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"It is not simply a good book about history. It is one of those books which makes history. ... "
-- Vladimir Bukovsky, co-founder of the Soviet dissident movement and author of Judgment in Moscow, and Pavel Stroilov, author of Behind the Desert Storm.
"Diana West is distinguished from almost all political commentators because she seeks less to defend ideas and proposals than to investigate and understand what happens and what has happened. This gives her modest and unpretentious books and articles the status of true scientific inquiry, shifting the debate from the field of liking and disliking to being and non-being."
-- Olavo de Carvalho
If you're looking for something to read, this is the most dazzling, mind-warping book I have read in a long time. It has been criticized by the folks at Front Page, but they don't quite get what Ms. West has set out to do and accomplished. I have a whole library of books on communism, but -- "Witness" excepted -- this may be the best.
-- Jack Cashill, author of Deconstructing Obama: The Lives, Loves and Letters of America's First Postmodern President and First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America
"Every once in a while, something happens that turns a whole structure of preconceived ideas upside down, shattering tales and narratives long taken for granted, destroying prejudice, clearing space for new understanding to grow. Diana West's latest book, American Betrayal, is such an event."
-- Henrik Raeder Clausen, Europe News
West's lesson to Americans: Reality can't be redacted, buried, fabricated, falsified, or omitted. Her book is eloquent proof of it.
-- Edward Cline, Family Security Matters
"I have read it, and agree wholeheartedly."
-- Angelo Codevilla, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Boston Unversity, and fellow of the Claremont Institute.
Enlightening. I give American Betrayal five stars only because it is not possible to give it six.
-- John Dietrich, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy.
After reading American Betrayal and much of the vituperation generated by neoconservative "consensus" historians, I conclude that we cannot ignore what West has demonstrated through evidence and cogent argument.
-- John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
"A brilliantly researched and argued book."
-- Edward Jay Epstein, author of Deception: The Invisible War between the KGB and the CIA, The Annals 0f Unsolved Crime
"This explosive book is a long-needed answer to court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow. Must-reading for serious students of security issues and Cold War deceptions, both foreign and domestic."
-- M. Stanton Evans, author of Stalin's Secret Agents and Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies
Her task is ambitious; her sweep of crucial but too-little-known facts of history is impressive; and her arguments are eloquent and witty. ... American Betrayal is one of those books that will change the way many of us see the world.
-- Susan Freis Falknor, Blue Ridge Forum
"American Betrayal is absolutely required reading. Essential. You're sleepwalking without it."
-- Chris Farrell, director of investigations research, Judicial Watch
"Diana West wrote a brilliant book called American Betrayal, which I recommend to everybody ... It is a seminal work that will grow in importance."
-- Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker
"This is a must read for any serious student of history and anyone working to understand the Marxist counter-state in America."
-- John Guandolo, president, Understanding the Threat, former FBI special agent
It is myth, or a series of myths, concerning WW2 that Diana West is aiming to replace with history in 2013’s American Betrayal.
If West’s startling revisionism is anywhere near the historical truth, the book is what Nietzsche wished his writings to be, dynamite.
-- Mark Gullick, British Intelligence
“What Diana West has done is to dynamite her way through several miles of bedrock. On the other side of the tunnel there is a vista of a new past. Of course folks are baffled. Few people have the capacity to take this in. Her book is among the most well documented I have ever read. It is written in an unusual style viewed from the perspective of the historian—but it probably couldn’t have been done any other way.”
-- Lars Hedegaard, historian, journalist, founder, Danish Free Press Society
The polemics against your Betrayal have a familiar smell: The masters of the guild get angry when someone less worthy than they are ventures into the orchard in which only they are privileged to harvest. The harvest the outsider brought in, they ritually burn.
-- Hans Jansen, former professor of Islamic Thought, University of Utrecht
No book has ever frightened me as much as American Betrayal. ... [West] patiently builds a story outlining a network of subversion so bizarrely immense that to write it down will seem too fantastic to anyone without the book’s detailed breadth and depth. It all adds up to a story so disturbing that it has changed my attitude to almost everything I think about how the world actually is. ... By the time you put the book down, you have a very different view of America’s war aims and strategies. The core question is, did the USA follow a strategy that served its own best interests, or Stalin’s? And it’s not that it was Stalin’s that is so compelling, since you knew that had to be the answer, but the evidence in detail that West provides that makes this a book you cannot ignore.
-- Steven Kates, RMIT (Australia) Associate Professor of Economics, Quadrant
"Diana West's new book rewrites WWII and Cold War history not by disclosing secrets, but by illuminating facts that have been hidden in plain sight for decades. Furthermore, she integrates intelligence and political history in ways never done before."
-- Jeffrey Norwitz, former professor of counterterrorism, Naval War College
[American Betrayal is] the most important anti-Communist book of our time ... a book that can open people's eyes to the historical roots of our present malaise ... full of insights, factual corroboration, and psychological nuance.
-- J.R. Nyquist, author, Origins of the Fourth World War
Although I know [Christopher] Andrew well, and have met [Oleg] Gordievsky twice, I now doubt their characterization of Hopkins -- also embraced by Radosh and the scholarly community. I now support West's conclusions after rereading KGB: The Inside Story account 23 years later [relevant passages cited in American Betrayal]. It does not ring true that Hopkins was an innocent dupe dedicated solely to defeating the Nazis. Hopkins comes over in history as crafty, secretive and no one's fool, hardly the personality traits of a naïve fellow traveler. And his fingerprints are on the large majority of pro-Soviet policies implemented by the Roosevelt administration. West deserves respect for cutting through the dross that obscures the evidence about Hopkins, and for screaming from the rooftops that the U.S. was the victim of a successful Soviet intelligence operation.
-- Bernie Reeves, founder of The Raleigh Spy Conference, American Thinker
Diana West’s American Betrayal — a remarkable, novel-like work of sorely needed historical re-analysis — is punctuated by the Cassandra-like quality of “multi-temporal” awareness. ... But West, although passionate and direct, is able to convey her profoundly disturbing, multi-temporal narrative with cool brilliance, conjoining meticulous research, innovative assessment, evocative prose, and wit.
-- Andrew G. Bostom, PJ Media
Do not be dissuaded by the controversy that has erupted around this book which, if you insist on complete accuracy, would be characterized as a disinformation campaign.
-- Jed Babbin, The American Spectator
In American Betrayal, Ms. West's well-established reputation for attacking "sacred cows" remains intact. The resulting beneficiaries are the readers, especially those who can deal with the truth.
-- Wes Vernon, Renew America
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Nov
3
Written by:
Diana West
Saturday, November 03, 2012 6:01 AM
First, the WSJ, now the NYT: CIA Director David Petraeus is feeling a little heat from the spotlight regarding Benghazi. It's an extremely soft-focus spot, however, one that obscures the most important question regarding Petraeus' role in Obama administration mendacity in characterizing what was a planned terrorist attack as a violent melee growing from a "spontaneous" protest over a Youtube video. That most important question is, Why, three days after this terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, did Petraeus go before the House Intelligence Committee and brief lawmakers that a Youtube video was to blame for a "spontaneous" protest -- wholly fictitious -- that "went on," as ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger told ABC on September 14 following the Petraeus briefing, "for two to three hours"?
Ruppersberger:
“In the Benghazi area, in the beginning we feel that it was spontaneous – the protest- because it went on for two or three hours, which is very relevant because if it was something that was planned, then they could have come and attacked right away,” Ruppersberger, D-Md., said following the hour-long briefing by Petraeus. “At this point it looks as if there was a spontaneous situation that occurred and that as a result of that, the extreme groups that were probably connected to al Qaeda took advantage of that situation and then the attack started.”
It was something that was planned; they did attack right away. There was no protest at all. But that's not what Petraeus appears to have told the Intell Comittee members. Why?
Meanwhile, ABC also reported in that same September 14 story:
Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were also briefed today by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs Admiral James Winnefeld. But senators emerging from that private briefing reported that they believed the attack in Libya was premeditated.
Call it "A Tale of Two Briefings."
In yesterday's Journal story and today's Times story, it's important to note that there is no examination of the administration's repeated lie that Benghazi was the result of a non-existent protest over a Youtube video "gone wrong" -- a lie which Petraeus was a leading purveyor of. The Times' Scott Shane gingerly raises and then abandons the subject this way: "Some news reports faulted his secret testimony to Congress days after the attack for supposedly supporting the view that it was not a planned strike but a spontaneous response to an offensive anti-Muslim video." The Wall Street Journal doesn't mention it at all.
Who concocted this lie, why and when? Who pulled the plug on it following Obama's September 25 UN address in which he cited the video six times (and declared: "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam")? That's a timeline that needs to be established as much as any other. I suppose these latest MSM stories represent some modicum of progress: Remember those trial-turned-lead balloons that went up recently to exonerate the CIA (Petraeus), including the notion that the Benghazi terrorists might have watched the Cairo protests on TV and then planned the attack (Ignatius); or that the CIA's bureaucratic layers prevented the truth that there was no "spontaneous" protest from getting to the top (Boot). But I don't think we should be grateful, and certainly not satisfied. The MSM is still covering-up more than covering Benghazi, despite the Page One placement.
It somehow seems a propos to interject here a 1901 statement of Lenin's which I came across yesterday in an exhibition at the National Gallery called "Shock of the News." Lenin said: "A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and an agitator, it is also a collective organizer."
That said, the Wall Street Collective Organizer report does offer a little insight into how Petraeus is regarded on the inside:
Mr. Petraeus didn't attend funerals held later for the two CIA contractors, irking some administration officials and CIA veterans.
Also:
In the aftermath of the assault, questions have been raised within the administration and on Capitol Hill about Mr. Petraeus's role in responding to the attack. On Oct. 10, lawmakers grilled senior State Department officials about the attack. At one point, lawmakers and officials alluded for the first time to the existence of the CIA facility. That set off alarms at the agency and at the State Department because that information was classified.
Some senior administration officials say they were surprised Mr. Petraeus went to that night's private Washington screening of the movie "Argo," about a covert CIA operation in 1979 in Tehran.
That would have been on October 10. I noted that premiere here, as covered by the Washington Examiner, because it broke the Examiner's recent months of silence on Huma Abedin by noting her presence at the screening -- along with that of Petraeus. (Further establishing CIA party-presence, General Counsel Stephen Preston was also at the screening.) Such fun. Affleck, it turns out, is a huge fan of Petraeus, whom he calls "one of the most remarkable living Americans." He likes Huma Abedin, too.
Affleck explained why he invited his "good friend" Abedin, who in turn brought along her husband. "The reason why she is here, is she was instrumental in helping us shoot at the State Department," Affleck said. "As you noticed, we shot at the real State Department ... our production designers were allowed to go inside and look at the seventh floor and recreate it."
Wonder if Abedin would extend the same hospitality to a movie called "Benghazi"? And would David Petraeus be able to make it to the DC premiere?
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