‘The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq’ is the comprehensive source on the administration’s campaign of disinformation before, during, and after the second Gulf War. From the careful linking of Saddam Hussein with AI Qaeda, to the WMD canard, to the September 2003 damage-control sideshow, AlterNet’s Christopher Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry team up with renowned journalist Robert Scheer to take the full measure of official deception.

This book offers the first analysis of this pattern, underscoring that the move to war was highly managed. The public did not commit troops and dollars to the invasion acting on the best information its government could provide. Instead, we fell victim to a marketing campaign conducted by a small group of influential radicals inside the Bush administration who were pursuing their own narrow, hubristic agenda.

Chomsky’s classic on wartime propaganda and opinion control has been updated and expanded into a two-section book, following the acclaimed format of his anti-war bestseller, 9-11(also available by Natraj). This new edition of Media Control, available in India for the first time, includes “The Journalist from Mars,” Chomsky’s talk on the media coverage of America’s “new war on terrorism.”

Chomsky begins by asserting two models of democracy—one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky “propa ganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state,” and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States. From an examination of how Woodrow Wilson’s Creel Commission “succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, war-mongering population,” to Bush Sr.’s war on Iraq, Chomsky examines how the mass media and public relations industries have been used as propaganda to generate public support for going to war.

Chomsky touches on how the modern public relations industry has been influenced by Walter Lippmann’s theory of “spectator democracy,” in which the public is seen as a “bewildered herd” that needs to be directed, not empowered; and how the public relations industry in the United States focuses on “controlling the public mind,” and not on informing it.

Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Noam Chomsky’s always tightly scheduled life ratcheted several levels higher in intensity. In the months that followed, he gave a great many public talks and countless interviews, many of them to the foreign media, who turned to him as one of the small handful of American intellectuals who stood opposed to the Bush administration’s aggressive military response to the attacks.

With unflagging conviction, Chomsky must have repeated a thousand times his argument that we cannot address terrorism of the weak against the powerful without also confronting ‘the unmentionable but far more extreme terrorism of the powerful against the weak’.

The argument, supported with an ever expanding array of historical case studies, documents, and analyses, fell on deaf ears in Washington and in the mainstream American media, but resonated with large audiences in the United States and abroad who turned once again to Chomsky for the voice of reason and conscience that he has provided for decades.

Chomsky does not see himself as a vehicle for social change but perhaps its enabler, by providing his audience with the information and analysis that are the fruits of his research.

He repeatedly emphasizes that there are choices to be made, and that it is up to the individual to act according to moral principle and to force those in power to do the same.

In a little over a decade, two events have transformed the world we live in: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of militant Islam. Charlie Wilson’s War is the untold story behind the last battle of the Cold War and how it fueled the new jihad.

George Crile tells how Charlie Wilson, a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a rogue CIA operative to launch the biggest, meanest, and most successful covert operation in the Agency’s history.

In the early 1980s, after a Houston socialite turned Wilson’s attention to the ragged band of Afghan “freedom fighters” who continued, despite overwhelming odds, to fight the Soviet invaders, the congressman became passionate about their cause. At a time when Ronald Reagan faced a total cutoff of funding for the Contra war, Wilson, who sat on the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, managed to procure hundreds of millions of dollars to support the mujahideen.

The arms were secretly procured and distributed with the aid of an out-of-favor CIA operative, Gust Avrakotos, whose working-class Greek-American background made him an anomaly among the Ivy League world of American spies. Nicknamed “Dr. Dirty,” the blue-collar James Bond was an aggressive agent who served on the front lines of the Cold War where he learned how to stretch the Agency’s rules to the breaking point.

Moving from the back rooms of the Capitol, to secret chambers at Langley, to arms-dealers conventions, to the Khyber Pass, Charlie Wilson’s War is brilliantly reported and one of the most detailed and compulsively readable accounts of the inside workings of the CIA ever written.

This is the second volume of a series of books by veteran journalist Najam Sethi on Pakistan’s sputtering journey under democracy from 1988 to 2021 after it emerged from a stifling decade of autocracy under Z A Bhutto from 1972-1977 and ruthless dictatorship under General Zia ul Haq from 1977 to 1988.

In this collection of nearly 200 articles, reports, commentaries and analyses, Sethi discusses a wide range of issues relating to state, society and government under the Nawaz Sharif regime from 1990 to 1993. Among the many subjects covered are: mockery of justice and judiciary under pressure; the “law of necessity”; state terrorism; humour in uniform; thinking beyond Saddam; privatise or perish; cold war blues; Nawaz Sharif’s options; freedom, fairness, state and party; disintegration of the social contract; the rise of Nawaz Sharif; India’s dangerous legacies; waylaying the press; the price of press freedom and accountability; the “great game” revisited; how the other half dies; US-Pak agenda for nuclear talks; art of stealing elections; dialoguing with India; unravelling Afghanistan; grasping cynics and power plays in Islamabad; Benazir Bhutto’s social contract; “cleaning-up the fanatics”; killing fields of fundamentalism; how and why to get rid of the 8th Amendment; third force vs third solution; the tragedy of General Asif Nawaz; Establishment vs Civil Society; Discretion vs Justice; Nawaz Sharif’s Lafafah legacies; and grand delusions of Mairaj Mohammad Khan and Rao Rashid.

The writing is full of sardonic humour, wit and penetrating analysis.

In May 2018, a book was published that set off a perfect storm in the intelligence circles in the subcontinent, and made people in the spy community sit up around the world. What made The Spy Chronicles unusual was that two of its authors, A.S. Dulat and Asad Durrani, co-writing with journalist Aditya Sinha, had headed their respective spy agencies — Dulat had been chief of India’s RAW, and Lt Gen. Durrani of Pakistan’s ISI.

More remarkably, these former chiefs of two of the most powerful spy agencies in the world, which were also bitter rivals, discussed the necessity for peace and how the relationship between their two countries could be improved. The fallout of the book would result in Lt Gen. Durrani, a man who has been spoken of as one of the clearest and sharpest thinkers to head the ISI, being put on the exit control list and having his pension revoked.

Honour Among Spies is a fictional account of a spy who is sent out into the cold, but one that reflects all too accurately the predicament of a distinguished officer fighting to protect his reputation. Woven into the novel is a throwback to another famous incident the raid on Osama bin Laden, about whose hideaway and the raid itself Lt Gen. Durrani had made some prescient comments. These and other elements come together in this taut battle of wits that takes forward, in a way, the narrative of The Spy Chronicles.