Book Review: Crossing Zero by Gould & Fitzgerald
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
Elizabeth Gould, Paul Fitzgerald – Crossing Zero: Afghanistan and Pakistan: the Ultimate Disaster?
Elizabeth Gould, Paul Fitzgerald – Crossing Zero: Afghanistan and Pakistan: the Ultimate Disaster?
Written: Nov 09 ‘11 on Epinions.com by vicfar
Cons:At times too brief and concise
The Bottom Line: A well-written anti-imperialist look at the failures of US occupation in Afghanistan
The 200-page book, just released, is a brilliant indictment of the insane US military occupation of Afghanistan. It also casts grave doubts on the rationale for continuing American interventionism and makes a strong case for retrenchment.
The book is very concise, and the obligatory historical introduction is kept to a minimum: it begins in 1577 with the earliest British colonial adventures in the region, and is especially critical of the disastrous policies following British retreat and the creation of seriously flawed borders.
But the Great Game of Central Asia has become recently important in view of the natural resources the region contains, and after WWII it has drawn the attention of the remaining superpowers. In a strategic effort to bring the USSR to its knees, the US and its secret services have engineered and built an extensive web of paramilitary groups, stoking religious fundamentalism and terrorism. The Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other groups,- the authors remind us are all creature of the Cold War. Now the fundamentalist forces unleashed by the US are wreaking havoc across the whole territory, and threaten the spread of political chaos all the way from Iraq to India.
At the outset, the authors trace the rise of the Taliban movement. At the origin is the massive funding, recruiting and training by the CIA and the ISI, the Pakistani secret service, acting in concert against the USSR. The book then details the early years of the Bush involvement, when Iraq was the more prized target, and the recent Obama strategy toward counterinsurgency, with a modest troop surge, the extension of the war into Pakistan and the growing assassination program, which cannot but remind the reader of the bloody Operation Phoenix in Vietnam.
The case presented against the military strategies created by the Pentagon is overwhelming: the US could not control the country even with 500,000 troops (just as the Russians could not), and large sections of it are in the hands of tribal leaders, with whom the US is desperately trying to make a deal. Much of the focus is on the covert support of the Talibans by the ISI and by the Pakistan government, all of it through the massive injections of US funds into Pakistan. Indeed, the US taxpayer is financing its troops and also the resistance movements to US occupation.
Of course, the game Pakistan is playing is understood in Washington, hence the recent forays across the border and the assassination program. The US, however, still has no viable strategy, continues to fund Pakistan, which funds the Talibans as part of its own strategic games against India, and is negotiating with the worst terrorists, hoping for a strategic retreat. Needless to say, a coalition government composed of warlords and terrorists is unlikely to return Afghanistan to a peaceful existence, and especially to to the secular administration which, like in Iraq, existed before the CIA fanned the flames of Islamic radicalism.
The central part of the book (Obamas Vietnam) examines the parallels between the two military disasters and confirms that Americans are using again a failed strategy, consisting of bombing, systematic assassination and inability to understand the reality under which they operate. Later, the book examines the variety of factions the constitute the anti-American resistance and succeeds in impressing upon the reader two major facts: the resistance landscape is unbelievably complex, and the US military does not have a clue about it.
The US continues to believe that bringing death from the skies and targeted assassinations can lead to victory, without trying to understand the socio-political reality they are trying to influence and mold into a stable democracy. To what extent is this strategy dictated by powerful lobbies who stand to gain fortunes by selling Washington useless but lethal hi-tech gadgets? Does Washington really believe that the drone assassination program is a viable alternative in state-building to the establishment of civil authority and political justice? In what amounts to a transfer of funds from the US tax-payer (or the foreign lender) to the booming defense industry, the US military may have found the Holy Grail: an interminable war, in the style of Orwells 1984, complete with a disinformation campaign by the compliant, corporate press, and accompanied by conservative think tanks whose members enjoy the profits of the war machine, while claiming the US is trying to defend freedom and democracies, two values the US has squelched more than any other country in the world since the beginning of the Cold War.
The book ends with a set of sensible recommendations, like establishing ties with the population, understanding their customs and culture all recommendations sure to fall on deaf years. As an example, the authors cite a complaint by president Karzai about the US stepped-up counterinsurgency program consisting of bursting into peoples homes at night to arrest suspects. Karzai remarked that it generates hate against the US and, indirectly, Karzai himself, because it violates the sanctity of Afghan homes. General Petraeus responded, dismayed, that he was astonished and disappointed by the statement, which was making Karzais position untenable.
Finally, in its epilogue, the authors trace a line of continuity spanning from early post-WWII US interventions up to Obamas war regime today. In spite of the seemingly increased insanity of the war operations, the authors claim to see a logical sequence of events, framed in the lunatic language of American exceptionalism and a boundless inability to acknowledge global overstretch. In this perspective, the US is unable to change course, because it is controlled by a single doctrine and cannot readapt its myths and beliefs to a changing reality. America is destroying, throughout the world, what is claiming to protect.
Hence the suggestion that a complete retreat (very unlikely) would do more good than harm. This brutal but fair conclusion quotes an article in the leftist British newspaper The Guardian, which reminds its readers that the US cannot offer the world its model, because the model has failed:
The US…has nothing substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed. In the affluent West itself modernity is now about dismantling the welfare system, increasing inequality and subsidizing corporate profits
this bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer to Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah imitators. In other words, if the US really must engage in nation building, it ought to start with the most bankrupt nation of them all: itself.
I found this short book highly informative, well structured and devastating in its conclusions. If you believe the substance of its claims, the world is in the hands of a group of mad men (Pentagon, White House, US secret services) who administer death and misery throughout a vast region, without a realistic objective and mired in a war without possible end. It is the stuff of nighmares. I hope the authors are wrong but I feel they are absolutely correct in their analysis.
Recommended: Yes
Book Review: Crossing Zero by Gould & Fitzgerald
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
Elizabeth Gould, Paul Fitzgerald – Crossing Zero: Afghanistan and Pakistan: the Ultimate Disaster?
Elizabeth Gould, Paul Fitzgerald – Crossing Zero: Afghanistan and Pakistan: the Ultimate Disaster?
Written: Nov 09 ’11 on Epinions.com by vicfar
Cons:At times too brief and concise
The Bottom Line: A well-written anti-imperialist look at the failures of US occupation in Afghanistan
The 200-page book, just released, is a brilliant indictment of the insane US military occupation of Afghanistan. It also casts grave doubts on the rationale for continuing American interventionism and makes a strong case for retrenchment.
The book is very concise, and the obligatory historical introduction is kept to a minimum: it begins in 1577 with the earliest British colonial adventures in the region, and is especially critical of the disastrous policies following British retreat and the creation of seriously flawed borders.
But the Great Game of Central Asia has become recently important in view of the natural resources the region contains, and after WWII it has drawn the attention of the remaining superpowers. In a strategic effort to bring the USSR to its knees, the US and its secret services have engineered and built an extensive web of paramilitary groups, stoking religious fundamentalism and terrorism. The Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other groups,- the authors remind us are all creature of the Cold War. Now the fundamentalist forces unleashed by the US are wreaking havoc across the whole territory, and threaten the spread of political chaos all the way from Iraq to India.
At the outset, the authors trace the rise of the Taliban movement. At the origin is the massive funding, recruiting and training by the CIA and the ISI, the Pakistani secret service, acting in concert against the USSR. The book then details the early years of the Bush involvement, when Iraq was the more prized target, and the recent Obama strategy toward counterinsurgency, with a modest troop surge, the extension of the war into Pakistan and the growing assassination program, which cannot but remind the reader of the bloody Operation Phoenix in Vietnam.
The case presented against the military strategies created by the Pentagon is overwhelming: the US could not control the country even with 500,000 troops (just as the Russians could not), and large sections of it are in the hands of tribal leaders, with whom the US is desperately trying to make a deal. Much of the focus is on the covert support of the Talibans by the ISI and by the Pakistan government, all of it through the massive injections of US funds into Pakistan. Indeed, the US taxpayer is financing its troops and also the resistance movements to US occupation.
Of course, the game Pakistan is playing is understood in Washington, hence the recent forays across the border and the assassination program. The US, however, still has no viable strategy, continues to fund Pakistan, which funds the Talibans as part of its own strategic games against India, and is negotiating with the worst terrorists, hoping for a strategic retreat. Needless to say, a coalition government composed of warlords and terrorists is unlikely to return Afghanistan to a peaceful existence, and especially to to the secular administration which, like in Iraq, existed before the CIA fanned the flames of Islamic radicalism.
The central part of the book (Obamas Vietnam) examines the parallels between the two military disasters and confirms that Americans are using again a failed strategy, consisting of bombing, systematic assassination and inability to understand the reality under which they operate. Later, the book examines the variety of factions the constitute the anti-American resistance and succeeds in impressing upon the reader two major facts: the resistance landscape is unbelievably complex, and the US military does not have a clue about it.
The US continues to believe that bringing death from the skies and targeted assassinations can lead to victory, without trying to understand the socio-political reality they are trying to influence and mold into a stable democracy. To what extent is this strategy dictated by powerful lobbies who stand to gain fortunes by selling Washington useless but lethal hi-tech gadgets? Does Washington really believe that the drone assassination program is a viable alternative in state-building to the establishment of civil authority and political justice? In what amounts to a transfer of funds from the US tax-payer (or the foreign lender) to the booming defense industry, the US military may have found the Holy Grail: an interminable war, in the style of Orwells 1984, complete with a disinformation campaign by the compliant, corporate press, and accompanied by conservative think tanks whose members enjoy the profits of the war machine, while claiming the US is trying to defend freedom and democracies, two values the US has squelched more than any other country in the world since the beginning of the Cold War.
The book ends with a set of sensible recommendations, like establishing ties with the population, understanding their customs and culture all recommendations sure to fall on deaf years. As an example, the authors cite a complaint by president Karzai about the US stepped-up counterinsurgency program consisting of bursting into peoples homes at night to arrest suspects. Karzai remarked that it generates hate against the US and, indirectly, Karzai himself, because it violates the sanctity of Afghan homes. General Petraeus responded, dismayed, that he was astonished and disappointed by the statement, which was making Karzais position untenable.
Finally, in its epilogue, the authors trace a line of continuity spanning from early post-WWII US interventions up to Obamas war regime today. In spite of the seemingly increased insanity of the war operations, the authors claim to see a logical sequence of events, framed in the lunatic language of American exceptionalism and a boundless inability to acknowledge global overstretch. In this perspective, the US is unable to change course, because it is controlled by a single doctrine and cannot readapt its myths and beliefs to a changing reality. America is destroying, throughout the world, what is claiming to protect.
Hence the suggestion that a complete retreat (very unlikely) would do more good than harm. This brutal but fair conclusion quotes an article in the leftist British newspaper The Guardian, which reminds its readers that the US cannot offer the world its model, because the model has failed:
The US…has nothing substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed. In the affluent West itself modernity is now about dismantling the welfare system, increasing inequality and subsidizing corporate profits
this bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer to Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah imitators. In other words, if the US really must engage in nation building, it ought to start with the most bankrupt nation of them all: itself.
I found this short book highly informative, well structured and devastating in its conclusions. If you believe the substance of its claims, the world is in the hands of a group of mad men (Pentagon, White House, US secret services) who administer death and misery throughout a vast region, without a realistic objective and mired in a war without possible end. It is the stuff of nighmares. I hope the authors are wrong but I feel they are absolutely correct in their analysis.
Recommended: Yes
Book Review: The Voice by Gould & Fitzgerald
Friday, January 6th, 2012The Voice
Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald’s novel The Voice takes its audience on a quest for the real Holy Grail, entwining scientific mythology with geopolitical intrigue in an esoteric thrill-ride Dan Brown couldn’t dream up, as a frustrated journalist unravels a 5,000-year-old mystery involving Templar knights, Celtic priests and Sufi mystics. Throughout the story the authors challenge Western linear views of reality by offering multidimensional paradigms that are perhaps more conducive to helping us better understand the unseen spiritual and quantum nature of our universe.
Commissioned by Oliver Stone as a screenplay in 1992 and originally published in 2000, The Voice is being reissued now because it is more relevant today than ever. Written before 9/11, The Voice eerily presages the “war on terror” on a number of occasions.
This mythological journey was inspired by the authors’ real world adventures as the first Western journalists allowed into Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Gould and Fitzgerald tried to report a picture of the Soviet “jihad” that stood in sharp contrast to the propaganda Dan Rather and the mainstream media had been peddling to the world.
The Voice’s protagonist is none other than Paul Fitzgerald, a middle-aged American writer living with his daughter Alissa in London and a former network news reporter whose wife had been killed while covering the war in Afghanistan. Not unlike real life, the character Paul’s Afghanistan experience changed the way he perceives the world as he begins to make esoteric connections between the Crusaders, the mujahideen and the CIA.
His distrust of the global elite can be felt early on when during inner dialogue he explains how he came to see events and the course of history itself as “an ancient and ongoing struggle between the forces of darkness and light with the ultimate goal being the evolution of the human soul.”
The book allows the authors to channel their own frustration and ironically tell the truth about past events as illustrated when Paul gives Rick Kendall from Transitron, a FOX-like communications conglomerate, a piece of his mind about being censored during the war:
“I don’t need to be reminded of what you caused in Afghanistan. If you had told people the truth about what we were doing in the first place maybe those Chinese nuclear weapons wouldn’t be in Pakistan. Maybe Osama bin Laden would still be in Saudi Arabia selling insurance to oil sheiks and there wouldn’t be a crisis. For ten years you knew we drew the Russians into Afghanistan and you lied about it. You and your friends had to turn the whole affair into a holy war. So this is what you get.”
Paul wonders aloud how the U.S. and CIA could “activate” Afghan holy warriors on the eve of the Apocalypse and not expect blowback, describing the power of the “freedom fighters” as mystical and real “just the way it was for the Crusaders in 1099.”
Ironically, Paul has vivid dreams about a Black Knight calling him to go on his own personal crusade and soon begins remembering numerous lifetimes of his ancestors from the Geraldine bloodline, stretching back to 1170 A.D. — the year the grail was brought to Ireland from Jerusalem.
The story integrates actual historical events, myth and Paul’s dreams which he comes to realize represent the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. Paul is the Black Knight, guardian of the grail, who must now act as a conduit between two realms and transform myth into reality in order to protect the grail’s secrets.
A mysterious astrologer named Mad Mary tells Paul that the powers of the grail were at one point well known, but had to be hidden for fear of being abused by demagogues:
“Everybody who comes along from Nebuchadnezzar on down wants the power of creation for himself — the magic rituals, the words of power. First it’s the Pharaoh, then Sargon, then Solomon, Alexander, Julius Caesar and the Pope. Now it’s Bill Gates and Rubert Murdoch hoarding the numbers and locking them up in little boxes, counting out their Shekels or Dinars or Pounds. But what are their qualifications for such wealth and power?”
Paul also stumbles upon riveting accounts of strains of an ancient pre-Celtic metaphysics that spanned Europe, the Near East and the Middle East in the fourth millennium B.C. that evidenced itself in all world religions. He also discovers that Irish monks practiced a mixture of paganism and Christianity that included rituals for communicating with spirits and demons, raising the dead and walking between worlds. He learns that all religion is a vast syncretion of beliefs accrued over a long period of time, but humanity needs to get back to the original idea in order to make sense of it.
During trips to the other dimension and through detective work in England and Ireland with help from Alissa, Paul pieces together the reality that the Crown has retained a colonial vice-grip on human destiny through secret societies since the beginning of recorded history — from the ancient Babylonian Brotherhood to the Masons of the current era.
The Brits had become masters of the game by the time of the Faerie Queene’s reign in the 16th century and, according to Paul, “The mystical past and the modern intelligence professional merged for the first time in the Elizabethan police state. It was the perfect marriage for seeking the Grail.”
Even more shocking is when he learns that Transitron executives have been monitoring his dreams through cutting-edge technology and that the company president, Lord Gilbert De Clare, is really the head of a group of technocratic illuminati obsessed with controlling history and acquiring the power to conquer death. Lord Gilbert has actually been stalking Paul from lifetime to lifetime, using powerful virtual reality software to divert Paul from his mission and the role he must play as the end time nears.
The Voice is an enthralling fast-paced read that is even more enjoyable when read with an open mind. Many of the historical assertions about religion and power are somewhat disturbing — and they should be. Belief in a world beyond our senses is a difficult one for a materialist society guided by rationalism and reason to digest. What is far easier to accept is the book’s other premise, that governments and corporations would try to secure and retain power by any means possible — both seen and unseen.
Visit grailwerk.com for more background information.

- Jay Dyer’s interview and Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism Presentation
- Our interview about President Carter’s true role in starting the longest war in US history
- President Carter, Do You Swear to Tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth?
- US Remains Mired in Afghanistan 19 Years Later – Rising Up with Sonali
- Dr. Charles Cogan Interview
- A Grand Illusion of Imperial Power: Part 1
- VT Classic: We’re all CIA Assets! What can be done, a personal story
- A Webinar with Paul & Liz
- ‘Magical Thinking’ has Always Guided the US Role in Afghanistan
- Magical Thinking and the US War in Afghanistan

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