Author : Richard Gid Powers
Publisher :
Page : 672 pages
File Size : 10,45 MB
Release : 1987
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :
Explores the life and turbulent times of the lawman who served as Director of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972.
Author : Hugh B. Urban
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 41,50 MB
Release : 2021-01-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 022674678X
The powers of political secrecy and social spectacle have been taken to surreal extremes recently. Witness the twin terrors of a president who refuses to disclose dealings with foreign powers while the private data of ordinary citizens is stolen and marketed in order to manipulate consumer preferences and voting outcomes. We have become accustomed to thinking about secrecy in political terms and personal privacy terms. In this bracing, new work, Hugh Urban wants us to focus these same powers of observation on the role of secrecy in religion. With Secrecy, Urban investigates several revealing instances of the power of secrecy in religion, including nineteenth-century Scottish Rite Freemasonry, the sexual magic of a Russian-born Parisian mystic; the white supremacist BrüderSchweigen or “Silent Brotherhood” movement of the 1980s, the Five Percenters, and the Church of Scientology. An electrifying read, Secrecy is the culmination of decades of Urban’s reflections on a vexed, ever-present subject.
Author : Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 12,60 MB
Release : 1998-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300080797
Traces the development of secrecy as a government policy over the twentieth century and its adverse effects on Cold War policy making
Author : Charlie Savage
Publisher : Little, Brown
Page : 1067 pages
File Size : 29,44 MB
Release : 2015-11-03
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0316286605
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage's penetrating investigation of the Obama presidency and the national security state. Barack Obama campaigned on changing George W. Bush's "global war on terror" but ended up entrenching extraordinary executive powers, from warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention to military commissions and targeted killings. Then Obama found himself bequeathing those authorities to Donald Trump. How did the United States get here? In Power Wars, Charlie Savage reveals high-level national security legal and policy deliberations in a way no one has done before. He tells inside stories of how Obama came to order the drone killing of an American citizen, preside over an unprecendented crackdown on leaks, and keep a then-secret program that logged every American's phone calls. Encompassing the first comprehensive history of NSA surveillance over the past forty years as well as new information about the Osama bin Laden raid, Power Wars equips readers to understand the legacy of Bush's and Obama's post-9/11 presidencies in the Trump era.
Author : John Prados
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 423 pages
File Size : 48,92 MB
Release : 2014-09-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0292762151
In December 1974, a front-page story in the New York Times revealed the explosive details of illegal domestic spying by the Central Intelligence Agency. This included political surveillance, eavesdropping, detention, and interrogation. The revelation of illegal activities over many years shocked the American public and led to investigations of the CIA by a presidential commission and committees in both houses of Congress, which found evidence of more abuse, even CIA plans for assassinations. Investigators and the public soon discovered that the CIA abuses were described in a top-secret document agency insiders dubbed the "Family Jewels." That document became ground zero for a political firestorm that lasted more than a year. The "Family Jewels" debacle ultimately brought about greater congressional oversight of the CIA, but excesses such as those uncovered in the 1970s continue to come to light. The Family Jewels probes the deepest secrets of the CIA and its attempts to avoid scrutiny. John Prados recounts the secret operations that constituted "Jewels" and investigators' pursuit of the truth, plus the strenuous efforts—by the agency, the executive branch, and even presidents—to evade accountability. Prados reveals how Vice President Richard Cheney played a leading role in intelligence abuses and demonstrates that every type of "Jewel" has been replicated since, especially during the post-9/11 war on terror. The Family Jewels masterfully illuminates why these abuses are endemic to spying, shows that proper relationships are vital to control of intelligence, and advocates a system for handling "Family Jewels" crises in a democratic society. With a new epilogue that discusses former CIA employee Edward Snowden's revelation of massive covert surveillance by the NSA, this powerful accounting of intelligence abuses committed by the CIA from the Cold War through the war on terror reveals why such abuses and attempts to conceal them are endemic to spying and proposes how a democratic nation can rein in its spymasters.
Author : Mark Fenster
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 42,68 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0816632421
JFK, Karl Marx, the Pope, Aristotle Onassis, Queen Elizabeth II, Howard Hughes, Fox Mulder, Bill Clinton -- all have been linked to vastly complicated global (or even galactic) intrigues. In this enlightening tour of conspiracy theories, Mark Fenster guides readers through this shadowy world and analyzes its complex role in American culture and politics. Fenster argues that conspiracy theories are a form of popular political interpretation and contends that understanding how they circulate through mass culture helps us better understand our society as a whole. To that end, he discusses Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the militia movement, The X-Files, popular Christian apocalyptic thought, and such artifacts of suspicion as The Turner Diaries, the Illuminatus! trilogy, and the novels of Richard Condon. Fenster analyzes the "conspiracy community" of radio shows, magazine and book publishers, Internet resources, and role-playing games that promote these theories. In this world, the very denial of a conspiracy's existence becomes proof that it exists, and the truth is always "out there." He believes conspiracy theory has become a thrill for a bored subculture, one characterized by its members' reinterpretation of "accepted" history, their deep cynicism about contemporary politics, and their longing for a utopian future. Fenster's progressive critique of conspiracy theories both recognizes the secrecy and inequities of power in contemporary politics and economics and works toward effective political engagement. Probing conspiracy theory's tendencies toward scapegoating, racism, and fascism, as well as Hofstadter's centrist acceptance of a postwar American"consensus, " he advocates what conspiracy theory wants but cannot articulate: a more inclusive, engaging political culture.
Author : Richard Gid Powers
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 512 pages
File Size : 49,87 MB
Release : 2020-02-04
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1982154497
A well-researched biography about the public and private life of J. Edgar Hoover—former FBI director and America’s most controversial law enforcer—that draws on previously unknown personal documents, a study of FBI files, and the presidential papers of nine administrations. Secrecy and Power is a full biography of former FBI director, covering all aspects of Hoover’s controversial career from the Red Scare following World War I to the 1960s and his personal vendettas against Martin Luther King and the civil rights and antiwar movements.
Author : William Walters
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 21,40 MB
Release : 2021-05-03
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1351977644
In State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary, William Walters calls for secrecy to be given a more central place in critical security studies and elevated to become a core concept when theorising power in liberal democracies. Through investigations into such themes as the mobility of cryptographic secrets, the power of public inquiries, the connection between secrecy and place-making, and the aesthetics of secrecy within immigration enforcement, Walters challenges commonplace understandings of the covert and develops new concepts, methods and themes for secrecy and security research. Walters identifies the covert imaginary as both a limit on our ability to think politics differently and a ground to develop a richer understanding of power. State Secrecy and Security offers readers a set of thinking tools to better understand the strange powers that hiding, revealing, lying, confessing, professing ignorance and many other operations of secrecy put in motion. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of security, secrecy and politics more broadly.
Author : Mary Graham
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 10,76 MB
Release : 2017-01-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0300223749
Ever since the nation's most important secret meeting--the Constitutional Convention--presidents have struggled to balance open, accountable government with necessary secrecy in military affairs and negotiations. For the first one hundred and twenty years, a culture of open government persisted, but new threats and technology have long since shattered the old bargains. Today, presidents neither protect vital information nor provide the open debate Americans expect.
Author : Derek Parker
Publisher :
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 10,3 MB
Release : 1992
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9780671769215
Offers an examination of herbal lore and astrology, and provides reproductions of works of art from medieval and Renaissance periods, Asia, and even cave paintings
