Douglas Valentine

"Courageously takes us inside the CIA's most shameful extralegal operations, exposing an intelligence service gone rogue. Douglas Valentine's book is a public service."  JOHN KIRIAKOU, author of The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror

"Douglas Valentine writes books that rip the bloody veil off the criminal enterprise known as the US government. When he does this, he combines incredibly in-depth research, interviews and an inviting style of prose that exposes the dark truth about the US nation and its national security state. The CIA as Organized Crime continues that tradition and is an important and crucial text. " RON JACOBS, Counterpunch

"Thanks to extensive interviews, he has an almost intimate feel for the operating mentality of the agency, why they operate the way they do—not only their bloody-minded ruthlessness or their rationalizations, important and interesting as these are—and why they are unbothered by such distinctions as Republican or Democratic presidents." PAUL BUHLE, Portside

 Based on fact, TDY is an action adventure story told by Pete, a young Air Force photojpournalist. In early 1967, Pete is fooled into volunteering for a secret and perilous mission into Southeast Asia. During the mission he learns the true meaning of good and evil, while nearly losing his life in the process.

"This definitive account of the Phoenix program, the U.S. attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary executive, remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America's Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians." Alfred W. McCoy, author the The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

In this extraordinary story of World War Two, the author's father describes the experiences that would affect the course of his life. Douglas Valentine tells of his capture by the Japanese in the fetid jungles of New Guinea, as well as his internment with Australian and British prisoners-of-war in the Hotel Tacloban - a place qwhere no mercy was shown or expected, and from which few came home alive. A celebration of cameraderie and a testament to "the soldier's faith," this is a story of murder, mutiny and an incredible military cover-up. 

This fascinating and engrossing account of early US efforts to control the illegal drug trade is also much more. Valentine deeply examines the practices of the CIA, carefully and skillfully making a connection between it and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). The book exposes the close relationship between organized crime and those in intelligence. From the Cold War to the 1960s, FBN director Harry Anslinger, in a desperate bid to outflank the FBI, entered into a "suicidal" relationship with the CIA. In 1962, the FBN began "its descent into knave spookery and internecine warfare." Valentine also smartly examines the CIA's role in using drugs as a weapon to turn foreign agents and supply funds to anti-communist organizations. His account of MKULTRA--the CIA experiment with LSD--is fascinating and nicely documented. Exploring the deep politics defined by Peter Dale Scott (Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, CH, Mar. '94), Valentine deftly plumbs the hidden roots of the early war on narcotics and proves that foreign policy considerations always trumped public health. The author also makes some fascinating connections between the triumvirate of the FBI, CIA, and FBN around the time of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. Summing Up: Outstanding. All levels/libraries. --- D. R. Turner, Davis and Elkins College

The Strength of the Pack documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement, from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968 through the early years of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Picking up where The Strength of the Wolf left off, the book shows how successive administrations expanded federal drug law enforcement operations under the pervasive but hidden influence of the CIA. The "wolf pack" is a metaphor for the multitude of agencies and their offshoots that comprise the labyrinth system currently waging the eternal war on drugs. Once upon a time, the "lone wolf" federal narcotics agent, last of the noir detectives, hard-boiled and streetwise, stalked his prey: vicious Mafia drug dealers and their international connections. But the rise of the American Superpower and the opium-infused Vietnam War saw the lone wolf replaced by a dehumanized bureaucratic system more suitable to empire: the wolf pack, secretly led by the CIA and designed specifically for using the war on drugs as a covert means of advancing the interests of the U.S. ruling class at home and abroad. Based largely on interviews with former federal narcotics agents and CIA officers, as well as the influential politicians and government bureaucrats they worked with, The Strength of the Pack focuses on the CIA's steady infiltration and corruption of federal drug law enforcement for the purpose of waging political and psychological warfare against the American public. Many books have focused on the public policy aspects of federal drug law enforcement, but no book to date has plumbed as deeply into the secret policies, or taken as comprehensive a view of them, as this one.

"The poems in Doug Valentine's book, "A Crow's Dream" are meticulously and carefully crafted. Many are tender meditations, deeply centered in Nature. Others contain striking juxtapositions and thought-provoking metaphors, like the three baby snakes who appear in the grass on Easter Sunday morning. There is even an imaginative personification of Talent as a beautiful, demanding and fickle girl.

"Valentine has an acute sense of what is true; it ranges from the innocent to the mundane to the decadent. Especially rich are his vivid observations of people, from the swaggering Cadillac Jack, to the twirling girl in Shadow Land and the boy who is watching her, to the lost and struggling Marvis Flynn, who "wraps the pieces of himself in a blanket"." Marilyn Tenenoff

The poets and poems in With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century speak on behalf of outcasts, immigrants, the working class, victims of race and gender discrimination, and those who are brutalized and then forgotten as nations clash and wage endless war. Diverse in ethnicity, experience and writing styles, the poets are united by a common interest in promoting peace, justice, and human welfare. Their poems tell of the struggle for human dignity from South Africa, Serbia and Vietnam to Chile, Australia and America. Concerned for the environment and the werll-being of all humanity, they represent an emerging poetic consciousness which is helping to define and shape the imnagination and languge of the 21st Century.