Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

To be honest, I am only halfway through this book, but I wonder if I will ever finish it. I had high expectations of it, but I am already quite disappointed. Having personally worked on several infrastructure projects in third world companies, I came to realize that the principal beneficiaries of such transactions are the people who do the transactions. Duh... So I was expecting a little more depth than this particular realization from someone who worked for a shadowy consulting firm (that I have never heard of, not that it doesn't exist) and... (pinkie in mouth a-la doctor evil)... the NSA. But no, it is all pretty predicatble (though not necessarily untrue) "America is evil" stuff you could recycle from any number of sources. Indeed, for someone who supposedly had access to the core of the US polico-economic power structure, his sources seem to consist almost entirely of popular and fairly recent mass-market books, articles from national newsmagazines, and data available on the Internet. For someone who in the 1970s was supposedly doing econometric forecasting of electricity requirements in Indonesia, I am surprised not to see data from more arcane sources. The fact that he wastes about 3 pages regurgitating US News and World Reports about US government connections to the Bin Laden family (it all connects to his time in Panama emphathizing with the locals in the 70s; really). Whatever. I really don't feel that I will get any new insights at this point. Whatever this guy actually did in the past and feels guilty about, I guess he has come to grips in the traditional American fashion by blabbing about it to the whole world.