the major events in the formation of Al Qaeda and the activities in the intelligence services leading to the war against Iraq.

    This historian, before all of these books were published, had already spent many hours researching and reading domestic and foreign assessments of Bush's maneuvering to divert the war against terrorism into a war against Saddam Hussein.

    The American Enterprise Institute's Project for a New American Century was a good start and led to more clues and into the right directions. (Even the creation in 2000 of the CETO, Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, a Marine Corps think tank, gives clues, in various articles and studies, to the torture policies).

    The foreign media outmatched ours by far in getting the story right. Now we have lots of books that corroborate and clarify the issue even more and hold those accountable who caused an enormous burden for America's workers, taxpayers and armed forces.

    Bamford is particularly good at exposing Bush's abuse of intelligence information and both he and Halper and Clarke agree on the crucial and irresponsible manipulation of the "Clean Break" proposals of getting rid of Saddam which had been commissioned in Israel and submitted to Netanyahu, who rejected it, and Bush who enacted it. It envisioned a complete rearrangement of the Mideast with the U.S. acting as a modern Rome. It is incontestably true that David Wurmser, Douglas Feith, Abram Shulksy, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle et al. were maneuvering a compliant Bush to attack Iraq. There is no doubt that they wanted the U.S. to serve Israel's interest. Feith's Office of Special Plans, created by Rumsfeld in 2000 to crank out justification for an attack on Iraq, fed phony and concocted info to the Pentagon and apprised the American-Israeli Public Action Committe (AIPAC) which presumably forwarded it to Israel. The recent disclosure of this spy story, coming after Bamford's book, supports the author's position.

    Interestingly enough, Feith's Office of Special Plans has already been disbanded and Feith, so far, is cooperating in the Investigation, which is likely to be forgotten and covered up just like the Israeli attack on the U.S. naval vessel the "Liberty" in l967, which killed some 36 sailors, was covered up and forgotten.

    This spy story also invalidates much of the criticism some reviewers have of his book.

    Bamford is excellent on intelligence activities and the tracing of Al Qaeda's tranformation of being an ally of the U.S. into an enemy. This happened in l996, in reaction to Israel's massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians in southern Lebanon, the so-called Qana massacre, which was widely broadcast in Moslem and European countries but totally neglected here. As Senior CIA officials, charged with analyzing the causes of 9-ll would say later on, the Israeli-Palestinain conflict is "central" to the causes, though not the only one.

    For those interesting in historical synthesizing here is a thought--Bush, Sr., presumably, ordered Saddam to be assassinated in 1991. Saddam may have planned to assassinate Bush, Sr. in Kuwait in '93 and, therefore Bush, Jr., got to Saddam in '03. It sort of recalls what LBJ told a reporter, who asked him what he thought of the Kennedy assassination. LBJ said "let me tell you something,son, Kennedy tried to get at Castro, but Castro got to Kennedy first." While this may be only LBJ's opinion, there may be parallels in Kennedy-Castro, Bush-Saddam connections.
    13 people found this helpful
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  • Did you know a THIRD WTC building fell on 911?
    5.0 out of 5 stars James Bamford is the best!
    Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2023
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    This is an old book, but I wanted a hard copy for my library.
    You've got to read his latest - current - SPY FAIL!
    One person found this helpful
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  • Robert Bruce Drynan
    5.0 out of 5 stars The best of current history
    Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    As always James Bamford's efforts are thoroughly researched and engagingly written. This book is still timely. History repeatedly demonstrates that once a tiger has been taken by the tail, the hold on the tail is passed from one administration to its successor. Interesting that as I read this book for a second time, the scandal of NSA illegal eavesdropping should surface again. Bamford's "Puzzle Palace", "Body of Secrets", and "Shadow Factory" are worthy of a second visit, (or first, if that be the case).
    One person found this helpful
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  • D Maccoy
    5.0 out of 5 stars A PRETEXT FOR WAR
    Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2004
    Verified Purchase
    In his, A PRETEXT FOR WAR, James Damford recaps the tragedy of 9/11 and the tragedy of how Bush responded within the first few hours and days; explores the sad state of our Intelligence community; and how the Bush team blatantly misused and falsified intelligence to stage the war with Iraq.
    Besides making it clear our CIA is in dire need of an overhaul, it show that we have good reason to impeach Bush for an abuse of power and deception.
    An interview with James Bamford concerning his book can be found at NPR Fresh Air, June 8, 2004.
    6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • S. O'connor
    5.0 out of 5 stars Thaught provoking - even today
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 17, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    A cracking read from the very beginning.
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