Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security - Hardcover

Faddis, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1599219069 ISBN 13: 9781599219066

Publisher: The Lyons Press, 2010

Synopsis

Former CIA case officer and author of Operation Hotel California and the forthcoming Beyond Repair, Charles S. Faddis takes a look at the state of homeland security and attempts to answer the question, "Are we really any safer than we were on 9/11?" While not a security expert, Faddis knows more than most about the subject and he does understand terrorism. He has also run numerous offensive operations in his 20 years with the Agency, so it's easy for him to stand in the shoes of a terrorist and appraise targets. To date, he has taken a look at military installations, passenger rail, freight rail, chemical plants, LNG facilities, and water treatment plants. He's just started to look at dams, and next up will be nuclear power plants. He went into this project very skeptical of what he would find. Several months later, he is terrified. The picture is not pretty.

About this title

Review:

"To an America that has gone to sleep long since 9/11, this book will serve as a wake-up call, a resounding alarm alerting everyone to the very real threats we face from an enemy committed to attacking us, again and again. Based on decades of experience as one of the CIA's top counter-terror operators, no one is more qualified than Charles Faddis to help us see our vulnerabilities and show every American what can be done to reduce them."--John Giduck, President, Archangel Anti-Terror Group and author of Terror at Beslan "Well researched and written with sophistication, Willful Neglect is a crucially important yet wholly disturbing depiction of gullibility and greed. Faddis points to the pervasive diversion of resources from genuine security needs by those hyping pork-barrel projects and lucrative new 'security' wares, and he takes on the industries and regulators aggressively seeking to save money by shirking their responsibilities to defend predeployed mass weapons among hundreds of poorly defended chemical, bio-weapon, and nuclear facilities against a host of feasible attacks."--Jim Warren, Executive Director of NC WARN, a nuclear power watchdog organization Praise for the author's previous book, Beyond Repair: "Faddis, a career CIA operations officer, pulls no punches in this provocative critique of the iconic and dysfunctional spy agency. . . . In a world where threats are multiplying and becoming more complex, [his] bleak assessment of the CIA should be required reading."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A devastating portrait of the agency's culture--with details that only an insider would know."--David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and author of Body of Lies ***From the author's Introduction: We had, on a strategic scale, plenty of warning that 9/11 was coming. Al Qaida told us they were coming, and they launched a series of preliminary attacks on targets such as US naval vessels and embassies. Across the globe there was chatter about the idea of attacking US aircraft and of using those aircraft as flying bombs. We did nothing. Like the commanders at Pearl Harbor we sat with our hands folded and assumed that when and if the attack came, it would come elsewhere, certainly not on our soil. Three thousand people died as the result of that complacency. Now, in the aftermath, it is our job to do what MacArthur did not do [after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941], to prepare for the next wave of attacks. There is no longer any possibility of avoiding the conclusion that we are at war. There is no question about the brutality of our foes, their level of creativity or their willingness to strike us inside our own borders. It is incumbent upon us, therefore, to move as fast as is humanly possible to block any all future attacks. Amazingly, though, as you tour this nation and examine the prime targets which beg to be defended from terrorist attack, what you find, eight years later, is that virtually nothing meaningful has been done. True, large new bureaucracies have been created and huge shiny, new office buildings constructed, but in terms of concrete measures which will stand in the way of determined, evil men, there is very, very little. --Charles Faddis

About the Author:

Charles S. Faddis served twenty years in the Central Intelligence Agency as an operations officer, holding positions as a department chief at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in Washington, D.C., and as a chief of station in the Middle East. He is the author of Beyond Repair (October 2009, Lyons Press), a scathing critique of today's CIA, and the coauthor of Operation Hotel California (October 2008 hardcover, May 2010 paperback; Lyons Press), which recounts how he led the first CIA mission into Iraq in 2002 in preparation for the pending invasion.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Lyons Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1599219069
• ISBN 13: 9781599219066
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240