Rating: 
Summary: Don't judge it if you haven't read it
Review: I found Mr. CLarke's book highly informative. Given the central role has played in counterterrorism efforts in three sucessive administrations it is essential reading. I am rather astonished that recent amazon.com reviwers are so readily able to conclude that Mr. Clarke is a self-serving liar. I was unaware that intimate knowledge of the workings of the National Security Council was so widespread. On "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer" last night, Colin Powell, who may know more about these matters than your reviewers, said that Mr. Clarke is "an expert in these matters" who has "served his country very, very well" and that one can "read the book and make your own judgment as to whether it's accurate". I advise interested persons to do just that.
Rating:
Summary: Finally the truth
Review: I bought "Against All Enemies" as soon as I heard about it, and I'm just grateful that someone with Clarke's credibility is finally telling the truth. It was clear in the weeks before the war that Bush was itching to invade Iraq, and that there was nothing the UN weapons inspectors could tell him that would stop the war from happening. All the lies, that Iraq was an imminent threat, the implications that Saddam was in league with Al Qaida...none of them were effectively challenged, certainly not by the lapdog mainstream media, until well after the true impact of our occupation started being realized. Now the White House is engaged in its campaign of character assasination against Clarke. Clarke obviously knew this would happen, and yet he's had the courage to go out and tell the truth anyway. As far as I'm concerned, the man's a hero.
Rating:
Summary: FINALLY -- THE TRUTH
Review: Finally someone is brave enough to tell the truth about 9/11 despite knowing that the Republican Right Wing Attack Machine would do everything possible to destroy his reputation. Clarke is a true American hero, and every citizen in this country should read this book and realize what really goes on in the White House. A masterful, compelling read and a terrifying tale.
Rating:
Summary: Grateful to Clarke.
Review: Finally, after the evasion and dodging to explain what exactly happened before, after and during 9/11, we have someone willing to come clean. I live in NYC and was there during the horrible events and in NY there's the feeling that we never got any real answers from the government or from anyone who had the ability to do so. I watched month after frustrating month as the 9/11 commission was put off and stalled by this administration until the pressure from the families of 9/11 finally forced their hand. I think the #1 status on Amazon and other listings has basically set the tone about how the public feels about the void of answers.
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Summary: The truth hurts!
Review: Clarke's book is well written and casts blame on numerous people, presidents and himself. A friend of our family died in Iraq - and that is horrible all by itself. But the likelihood that he died for no good reason is enough to get this president a one way ticket back to Texas.Also interesting to see all the one star reviews here - I'd love to find out how many of them actually read this book with an open mind (or read it at all). It's days like these that make me ashamed to have been a Republican. Thank you Richard Clarke for having the courage and patriotism to write this book!
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Summary: book review versus political debate
Review: I did read Mr. Clarke's book, without having a specific political opinion - being a swiss citizen - on whether the democrats or the republicans should win the next presidential election. I did find his statements rather an interesting read. I do assume, that Mr. Clarke is quite an authorative Washington insider, based on his 10 years of serving american presidents of different political background. Else it would be rather unprofessional, that either presidents (democrat or republican) would have employed him in such an important position for such a long time. I do therefore assume, that Mr. Clarke's statements can be assumed to be rather credible. The many reviews on amazon.com's website - depicting Mr. Clarke as a blunt liar - show to me, that this review site has been transformed from an objective forum for reviews by readers, to a site for political debate and subjective political mud slinging. I find this rather shocking and unworthy. I can recommend anybody to read this book and draw their own conclusions.
Rating:
Summary: Angry but Honest. A surprisingly engaging read.
Review: The highest recommendations I can give for this book are that it is unexpectedly engaging and that it is enraging those who only accept their information pre-digested by Fox News. I wonder if those who are attacking Clarke have even read the book or have just seen the hacked up quotes on Fox and Rush. Try reading it. Clarke is clear and direct and tells you in the first chapter one of the reasons he wrote the book. A close friend died in the 9/11 attack; a former FBI employee who would not have been in the World Trade Center if the FBI had paid attention to bin Laden. This is not a dry analysis of terrorism. It is a fresh and current action story with Clarke's very personal but honest insights into how this happened. If you are interested in a unique and penetrating perspective of the war on terror, read this book. If you are not interested in any perspective but your own, try reading it anyway. Doctors recommend elevating your heart rate at least 3 times weekly. I also recommend reading Clarke's 9/11 Commission testimony (March 24th). It is so nuanced that the mincemeat served even by the mainstream media is misleading.
Rating: 
Summary: Inept of Mental deficient?
Review: The only failure that allowed the 9/11 attack to happen was a failure of the imagination: no one could have imagined that a human being could be so callous, so devoid of any basic respect for human life, to use airplanes loaded with passengers as weapons to kill many more people. The idea in the abstract was not new; there had been a few 'blockbuster movies', such as the one about the taking of Air force One by a gang of terrorists, where the plan of the terrorists was to crash the hijacked plane on the White House, or some other 'visible' target like that. But no one could ever imagine that there could be people that could actually do it. It was a lack of imagination, very costly and very tragic, but also very human. Mr. Clarke has failed, for the n-th time, to identify the only possible action that could have prevented 9/11: reinforcing of the airlines cockpit doors after instructing the pilots not to open the door even if the terrorists on board threatened the life of the flight attendants. A second possible action that may have limited the extent of the tragedy, would have been to put fighters plane, around all the main cities and airports, on alert and with instruction to blow up any passenger plane that shows sign of been under hijacker's control. All the other possible actions that Mr. Clarke claims could have prevented 9/11 could not have made the slightest difference. The fact that all four teams of hijacker were able to board and take over the planes means that their planning was 100% effective; even for the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, the takeover did work, but fortunately not so the targeting. That enormous success rate indicates in turn that the counterterrorism measures were zero per cent effective. Did Mr. Clarke, as anti-terrorism chief, ever thought about the possibility of and attack like 9/11? The answer is clearly no, for the counter measures would have been quite simple and cost next to nothing. No having though in the least, about the possibility of a 9/11 type of attack, there was nothing, Mr. Clarke or anyone else could do prevent or at least reduce the enormity of the tragedy. Clearly, Mr. Clarke, and no one else, is responsible for the failures that allowed 9/11 to happen. It behooves Mr. Clarke to apologize to the relatives of the dead, and to the survivors, as well as to the rest of the world. On the other hand, Mr. Clarke's failure is completely understandable. Even if he would have thought about the 9/11 scenario, and ordered the countermeasures, it is not altogether certain that the pilots, behind a reinforced cockpit door, would have been able to disobey the hijackers and allow the other members of the crew to be slaughtered one by one at the other side of the door; nor that the fighter pilots, having had the time to scramble and intercept the hijacked planes, would have been able to blow them and their passengers off their path of destruction. Mr. Clarke failure to imagine the 9/11 attack is understandable; his failure to understand what had happened and how it could have been prevented, days after the attack, can only be qualified as ineptitude; his failure to understand the attack even today, after more than 30 months of research and analysis, can only be qualified as a case of mental deficiency.
Rating: 
Summary: SOME PART OF THE TRUTH, IF NOT THE WHOLE TRUTH
Review: This is a quite revealing and damning account of Bush administration incompetence, at least, and very likely something quite worse. On one of the key claims--that right after 9-11 Bush insisted that Iraq and Saddam were the central issues--there is now full corroboratiom from at least two witnesses to the conversation between Bush and Clarke. Both Roger Cressey and Tom Maertans have confirmed Bush's comments. Moreover, Ms. Rice's credibility problems in terms of what she knew and when have become overwhelming at this point. My main issue with this book is that it ignores the long and sordid history of Western interference and manipulation of the Middle East by both British and American governments. National Security Council Memorandum (NSC) 5401 from 1953 makes clear what US policy in the region was and is focused on: "United States policy is to keep the sources of oil in the Middle East in American hands." In light of that and other delcassified documents from the NSC and US State Department, it is not hard to believe that the 9-11 targedy may have been fomented to justify an invasion and occupation of an oil-rich nation. Mr. Clarke has been,up to now,a loyal player for several US administrations; and it is likely that,if he does have a hidden agenda, it is to disable the neo-conservative hold on foreign policy represented by such neo-cons as Paul Wolfowoitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Clarke may be acting with the approval and urging of more moderate imperialists, such as Jmaes Baker III and Brent Scowcroft, whom he actually mentioned in his 9-11 commission testimony. The George Kennan doctrinaires (see PPS 23, dated February 1948)as I call them, want world resource control for the usual economic and strategic reasons. They find the confrontational preventive war strategy of the neo-cons as alarming as the religious right notion of Armageddon. The apparent conflation of those two positions into an integrated Bush regime foreign policy is extremely troublesome for "kinder and gentler" imperial planners. In any event, Clarke has done some good, although the whole truth of 9-11 remains hidden from view. To get a more complete and accurate view of 9-11, I would strongly recommend readers get the two books by Dr. Nafeez Mossedeqh Ahmed, a British scholar of Bangladesh extraction. Both THE WAR ON FREEDOM and BEHIND THE WAR ON TERROR provide fully documented factual analyses of both 9-11 and the so-called "war on terror." Both books are must reads for critical thinkers who want a real, not mythologized, view of American foreign policy.
Rating: 
Summary: AN IMPORTANT BOOK, though not without problems
Review: I am European and see myself as a neutral observer in the present media war between Republicans and Democrats. One of the first observations I made while reading this book beyond the first chapter was that no person commenting on it on TV or radio in the first few days after its publication had actually read more than the first chapter. So everyone was talking about it, but no one had read it. This book can be, in my opinion, divided into three parts: Part one is the first chapter that contains a detailed account of the events on 9/11/01 and immediately thereafter as seen from the perspective of someone working in the White House. It makes some people in the Bush Administration look somewhat bad. Part two, chapters 2-9, is a detailed description of how the United States became the target of terrorists and how (mostly) the Clinton Administration tried to do something about the threat. This part makes the FBI, CIA and US Military leadership look very bad. So bad, that it is actually too scary to be true. Part three, chapters 10 and 11, and the epilogue, are devoted to the Bush Administration pre- and post 9/11, and this part also makes them look very bad. Even if disagreeing with many opinions expressed by the author, one does learn a lot of interesting facts while reading this book. Unfortunately, most of those facts are actually quite scary, such as the realization to what extent Americans working for different government agencies show no ability to work together on the common goal to defeat an enemy. Again, too scary to be true. One also gets the impression that the author really, really dislikes the current Bush Administration. It is impossible to tell if he dislikes them because he thinks they are incompetent, or if he dislikes them and therefore paints a negative picture of them. Since the former option is far scarier, I would prefer that the latter is true. Overall, the only competent and smart guy (other than occasionally Clinton, whom the author seems to admire quite a bit) in all the described events is the author himself. Whether or not this is factual remains to be seen. However, if it is true, he better be put back to work where he left off when Bush came to the White House, since it is men and women like him and those lower-level FBI agents who knew before 9/11 that something is cooking, who will save this nation from further attacks.
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