The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men, Eric Lichtblau, 2014

The shocking story of how America became one of the world’s safest postwar havens for Nazis

Thousands of Nazis — from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich — came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. They had little trouble getting in. With scant scrutiny, many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees,” their pasts easily disguised and their war crimes soon forgotten. But some had help and protection from the U.S. government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.

For the first time, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story not only of the Nazi scientists brought to America, but of the German spies and con men who followed them and lived for decades as ordinary citizens. Only years after their arrival did private sleuths and government prosecutors begin trying to identify the hidden Nazis. But even then, American intelligence agencies secretly worked to protect a number of their prized spies from exposure. Today, a few Nazis still remain on our soil.

Investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, relying on a trove of newly discovered documents and scores of interviews with participants in this little-known chapter of postwar history, tells the shocking and shameful story of how America became a safe haven for Hitler’s men.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander, 2010/2012

The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year; been dubbed the “secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West; and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers, and prisons nationwide.The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face.

As the United States celebrates its “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of black men in major urban areas are under correctional control or saddled with criminal records for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an extraordinary percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a parallel social universe, denied basic civil and human rights—including the right to vote; the right to serve on juries; and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. Today, it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet as civil-rights-lawyer-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander demonstrates, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once labeled a felon, even for a minor drug crime, the old forms of discrimination are suddenly legal again. In her words, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

Alexander shows that, by targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.

The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community—and all of us—to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.

Teaching Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Teaching Tolerance: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Puzzle Palace: A Report on N.S.A., America’s Most Secret Agency, James Bamford, 1982

Philip Taubman’s review of The Puzzle Palace in The New York Times, 19 September 1982: FIFTY-THREE years ago [1929], in the early months of Herbert Hoover’s Administration, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson was presented with a small batch of Japanese telegrams that had been deciphered by a highly secret American code-breaking organization known as the Black Chamber. Appalled at the invasion of another nation’s private communications, Stimson immediately cut off funding to the cryptologists with the admonition ”Gentleman do not read each other’s mail.” It was not one of the more pre-scient decisions in American history. Driven by the exigencies of World War II and then the Cold War and drawing on advances in computers and electronics, in 1952 the Government created a new version of the Black Chamber – the National Security Agency, which is the largest, most sensitive and potentially most intrusive American intelligence agency.

With acres of computers, electronic listening posts located around the world and a fleet of spy satellites circling overhead, the N.S.A. can eavesdrop on communications of friends and enemies, including American citizens. News of an invasion, an assassination or a coup overseas can be flashed from the point of interception to the President’s desk within minutes. The latest performance data from Soviet missile tests can be recorded and analyzed, providing the main means of verifying Soviet compliance with strategic arms limitation agreements. Even the radiophone conversations of top Soviet officials riding to the Kremlin in their limousines has been snatched out of the atmosphere by the N.S.A. In code breaking and making, the fundamental function of the agency, the work of the Black Chamber has long since given way to enormously complex mathematical puzzles that are the province of powerful computers. With an annual budget in excess of $2 billion and more than 60,000 employees, the N.S.A. easily eclipses other intelligence organizations in size, including the Central Intelligence Agency.

Despite its size and significance, the N.S.A. has operated in almost absolute secrecy. For years its very existence was considered secret, and the seven-page memorandum signed by President Truman in 1952 that created the agency by consolidating various Defense Department offices is still classified. James Bamford, a Massachusetts writer who has a law degree and who specializes in investigative research, rips away the secrecy with this book. There have been glimpses inside the N.S.A. before, but until now no one has published a comprehensive and detailed report on the agency. The quality and depth of Mr. Bamford’s research are remarkable. Through interviews with former N.S.A. officials, scrutiny of thousands of obscure public documents and aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act, Mr. Bamford has emerged with everything except the combination to the director’s safe. In some sections it appears that he may even have that….

Intelligence officials have been dreading publication of this book, and they made a concerted effort to limit Mr. Bamford’s research. The Justice Department, at the insistence of the N.S.A., even took the highly unusual step of asking Mr. Bamford to return documents about the agency that Justice itself had released to him. They dealt with a 1975-76 investigation of widespread illegal monitoring of domestic communications by the N.S.A. Mr. Bamford refused to return the papers….

The catalyst for the Justice Department investigation was a series of disclosures in the 1970’s in the press and in testimony before Congressional committees about questionable N.S.A. operations. These revelations included the fact that the Nixon Administration had used the N.S.A. to monitor the activities of antiwar leaders and radicals, including the Weathermen. In one memorable case the Government abruptly dropped criminal charges in Detroit against a group of Weathermen rather than risk exposure of the N.S.A.’s involvement in monitoring their communications….

As Mr. Bamford makes clear, the N.S.A. and its predecessor agencies often operated outside the Constitution and the law by intercepting certain kinds of domestic communications. From 1919, when Black Chamber officials arranged for Western Union to violate the law by providing them copies of telegrams, to the 1960’s and early 1970’s, when the N.S.A.’s technology was used to spy on antiwar protesters, intelligence officials frequently displayed a startling insensitivity to the law….

The law has not kept up with communications technology and the technology of spying. ”Where America’s chief source of raw intelligence was the clandestine agent with his or her Minox camera,” he writes, ”today that source is the same worldwide blanket of microwave signals and rivers of satellite transmissions that gives us our telephone calls and our remote banking, telegrams, and soon, our mail.” With no compensating changes in the law to control the application of the new technology, he warns, ”Like an ever-widening sinkhole, NSA’s surveillance technology will continue to expand, quietly pulling in more and more communications and gradually eliminating more and more privacy.”

By revealing the scope and opening up the operations of the N.S.A. without giving away its most sensitive secrets, Mr. Bamford has performed an important public service in this impressive book.

The Secret Way to War: the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History, Mark Danner, 2006

The Secret Way to War, with a preface by by Frank Rich, includes Mark Danner’s strongly argued analysis of the Downing Street Memo as well as the complete text of the memo and seven other leaked British documents. Collectively, the documents show the members of Tony Blair’s government and their counterparts in Washington struggling to find legal and political rationales and strategies for regime change in Iraq.

The United States went to war in Iraq to eliminate the threat from Saddam Hussein’ s weapons of mass destruction– which turned out not to exist. As the war drags on, the strange case of the weapons that were not there remains a matter of bitter debate, for it underscores the fact that the goals and the motivations of the Bush administration officials who argued for war are still largely obscure. Yet in fact there exists crucial and little-publicized evidence that lets us understand the secretive, even deceptive, way that the the US launched a war of choice in the Middle East in March 2003.

At the beginning of May 2005, just before the British elections, the London Times published the “Downing Street Memo,” the leaked secret minutes of a July 2002 meeting of senior British intelligence, foreign policy, and security officials. The memo made clear that eight months before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush had already decided on war. The British officials who attended the meeting were told that the “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” that the US wanted to avoid consulting the UN, and that few plans were being made for the aftermath of war.

Largely ignored in the US press for weeks afterward, The New York Review of Books published the memo in its entirety with an extensive commentary by award-winning journalist Mark Danner. Danner explains how the memo clarifies the broader– and largely concealed– history of the events leading up to the Iraq war. He shows that the Bush and Blair administrations advocated the resumption of UN weapons inspections as a means not to avoid war but to ensure it. Most importantly, Danner argues that in the face of the memo’s clear evidence of deception, the press, public, and Congress still have not held the administration responsible.

The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret N.S.A. from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, James Bamford, 2008

James Bamford has been the preeminent expert on the National Security Agency since his reporting revealed the agency’s existence in the 1980s. Now Bamford describes the transformation of the NSA since 9/11, as the agency increasingly turns its high-tech ears on the American public.

The Shadow Factory reconstructs how the NSA missed a chance to thwart the 9/11 hijackers and details how this mistake has led to a heightening of domestic surveillance. In disturbing detail, Bamford describes exactly how every American’s data is being mined and what is being done with it. Any reader who thinks America’s liberties are being protected by Congress will be shocked and appalled at what is revealed here.

Alexander Nazaryan, “The N.S.A.’s Chief Chronicler,” The New Yorker, 10 June 2013.

Democracy Now!, James Bamford: “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.” 14 October 2008.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein, 2007

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Larissa MacFarquhar, “Profiles: Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left.” The New Yorker, 8 December 2008.

Democracy Now!, “The Shock Doctrine: Naomi Klein on the Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” 17 September 2007.

The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes, Deborah Nelson, 2008. Review by Tara McKelvey, “Many My Lais.” The New York Times, 12 December 2008.

Villagers, acting as human minesweepers, walked ahead of troops in dangerous areas to keep Americans from being blown up. Prisoners were subjected to a variation on waterboarding and jolted with electricity. Teenage boys fishing on a lake, as well as children tending flocks of ducks, were killed. “There are hundreds of such reports in the war-crime archive, each one dutifully recorded, sometimes with no more than a passing sentence or two, as if the killing were as routine as the activity it interrupted,” Deborah Nelson writes in “The War Behind Me.”

The archive in question, a set of Army documents at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md., reveals widespread killing and abuse by American troops in Vietnam. Most of these actions are not known to the public, even though the military investigated them. The crimes are similar to those committed at My Lai in 1968. Yet, as Nelson contends, most Ameri­cans still think the violence was the work of “a few rogue units,” when in fact “every major division that served in Vietnam was represented.” Precisely how many soldiers were involved, and to what extent, is not known, but she shows that the abuse was far more common than is generally believed. Her book helps explain how this misunderstanding came about….

Ken Silverstein, Six Questions for Deborah Nelson on Vietnam War Crimes, and Why They Matter Now. Harper’s, 2 February 2009.

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, Mark Danner

Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: Includes the torture photographs in color and the full texts of the secret administration memos on torture and the investigative reports on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

In the spring of 2004, graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison flashed around the world, provoking outraged debate. Did they depict the rogue behavior of “a few bad apples”? Or did they in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the “war on terror”?

The images are shocking, but they do not tell the whole story. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents but the result of a chain of deliberate decisions and failures of command. To understand how “Hooded Man” and “Leashed Man” could have happened, Mark Danner turns to the documents that are collected for the first time in this book.

These documents include secret government memos, some never before published, that portray a fierce argument within the Bush administration over whether al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and how far the US could go in interrogating them. There are also official reports on abuses at Abu Ghraib by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by US Army investigators, and by an independent panel chaired by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger. In sifting this evidence, Danner traces the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guantanamo “migrated” to Iraq as resistance to the US occupation grew and US casualties mounted.

Yet as Mark Danner writes, the real scandal here is political: it “is not about revelation or disclosure but about the failure, once wrongdoing is disclosed, of politicians, officials, the press, and, ultimately, citizens to act.” For once we know the story the photos and documents tell, we are left with the questions they pose for our democratic society: Does fighting a “new kind of war” on terror justify torture? Who will we hold responsible for deciding to pursue such a policy, and what will be the moral and political costs to the country?