See No Evil Review Essay

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Pages: 7

See No Evil:

The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism

X X

X N X Security

Fall Semester 200N

Professor X X

See No Evil Review

This report is based on the book; See No Evil, by Robert Baer. To be honest, I didn't read Baer's book. I listened to the audio version which has Robert Baer himself reading his book. While flying commuter and mail flights, I was able to listen to Baer’s adventures in the Middle East. There is a distinct similarity between this book and Harvey Kushner's Holy War on the Homefront, being that despite all the warnings our intelligence officers have supplied to our government agencies, there seems to be little or no action taken to stop
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His liaison was a Sunni Muslim general from a high Euphrates family. At that time, in 1995, the Sunnis represented only about 20% of Iraq, but they had pretty much all the military power. Hussein could have been removed by his own people long before it became necessary for us to intercede directly. Negotiations were kept up for quite awhile, but the support from the US never came through. They launched their attack on Saddam but due to betrayal and maybe a lack of support, it was squashed. It seemed that when anything dubious would occur in the Middle East, the CIA would close their eyes and not see the evil, hence the name of the book, See No Evil. There were many times that tragedies could have been prevented if only a little action would have been taken when the warnings came in.

Baer came back to United States and finished off his career with CIA working on Middle East affairs until his retirement in 1997. His frustration only grew until he finally pulled the pin. He retired with an honored accommodation. Now he writes books about his adventures and probably makes a lot more money.

After listening to Robert Baer and reading Harvey Kushner, it seems that a number of terrorist attacks could have been prevented and were not always a surprise. The unheeded warnings of the 9/11 travesty could have