Reviews for Picture's Worth 1,000 Words A Workbook for Visual Communications

The average rating for Picture's Worth 1,000 Words A Workbook for Visual Communications based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-08 00:00:00 Renee Harmon This is a superbly reseached work and tells the shadowy tale of American foreign policy from the late 40's to the present day. But it is really a 700 page indictment of how bad a government agency can be. The one thing the CIA did well was give money away, BILLIONS of dollars spent with a slim margin of return at best, and at worse it became clear that the CIA had literally been conned out of hundreds of millions by other states and even individuals. But any work of journalism, to be regarded as great, must be objective and here is the problem with this book: it is such a pervasivley negative account, it reports that the CIA is so off the charts bad, that a reader wonders if Weiner is just slamming them page after page. Surely in over 60 years of service the CIA has done something right. To his credit, he documents a rebuttal by a CIA director that says essentially that their greatest successes were secret while only their many failures were known publically. This could be true, but Weiner has created a work that dramatically documents an ascerbic, scathing history of the CIA, describing them as air conditioned, comfortable bureacrats in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, far from the image of worldly and competent super spy that the agency wishes to be portayed. The agents and analysists may see themselves as James Bond, but Weiner describes them more like the John Malkovitch character from the Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading: inept, arrogant, ineffective, detached from reality and drunk. Presidents have privately called the agents of the CIA clowns, jerks, idiots, drunks, thieves, and liars. Allen Dulles, one the earlies and most influential directors, used to heft a report to determine how heavy it was, rather than actually reading it. He even did this in front of the author of the report, and may have blithley given it back with an instruction that it needed more, as if it were too light. Later in his career he may watch a Washington Senators baseball game, ignoring the agent who was trying to brief him on some issue. Early on the CIA used the communists against the fascists, and later sided with fascists against the communists. The CIA's battle with communism was its early raison d'etre and the fall of the Soviet Union caused many lifelong agents to mourn the passing of its foe as a sign that their time too had come. The CIA had stumbled across early terrorsist plots by the PLO and had indications that sub-state level terror may be the wave of the future but did little to prevent the rise of the terrorists, largely due to the fact that thier credibility at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department had diminshed to the point where the CIA had become an almost ran in terms of US foreign policy. Some of the notoriously bad predictions of the CIA: The Soviet Union will not invade Afghanistan The Shah of Iran is safe from revolution There is no liklihood of Soviet missles in Cuba China will not invade Korea. We are absolutely winning the war in Vietnam. Don't worry about an embassy attack in Iran. Iraq will not invade Kuwait. (A senior CIA official learned of the invasion from his neighbor who had seen it on CNN) And worst of all, a case of the boy who cries wolf in 2001, as CIA officials actually had some idea of plots in existence, but the seriousness of the reports were corrupted by decades of poor intelligence and the weakened esteem at the White House and so the reports went relatively unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations. With the attacks of 9/11 in 2001, the CIA's worst nightmare had been realized as the CIA had failed to prevent a second Pearl Harbor. Later on, the politics and ineffectiveness of the the agency contributed to the poor intelligence that led to the US invasion of Iraq as the CIA produced reports based upon faulty intelligence gathering, hearsay, and was essentially aimed at delivering news that Bush wanted to hear rather than telling the truth that they just did not know for sure what Iraq had in terms of WMD. Scary book if it's as accurate as it appears.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-25 00:00:00 Linda Specker I enjoyed Legacy of Ashes a little less than Enemies by the same author. Not that it is not fascinating and horrifying, just that perhaps it painted such an abysmal picture of the agency - probably deserved, I know - but did not really point to things they do right or should do better. The Central Intelligence Group (the predecessor to the CIA) was created in the wake of the end of WWII by President Harry Truman in order to focus the FBI on internal surveillance and investigation and have an intelligence gathering organization focused on outside sources. The first director of national intelligence was wealthy Rear Admiral Sidney W Souers (who also happened to make his fortune with the first self-service supermarket chain the US - Piggly Wiggly (and FUN FACT: I worked for a Piggly Wiggly when I was 13-15 and have fond memories of slicing the meat of my thumb open when cutting some OJ cartons and tipping over a 6-tier wine rack with the floor wax machine)). But Souers quickly found that there was no mandate and was not long in this position for this organization which itself had a very short shelf life. The CIA was created in the wake of the dissolution of the CIG and continued with a poorly defined mission and with directors that were more obsessed with black ops (reversal of regimes "hostile to the US" and cloak and dagger stuff) than the actual intelligence they gathered. Due to this, it took decades to have reliable information from the Soviet Union and yet the CIA prided itself in overturning regimes in Iraq and Guatemala (the true facts of these operations were far more sordid as documented by Tim Weiner). I was appalled at many of the details, not the least of which was the use of Jew-baiting as propaganda to try and raise a crowd to support the US-backed coups. Particularly enlightening was the description in chapter 14 of the attempted coup in Syria in '57 which has such painful and dramatic resonance now, 60 years later. Of course, the Korean War (also a CIA screwup by underestimating the Chinese strength amassed at the NK-China border) and the Vietnam War (replete with senseless murders of civilians in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam including torture and napalm bombings). Someone, despite all these catastrophes, the CIA was able to paint a nice picture to VP Nixon and later President Johnson. From Weiner's notes, we can see that there is a great deal of evidence behind the theories that the Cubans with some aid from the KGB had the best reason for Kennedy's assassination in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs disaster and that the Cuban Missile crisis was not the story of Kennedy bravely staring down the nuclear barrel but rather Kruschev offering an exchange of US removal of arms in Turkey for USSR removal of arms in Cuba. A majority of the document sources Weiner is using are declassified dossiers from 2002-2004, so the research is relatively recent and contains many facts previously hidden to the public. In fact, there had been multiple illegal attempts on Castro's life by the CIA of which Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General was well aware, and it is highly likely that the use of deranged USSR-citizen-wannabe Oswald was acting on the orders of the Cubans with aid from the USSR. Moving on towards the late 60s early 70s, the catastrophe in Indonesia was also largely the CIA's fault costing literally hundreds of thousands of lives. The issue is that the massive amounts of dark money that could be coerced out of Congress to fund these operations regardless of their income were so appetizing to the folks running the CIA and they had no qualms about lying about their intentions (spies being good at lying, right?) This lead to incredible abuses of power and the law and a shocking number of lost lives - both enemy and friendly, both military/CIA and civilian. I am unable to continue detailing each of the many disasters that the CIA ham-handed, but I will mention the two that were most influential on my personal opinion of the CIA - the false information on "weapons of mass destruction" that Saddam Hussain (who the CIA put into power and armed) that the CIA gave knowingly to Colin Powell who then knowingly lied about it in front of the UN justifying a useless invasion of Iraq under Dubya, and then the supreme crime of the CIA - their complete lack of any warning whatsoever in the 9/11 bombings in NYC. Due to these failures, there was a bit of a come to Jesus moment back in 2005-2006 at which time the CIA was nearly disbanded. Unfortunately, the book was written in 2007, so I do not have any information on what happened in the 10 years lapse. I suppose it does not look like Carrie, Saul and Quinn going after the bad guys, but something far different. Highly readable and well-researched, Legacy of Ashes is an important book right now was some fundamentals of democracy are being called to attention and in some cases destroyed by Drumpf's government. The question of collective national security vs individual freedom is one in which the latter has most often lost the battle (and seems to be losing again in terms of Drumpf Internet Policy). I think that this book makes the argument that hiding things from citizens nearly always leads to catastrophe and that when the government steamrolls individual rights, it almost always comes back to haunt them one way or another.