on the morning of October 3, 2009, Combat Outpost Keating was viciously attacked by Taliban insurgents. The 53 U.S. troops, having been stationed at the bottom of three steep mountains, were severely outmanned by nearly 400 Taliban fighters. Though the Americans ultimately prevailed, their casualties made it one of the war's deadliest battles for U.S. forces. And after more than three years in that dangerous and vulnerable valley a mere 14 miles from the Pakistan border, the U.S. abandoned and bombed the camp. A Pentagon investigation later concluded that there was no reason for Outpost Keating to have been there in the first place.The Outpost is a tour de force of investigative journalism. Jake Tapper exposes the origins of this tragic and confounding story, exploring the history of the camp and detailing the stories of soldiers heroic and doomed, shadowed by the recklessness of their commanders in Washington, D.C. and a war built on constantly shifting sands.

    Other key elements of the book will include:A careful account of Obama’s decision-making process as the raid was plannedThe fascinating story of a group of CIA analysts—largely women—who never gave up assembling the tiniest clues about OBL’s whereaboutsThe untold and action-packed history of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the SEALsAn analysis of what the death of OBL means for al Qaeda, and for Obama’s legacy. Just as Too Big to Fail captured, in riveting detail, the anatomy of this decade’s financial disaster, so too is Manhunt one of the key stories of this decade: the authoritative, immersive account of the operation that killed the man who organized the largest mass murder in American history.

    Unfortunately, for citizens in the United States and throughout the world, distinguishing between fact and fiction—always a formidable challenge— is now more difficult than ever, as a constant stream of questionable information pours into media outlets.In The Future of Truth, Charles Lewis reminds us of the history of public dishonesty in the United States—from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s cover-up of real motives behind the Vietnam War, to George W. Bush’s public rationales for military action in Iraq and Afghanistan— and how courageous investigative journalists stood up to power to bring truth to light. He then explores the implications for today: what are the root causes and consequences of deception?Lewis argues forcefully that while data points and factoids abound, it is much harder to get to the whole truth of complex issues in time for that truth to guide citizens, voters, and decision-makers.

    Since World War II we have been conditioned to believe that America's motives in 'exporting' democracy are honorable, even noble. In this startling and provocative book, William Blum, a leading dissident chronicler of US foreign policy and the author of controversial bestseller Rogue State, argues that nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, unless this fallacy is unlearned, and until people understand fully the worldwide suffering American policy has caused, we will never be able to stop the monster.

    Lucid in his vision of America's place in the world, refreshingly candid about his family life and his time in the Senate, Obama here sets out his political convictions and inspires us to trust in the dogged optimism that has long defined us and that is our best hope going forward.

    Picking up where his hilarious Screen Burn left off, Dawn of the Dumb collects the best of Charlie Brooker's recent TV writing, together with uproarious spleen-venting diatribes on a range of non-televisual subjects - tackling everything from David Cameron to human hair. Rude, unhinged, outrageous, and above all funny, Dawn of the Dumb is essential reading for anyone with a brain and a spinal cord. And hands for turning the pages.

    Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions:• Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia?• What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood—run, leap, throw, tackle—into a billion-dollar industry?• How did a sport that causes brain damage become such an important emblem for our institutions of higher learning?There has never been a book that exposes the dark underside of America’s favorite game with such searing candor.

    It shows that the corruption of American "conservatism" began long before George W. Bush ballooned the budget and asserted dictatorial rights over the country and the world. The American Right long ago slid into the abyss. Betrayal of the American Right is the full story, and the author is none other than Murray N. Rothbard, who witnessed it all first hand. He tells his own story and reveals that machinations behind the subversion of an anti-state movement into one that cheers statism of the worst sort. The book was written in the mid-1970s and is only now published for the first time. Each time a prospective publisher promised to go ahead, the deal fell through. Even so, it has been privately circulated for the 30 years since it was written - and everyone lucky enough to own a copy of the manuscript knew he had a treasure. People who have read it swear that it is the best account ever how the old right was subverted to become a propaganda branch of the state, not just recently but fifty years ago. So Rothbard's account is not only a critical historical document; it also has explosive explanatory power. According to Rothbard, the corruption of the right began in the ten years after the end of the Second World War. Before then, a strong movement of journalists, writers, and even politicians had formed during the New Deal and after. There was a burgeoning literature to explain why New Deal-style central planning was bad for American liberty. They also saw that central planning and war were linked as two socialistic programs. The experience of war was telling. Prices were controlled by central edict. Businesses were not free to buy and sell. Government spending went through the roof. The Fed's money machine ran constantly. The war was a continuation of the New Deal by others means. They learned that a president dictatorial enough to manipulate the country into war would think nothing of ending liberty at home. There were wonderful intellectuals in this movement: Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, and dozens of others. This movement didn't want to conserve anything but liberty. They wanted to overthrow the alien regime that had taken hold of the country and restore respect for the Constitution. They believed in the free market as a creative mechanism to improve society. They favored a restoration of the gold standard, decentralized government, and peace and friendship with all nations (as George Washington wanted). Murray Rothbard recounts all this, and then enters into the picture. He was a central player in the unfolding events. As a young man, he first encountered the new generation of people on the right who departed dramatically from the old. They were the first "neoconservatives." They favored war as a means. They were soft on executive dictatorship. They considered economics rather trivial compared with the struggle against international foes. They found new uses for the state in the domestic realm as well. They like the CIA, the FBI, and no amount of military spending was enough for them. A leader of the movement William F. Buckley even called for a "totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores" so long as Russia, which had been an alley in the war, had a communist system. This transformation was formative for Rothbard. He began an intellectual journey that would lead to a break from the movement that was now calling itself conservative. He studied with Ludwig von Mises during and after his graduate school years. He wrote a seminal book on economics. He wrote at a fevered pace for the popular press. By 1965, he found that he was pretty much alone in carrying on the Old Right vision. Most everyone else had died or had entered

    Trump watches over six hours of Fox News a day, a habit his staff refers to as “executive time.” In January 2020, when Fox News began to downplay COVID-19, the President was quick to agree. In March, as the deadly virus spiraled out of control, Sean Hannity mocked “coronavirus hysteria” as “new hoax” from the left. Millions of Americans took Hannity and Trump's words as truth—until some of them started to get sick.In Hoax, CNN anchor and chief media correspondent Brian Stelter tells the twisted story of the relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News. From the moment Trump glided down the golden escalator to announce his candidacy in the 2016 presidential election to his acquittal on two articles of impeachment in early 2020, Fox hosts spread his lies and smeared his enemies. Over the course of two years, Stelter spoke with over 250 current and former Fox insiders in an effort to understand the inner workings of Rupert Murdoch's multibillion-dollar media empire. Some of the confessions are alarming. “We don't really believe all this stuff,” a producer says. “We just tell other people to believe it.”At the center of the story lies Sean Hannity, a college dropout who, following the death of Fox News mastermind Roger Ailes, reigns supreme at the network that pays him $30 million a year. Stelter describes the raging tensions inside Fox between the Trump loyalists and the few remaining journalists. He reveals why former chief news anchor Shep Smith resigned in disgust in 2019; why a former anchor said “if I stay here I’ll get cancer;” and how Trump has exploited the leadership vacuum at the top to effectively seize control of the network.Including never before reported details, Hoax exposes the media personalities who, though morally bankrupt, profit outrageously by promoting the President’s propaganda and radicalizing the American right. It is a book for anyone who reads the news and wonders: How did this happen?

    Left-wingers keenly support the bombing of Belgrade and the invasion of Iraq. Tories warn against the threat to civil liberties. The 'progressive' BBC gives a fair hearing to the Conservative Party. Socialist journalists turn and rend Ken Livingstone. In democratic London, merely expressing your opinion can be seriously bad for your career, while in autocratic Moscow you can say pretty much what you like, provided you don't do anything about it. The tearing down of the old Iron Curtain may have allowed markets to sweep into the old Warsaw Pact lands - but it has also permitted revolutionary left-wing ideas to spread like a bacillus through the 'West'.Nobody really cares any more about the old shibboleths of state ownership. The British Labour Party - which opposed nuclear weapons, supposedly on principle, when they mattered - is quite happy to spend billions on the same weapons now that they are unnecessary.The supposed 'right' is as confused and nonsensical as the supposed 'left'. Neo-conservatives run vast budget deficits at home and engage in utopian adventures abroad. They are actively opposed to old conservative ideas such as national sovereignty, strong families and rigorous selective education, and happy to bend the knee to left-wing orthodoxies from man-made global warming to egalitarianism.The political compass is broken, its needle swinging wildly and meaninglessly. The existing political parties have converged, or perhaps simply retreated in confusion on to what looked like safe territory, the often tried and repeated failed policies of Fabian Social Democracy, now worsened by 1960s sexual and social radicalism. They are no longer adversaries, their personnel are interchangeable and they struggle to find ways to distinguish themselves from each other. They simply ignore - or deny - huge areas of human experience and concern from mass immigration to the collapse of marriage and the disappearance of order and rigour in the state education system.Yet conventional wisdom continues to insist that formal politics can and should continue as it did before - and that an exasperated and increasingly angry electorate should place its hopes in a mere change of personnel at the next election. Peter Hitchens argues for the re-establishment of proper adversary politics and the rediscovery of principle.

    Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after September 11th, 2001.Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times.The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.

    

    The book is an urgent call for a return to bedrock conservative principle and a cry to once again put country before party.   Dear Reader,   I am a conservative.             I believe that there are limits to what government can and should do, that there are some problems that government cannot solve, and that human initiative is best when left unfettered, free from government interference or coercion. I believe that these ideas, tested by time, offer the most freedom and best outcomes in the lives of the most people.             But today, the American conservative movement has lost its way. Given the state of our politics, it is no exaggeration to say that this is an urgent matter.             The Republican party used to play to a broader audience, one that demanded that we accomplish something. But in this era of dysfunction, our primary accomplishment has been constructing the argument that we’re not to blame. We have decided that it is better to build and maintain a majority by using the levers of power rather than the art of persuasion and the battle of ideas. We’ve decided that putting party over country is okay. There are many on both sides of the aisle who think this a good model on which to build a political career—destroying, not building.              And all the while, our country burns, our institutions are undermined, and our values are compromised. We have become so estranged from our principles that we no longer know what principle is.             America is not just a collection of transactions. America is also a collection of ideas and values. And these are our values. These are our principles. They are not subject to change, owing to political fashion or cult of personality. I believe that we desperately need to get back to the rigorous, fact-based arguments that made us conservatives in the first place. We need to realize that the stakes are simply too high to remain silent and fall in line.             That is why I have written this book and am taking this stand.   —Jeff Flake

    It is in many ways a tougher opponent than the original threat we faced before September 11, and we are not doing what is necessary to make America safe from that threat." No one has more authority to make that claim than Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The one person who knows more about Usama bin Laden and al Qaeda than anyone else in this country, he has devoted two decades of his professional life to combating terrorism. Richard Clarke served seven presidents and worked inside the White House for George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush until he resigned in March 2003. He knows, better than anyone, the hidden successes and failures of the Clinton years. He knows, better than anyone, why we failed to prevent 9/11. He knows, better than anyone, how President Bush reacted to the attack and what happened behind the scenes in the days that followed. He knows whether or not Iraq presented a terrorist threat to the United States and whether there were hidden costs to the invasion of that country. Most disturbing of all are Clarke's revelations about the Bush administration's lack of interest in al Qaeda prior to September 11. From the moment the Bush team took office and decided to retain Clarke in his post as the counterterrorism czar, Clarke tried to persuade them to take al Qaeda as seriously as had Bill Clinton. For months, he was denied the opportunity even to make his case to Bush. He encountered key officials who gave the impression that they had never heard of al Qaeda; who focused incessantly on Iraq; who even advocated long-discredited conspiracy theories about Saddam's involvement in previous attacks on the United States. Clarke was the nation's crisis manager on 9/11, running the Situation Room -- a scene described here for the first time -- and then watched in dismay at what followed. After ignoring existing plans to attack al Qaeda when he first took office, George Bush made disastrous decisions when he finally did pay attention. Coming from a man known as one of the hard-liners against terrorists, Against All Enemies is both a powerful history of our two-decades-long confrontation with terrorism and a searing indictment of the current administration.

    Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”   That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.  They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.   A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.