Book Review: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.  Jane Mayer. Doubleday: New York, 2008.                                                                                                                                                               Prepare to be shattered. This is a difficult book to read. Mysteries of Bush Administration Response Post 9/11 Revealed Jane Mayer’s meticulous dissection of the actions of the Bush administration post 9/11 is an extraordinary service to Americans and to the world. Many of us have been trying to understand how this presidency went so wrong.

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The Lives of Others.  Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmark. (2006) Starring: Sbastian Koch; Ulrich Muhe; Martina Gedeck.                                                                                                                                                               Daily Life in a Police State This film takes us back to 1984 in East Berlin in the GDR, where the lives of ordinary people are overseen by the state police, the Stasi.  A virtual Orwellian state exists to watch over the people to insure that no one deviates from the party line, and that no one escapes to the west. One of the bureaucrats in the Stasi, Captain Wiesler, is assigned to eavesdrop on the lives of a playwright, Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend, Christa Maria, a well-known actress.  This couple are successful in the artistic world of the GDR but constrained in what they can write. The actress, unbeknown-st to her lover, is being sexually abused and blackmailed by a high government official.

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Book Review:  Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West. Benazir Bhutto. Harper Collins, New York, New York, 2008.                                                                                                       Finished Just Before Her Assassination This book was finished days before Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan last December.  With the publication of this book we can now honor the contribution she made in leaving it to the world.  It is an important work and forwards the reconciliation and democracy building she was engaged in as she lived. I have never read anything as comprehensive as this about the Muslim world.

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  (Editor’s Note: Today’s interview is with John Fair, a former Air Force officer who once worked in the Pentagon planning for war and who left that career to become a minister and peacemaker.  John’s ministry is focused on the need for planning for a sustainable peace. )                                                               Life in the Air Force and Planning for War Q: John, I understand that you were a career officer in the Air Force. Help me to understand what led you to eventually leave the Air Force to become a minister and then a peacemaker. How did the conviction that you must work for peace, not war, evolve inside you? JF: I grew up in a church-going family.   I learned to fly at an early age. I became an Air Force fighter pilot and gradually began to see things on a larger scale.  I found it foolish chasing Russian bombers around the arctic icepack.

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If we really wanted to create a more peaceful world, what could we do? What if it was up to you and me? What would you do? If you think President Bush is doing it wrong, what would you do differently? If you don’t like those terrorists exploding themselves in car bombs in Iraq or in the subways in London or God forbid, slamming more airplanes into buildings in our own country, how would YOU get them to stop? We tend to think creating peace is something that the experts are supposed to do, the politicians, the diplomats, the top elected officials, and then the rest of us go to war when they tell us to or we complain loudly when we think it was a mistake, but aside from that, most of us have delegated the job of peace-making to someone else, to those people whose job it is or to those saintly creatures who choose to work in war-torn lands trying to get people to love each other.

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