The Dirty Business of War by Kenneth Eade

The Dirty Business of War

The subject of my latest thriller novel, Beyond All Recognition, is one that all of us are aware of but hardly any of us know about – war. One of our most distinguished and highest ranking military men, Major General Smedley Butler said, “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

“Perception Management” was pioneered in the 1980’s under the Reagan administration in order to avoid the public opposition to future wars that was seen during the Vietnam War.[1] It is simply a fancy word for propaganda, and is used knowingly by the government to control the media to convey the spin on the news that it wants the public to hear.

At the onset of the Iraq war in 2003, journalists were embedded with US troops as combat cameramen. The reason for this was not to show what was happening in the war, but to present the American view of it. Perception management was used to promote the belief that weapons of mass destruction were being manufactured in Iraq to promote its military invention, even though the real purpose behind the war was regime change. [2]

In 2001, the Rendon Group, headed by John Rendon, was secretly granted a $16 million contract to target Iraq with propaganda.[3] Rendon, who had been hired by the CIA to help create conditions to removal Sadaam Hussein from power, is a leader in “perception management”. Two months later, in December 2001, a clandestine operation performed by the CIA and the Pentagon produced false polygraph testimony of an alleged Iraqi civil engineer, who testified that he had helped Sadaam Hussein and his men hide tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.[4] This was seeded into the media by Rendon to get the American people behind the invasion of Iraq. Of course, we now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction hidden anywhere in Iraq.

President Bush himself admitted in a televised interview with Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News that, “One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” Vice President Dick Cheney stated on Meet the Press, “If we’re successful in Iraq…we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”

General Wesley Clark, the former NATO Allied Commander and Joint Chiefs of Staff Director of Strategy and Policy, stated in his book, Winning Modern Wars, “Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.”

In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld sent Colonel James Steele to serve as a civilian advisor to Iraqi Paramilitary special police commandos known as the “Wolf Brigade”. Steele was a counter-insurgency specialist who was a member of a group of US Special Forces advisors to the Salvadorian Army and trained counter-insurgency commandos in south America, who carried out extreme abuses of human rights.[5] The Wolf Brigade was created and established by the United States and enabled the re-deployment of Sadaam Hussein’s Republican Guard. The Brigade was later accused by a UN official of torture, murder and the implementation of death squads.[6] The techniques used by these counter-insurgency squads were described as “fighting terror with terror”, which was previously done in other theaters, such as Vietnam and El Salvador.[7]

Colonel Steele, with the help of Col. James Hoffman, set up torture centers, dispatching Shia militias to torture Sunni soldiers to learn the details of the insurgency.[8] This has been attributed as a major cause of the civil war which led to the formation of ISIS.[9] The operation of death squads as counter-insurgency measures was also common knowledge at the time.[10]

In Beyond All Recognition, after a cleansing operation in an Iraqi village is discovered by journalists to be a massacre of innocent civilians, the Captain who commanded the company which invaded the village is court-martialed as a scapegoat to cover up the fact that his orders came from the very top. The book is fictional, but can be classified as faction, as it opens one’s eyes about how and why the United States became involved in Iraq.

[1] Parry, Robert (December 28, 2014) “The Victory of Perception Management” Consortium News

[2] Brigadier BM Kappor (2016) The Art of Perception Management in Information Warfare Today, USI of India

[3] Bamford, James (November 18, 2004) The Man Who Sold the War, Rolling Stone

[4] Brigadier BM Kappor (2016) The Art of Perception Management in Information Warfare Today, USI of India 2016

[5] Mass, Peter (May 1, 2004) “The Way of the Commandos” New York Times

[6] Buncombe, Andrew (February 26, 2006) “Iraq’s Death Squads: On the Brink of Civil War” The Independent

Spencer, Richard (October 25, 2010) “WikiLeaks War Logs: Who are the Wolf Brigade?” The Daily Telegraph

Leigh, David (October 24, 2010) “The War Logs: Americans handed over captives to Iraq torture squads” The Guardian

[7] Snodgrass Godoy, Angelina (2006) Popular Injustice: Violence, Community and Law in Latin America, Stanford University Press, pp. 175-180.

[8] “US trained death squads organized torture sites across Iraq” Russia Today (April 8, 2013)

[9] Freeman, Colin (June 29, 2014) “Death Squads, ISIS and a new generation of fighters – Why Iraq is facing break-up”

[10] Cerny, Jakub (June 2006) “Death Squad Operations in Iraq, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom

Title: Beyond All Recognition (Brent Marks Legal Thrillers) by Kenneth Eade
Published: July 15, 2016
Publisher: Times Square Publishing
Genre: Legal Thriller/courtroom drama
Recommended Age: 18+

Synopsis:

Experience the suspense and mystery of the latest in the best selling legal thriller series from the author critics hail as: “One of the strongest thriller writers on the scene.”

This fast-paced and action packed legal and military thriller introduces us to 26-year-old Captain Ryan Bennington, in command of a company during the Iraq War and fighting a faceless enemy in the global war on terror where a split-second decision could mean the difference between killing an innocent civilian or losing an entire platoon to a suicide bomber. Ryan survives the war and comes home to conquer PTSD and chronic unemployment, only to be arrested for following the orders of his Commander to kill suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists in a small Iraqi village, who turn out, after the raid, to be civilians.

Lawyer Brent Marks takes on Ryan’s defense in his court-martial trial, which will reveal the deepest, darkest secrets of the military industrial complex. In their search for a scapegoat, have the powers-that-be gone too far this time?

Purchase: Barnes & Noble | GoodReads | Amazon

About the Author

Described by critics as “one of our strongest thriller writers on the scene,” author Kenneth Eade, best known for his legal and political thrillers, practiced law for 30 years before publishing his first novel, “An Involuntary Spy.” Eade, an up-and-coming author in the legal thriller and courtroom drama genre, has been described by critics as “One of our strongest thriller writers on the scene and the fact that he draws his stories from the contemporary philosophical landscape is very much to his credit.” He is the author of the “Brent Marks Legal Thriller Series”, the fifth installment of which, Killer.com, won best legal thriller in the 2015 Beverly Hills Book Awards, and the “Involuntary Spy Espionage Series”.

Said Eade of the comparisons, “Readers compare me in style to John Grisham and, there are some similarities, because John also likes to craft a story around real topics and we are both lawyers. However, all of my novels are rooted in reality, not fantasy. I use fictional characters and situations to express factual and conceptual issues. Some use the term ‘faction’ to describe this style, and it is present in all my fictional works.”

Eade has written twelve novels, which are now in the process of being translated into six languages. He is known to keep in touch with his readers, and offers a free Kindle book to all those who sign up at his web site, www.kennetheade.com.

Connect with Kenneth Eade: Amazon Author Page | Facebook | Twitter | GoodReads | Website