Ruby Sisson Library

An account of the transformation of the CIA and America's special operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in the world's dark spaces: the new American way of war.

Maddow shows how deeply militarized our culture has become--how the role of the national security sector has shape-shifted and grown over the past century to the point of being financially unsustainable and confused in mission.

The founder of Blackwater, the world's most controversial military contractor, describes how the company took on high-risk security jobs around the world, completing nearly 100,000 missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to have opponents tarnish their reputation.

Chronicles the final months of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. On August 27, 2010, three CIA officers ask for a private meeting with CIA Director Leon Panetta. During that secret session, they tell Panetta that agents have tracked a courier with deep Al Qaeda ties to a three-story house at the end of a dead-end street in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But they say it’s more than a house—it’s a heavily protected fortress. No one in the meeting says the...

The twenty-fifth Secretary of Defense takes readers behind the scenes to reveal the inner workings of the Pentagon, its vital mission, and what it takes to lead it. The Pentagon is the headquarters of the single largest institution in America: the Department of Defense. The D.O.D. employs millions of Americans. It owns and operates more real estate, and spends more money, than any other entity. It manages the world’s largest and most complex information...

The former Secretary of Defense offers a candid account of serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. spends more on the military than the entire rest of the world combined and maintains 300,000 troops abroad in an "empire of bases," all part of a credo of global leadership and a consensus that the U.S. must maintain a state of semiwar. The Washington consensus, across administrations dating back to the cold war, is that the world must be organized in alignment with American principles, even if it means using force. Bacevich, with background...

A century of unwise American military adventures is probed in this perceptive study of foreign policy over-reach from Woodrow Wilson's "hubris of reason" to George W. Bush's "hubris of dominance." In each case, Beinart finds a dangerous confluence of misleading experience and untethered ideology.

In Blowback, Chalmers Johnson linked the CIA's clandestine activities abroad to disaster at home. In The Sorrows of Empire, he explored the ways in which the growth of American militarism has jeopardized our stability. Now, in Nemesis, he shows how imperial overstretch is undermining the republic itself, both economically and politically. Delving into new areas--from plans to militarize outer space to Constitution-breaking presidential activities...

"When the Israeli ambassador to France is shot dead in Paris by an unknown sniper, the Israeli government blames Hamas and begins planning a massive invasion to obliterate the terrorist organization once and for all. To avoid an all-out war, three members of the UN Security Council--the United States, France, and the United Kingdom--assemble a team of intelligence agents to uncover the truth behind the assassination"--Amazon.com.