The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America

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The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America

3.67 of 5 stars 3.67 · rating details · 45 ratings · 13 reviews

In the course of his forty-year-career as one of America's most admired journalists, Robert Scheer's work has been praised by Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion, who deems him "one of the best reporters of our time." Now, Scheer brings a lifetime of wisdom and experience to one of the most overlooked and dangerous issues of our time - the destructive influence of Am...more

Hardcover, 320 pages

Published June 9th 2008 by Twelve

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May 11, 2013 Tim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: america-non-fiction

This was, for me, a difficult book to read. It is largely people outside of America, ordinary citizens of developing nations, who suffer the consequences of American military action. It is hard not to get very angry about how y'all allow the wool to be pulled over your eyes by successive administrations, who lie to you and convince you that bombing the crap out of somewhere is going to make your world safer; that overthrowing democratically elected governments, installing puppet dictators like P...more

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Jan 11, 2010 Dave rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Any book who's first chapter is titled "The Gift of 9/11" is going to strike a chord with me.

Robert explores how the tragedy of 9/11/2001 was exploited by a few to reap significant profits. The numbers are baffling, but seem drawn from well known sources: $2.5 billion each for new nuclear subs, $300 billion for the F-35 project, nearly a hundred extra Globemasters produced beyond what the air force asked for or needed.

The style of the book reminded me of George Monbiot's books or Len Deighton's...more

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Feb 04, 2013 Mal Warwick rated it 4 of 5 stars

Pentagon Waste and Fraud, and Who's Really Responsible for Thjem

Books about current affairs, especially those by journalists, rarely keep their edge once the headlines they address have vanished from the news. A 2008 book by former Berkeley activist Robert Scheer’s is a notable exception. Scheer wrote five years ago about the spectacular buildup of the U.S. military machine following 9/11, and his report transcends the facts and circumstances of the story. The Pornography of Power delivers insig...more Pentagon Waste and Fraud, and Who's Really Responsible for Thjem

Books about current affairs, especially those by journalists, rarely keep their edge once the headlines they address have vanished from the news. A 2008 book by former Berkeley activist Robert Scheer’s is a notable exception. Scheer wrote five years ago about the spectacular buildup of the U.S. military machine following 9/11, and his report transcends the facts and circumstances of the story. The Pornography of Power delivers insight into what should be one of the issues that most preoccupies concerned Americans: the seemingly unassailable position of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about more than half a century ago.

Over the eight years George W. Bush inhabited the White House, the U.S. military budget more than doubled, from about $300 billion to just under $700 billion. (In reporting these figures, the Office of Management and Budget notes that they exclude expenditures for the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans’ Affairs. Clearly, they also exclude funds for the CIA, which runs its own military operations, as well as interest on the debt incurred to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

You might be tempted to think that these gargantuan increases are understandable, given the expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — but you would be wrong. In fact, a huge proportion of the money spent on the military in the first decade of the 21st Century was not to support troops in the field or provide them with the weapons and protection they required. It was to finance the development and acquisition of new, high-tech weapons systems that could never be deployed in an asymmetric war against terrorists or insurgents.

The central insight of The Pornography of Power is that the waste and fraud in the military budget isn’t hidden in the cracks of obscure documents — it’s right out front in multi-billion-dollar expenditures for unnecessary new weapons. How do we know these weapons are unnecessary? Because the military brass told us so — and Congress simply forced the Pentagon to develop (or continue developing and producing) them, anyway. As Scheer reports, Congress voted hundreds of billions of dollars to develop and produce big-ticket weapons systems such as nuclear attack submarines and the trouble-plagued F-35 ”joint strike fighter,” often on the basis of absurd arguments that they were needed to defend us against Al Qaeda.

The occasional glaring example of fraud complicates this picture of Pentagon waste, but simple, straightforward corruption (cushy corporate jobs for a cooperative Pentagon bureaucrat, for example) is a minor factor. The real problem are the politicians — liberal Democrats like Barbara Boxer as well as the usual suspects on the Republican right — who fearfully back spending money on these boondoggles because they expect blowback from constituents if they don’t. And if we can’t count on Senators and Representatives who champion cuts in the military budget out of the other side of their mouths, then what hope is there to eliminate the waste?

Despite the occasional jarring reminder that Scheer is writing about events several years in the past, and some circumstances that have changed during the last five years, The Pornography of Power remains relevant reading today. You can count on one thing above all from Bob Scheer: straight talk.(less)

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Jun 27, 2008 Tom rated it 3 of 5 stars

With 4000 American soldiers killed and $500 billion spent, now might be a good time to employ the "cut and run" strategy those hawkish caricatures on the right have been robotically lampooning and, then, it wouldn't hurt to apologize to our hosts on the way out. As Mike Gravel soberingly put it, we can walk into a Baskin Robbins in Hanoi and buy ourselves an ice cream cone, or, in other words, so much for losing that other war... But The Pornography of Power isn't about why we're fighting in Ira...more

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Nov 28, 2009 Joy rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you miss Robert Scheer syndicated column in the San Francisco Chronicle, this book is for you. If that is not enough, try http://www.truthdig.com/

Lucky for Walnut Creek that Scheer spoke at the local Unitarian Church last April!

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Feb 25, 2012 Canonray rated it 3 of 5 stars

I knew some of the events in this book, butputting it all together in one place really got me angry at those who lied us into wars and got rich in the process. I wish everyone who voted for Bush/Cheney would read this and have a heartfelt talk with themselves. Interesting, but a rather dry read.

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May 19, 2009 paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

I wasn't surprised by a lot in this book, being a died in the wool liberal. However, I was impressed with the breadth of research Robert Sheer went to to put together this very cogent argument.

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May 03, 2009 Adrienne rated it 4 of 5 stars

A good oversight of where the military industrial complex is today.

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Aug 06, 2008 Andrew rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Americans

I listen to Scheer on NPR's Left, Right and Center, where he represents the Left. In PofP, Scheer exposes the corrupt relationship between Defense Contractors and the Federal government, showing it to be a pervasive and bipartisan problem. I might have given it 4 stars if Scheer had included footnotes, a significant oversight for this kind of expose.

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Aug 07, 2012 Pascale Plänk Steig rated it 3 of 5 stars

This challenging book meticulously catalogs the money appropriated for defense by the criminals in the Bush administration to fight the so-called “War on Terror.”

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Aug 09, 2008 Dublindem rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a mustread book if you are trying to find out why our defense budget dwarfs everything else.

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Aug 13, 2008 Alec Gray rated it 4 of 5 stars

Must read about the military-industrial underpinnings of Iraq

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Oct 11, 2008 Dana Stabenow rated it 1 of 5 stars

I'm sure he's right, but too much of a rant.

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Mar 31, 2013 Hany rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: politics

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Mar 02, 2013 Timi Cabana marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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Jan 20, 2013 Vijay Nyayapati marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Jan 18, 2013 Ints rated it 5 of 5 stars

Jan 05, 2013 Ainsley marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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Oct 15, 2012 Jennifer Sweeney rated it 5 of 5 stars

Oct 05, 2012 Shyue Chou Chuang rated it 4 of 5 stars

Oct 07, 2012 Greg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Aug 28, 2012 Dennie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Aug 08, 2012 Twelve Books added it

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Jun 10, 2012 James rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-united-states

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About Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer is an American journalist who writes a column for Truthdig which is nationally syndicated in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California and is Editor in Chief for the online magazine Truthdig.

Scheer was born to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew, and his father, a German,...more Robert Scheer is an American journalist who writes a column for Truthdig which is nationally syndicated in publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation. He teaches communications as a professor at the University of Southern California and is Editor in Chief for the online magazine Truthdig.

Scheer was born to immigrant parents. His mother, a Russian Jew, and his father, a German, both worked in the garment industry. After graduating from City College of New York with a degree in economics, he studied as a fellow at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and then did further economics graduate work at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale University, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford, the same post once held by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

While working at City Lights Books in San Francisco, Scheer co-authored the book, Cuba, an American tragedy (1964), with Maurice Zeitlin. Between 1964 and 1969, he served, variously, as the Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor-in-chief of Ramparts magazine. He reported from Cambodia, China, North Korea, Russia, Latin America and the Middle East (including the Six-Day War), as well as on national security matters in the United States. While in Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, Scheer obtained an introduction by the Cuban leader for the diary of Che Guevara — which Scheer had already obtained, with the assistance of French journalist Michele Ray, for publication in Ramparts and by Bantam Books.

During this period Scheer made a bid for elective office as one of the first anti-Vietnam War candidates. He challenged U.S. Representative Jeffrey Cohelan in the 1966 Democratic primary. Cohelan was a liberal, but like most Democratic officeholders at that time, he supported the Vietnam War. Scheer lost, but won over 45% of the vote (and carried Berkeley), a strong showing against an incumbent that demonstrated the rising strength of New Left Sixties radicalism.

In July 1970, Scheer accompanied as a journalist a Black Panther Party delegation, led by Eldridge Cleaver, to North Korea, China, and Vietnam. The delegation also contained people from the San Francisco Red Guard, the women's liberation movement, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newsreel, and the Movement for a Democratic Military. The purpose of the delegation was to "express solidarity with the struggles of the Koreans" and to "bring back to Babylon information about their communist society and their fight against U.S. imperialism," according to the Black Panthers' publication.

After several years freelancing for magazines, including New Times and Playboy, Scheer joined the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a reporter. There he met Narda Zacchino, a reporter whom he later wed in the paper's news room. As a national correspondent for 17 years at the Times, he wrote articles and series on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union during glasnost, the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics and the military, as well as covering several presidential elections. The Times entered Scheer's work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer national reporting award for a series on the television industry.

After Scheer left the Times in 1993, the paper granted him a weekly op-ed column which ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005. The column now appears in the San Francisco Chronicle and is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate. He is also a contributing editor for the Nation magazine.

Scheer can be heard weekly on the nationally syndicated political analysis radio program "Left, Right & Center" produced at KCRW in Santa Monica and syndicated by Public Radio International.

Scheer has interviewed every president from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton. He conducted the noted 1976 Playboy interview with Ji(less)

More about Robert Scheer...

Books by Robert Scheer

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street

Playing President: My Close Ecounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton--and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush

With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush, and Nuclear War

Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power

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