The term 'black budget' itself was new to me till I read this book. This book is about the Black budget of the Pentagon. We see the same practices in dealing with the Guantanamo Bay inmates and in the war in Iraq. Though I read it 22 years later now, it still feels very current because the secrecy and deception that Weiner has talked about does not seem to have gone anywhere. 'Blank Check' is his book on the Pentagon and it was written in 1990. Not great.Īlso, there's special amusement value in hearing about the way the Reagan and Bush I presidencies dealt with the mujaheddin, *without the benefit of hindsight*.Įver since I read Tim Weiner's brilliant book on the FBI's history, called 'Enemies', which showed clearly how the FBI has been operating outside the law since its inception with the support of various Presidents, all the way from FDR to George.W.Bush, I decided to read the other two investigative books by him - one on the Pentagon and the other on the CIA.

Weiner could have made that argument in about 100 pages, but it takes him 200. Combine that with the militarist doctrines of recent administrations, which use the black budget to pay for off-the-books wars. The beneficiaries of the expense have been, of course, arms manufacturers. Weapons developed in secrecy are always more expensive, and often of lower quality, than weapons that are developed in public. You can say it didn't need quite as much secrecy as it got, but it's hard to deny that keeping nukes secret was a reasonable goal.īut the unintended consequences weren't so great: a secret budget for defense purposes, which grew particularly quickly under Reagan, is a major cause of today's bloated, morally repugnant arms industry. In short, the 'black budget' came into existence to keep the Manhattan project secure.

But 'Blank Check' has a much stronger argument than his more recent books. Weiner has since written histories of the FBI and the CIA his strengths and weaknesses were all on display in this book (1990): great eye for something that needs to be written about, tenacious research, total inability to put the research into a reasonable format.

Tim weiner nixon