“Mexico’s go-to Web site on information on the country’s drug war.” — MSNBC

“A gritty, front-row seat to Mexico’s drug war.” — Houston Chronicle

“Some of the horror it displays makes the 2002 film City of God, charting the drug war on the streets of Brazil’s look like a Disney film.” — The Daily Mail

 

What is the value of telling the truth? For an independent blog reporter in the midst of the Mexican Drug War, it’s as important as her very life, which is threatened on a daily basis.  The internationally famous Blog Del Narco is an anonymously typed blog that documents a rare insider’s views of the elusive and highly violent drug war in Mexico.

 

Hidden by veils of Internet privacy due to death threats, this 30-year-old blogger has become a local hero and is documenting Mexico’s decline.  She reveals the horrible savagery of the drug cartels with gruesomely graphic pictures, videos and stories of beheadings, death squads, paramilitary cops in ski masks dragging people off and public humiliation.  Blog Del Narco’s highly viewed site (Alexa rated 50 in Mexico, 5,000 in the US, 128,000+ twitter following) has become an international mecca of information into a world that few have gone, and even fewer have lived to tell about.

Original handpicked blog entries are formatted to describe an epic and tragic true story that unfolds the savagery of daily life in Mexico.   This book contains both the original Spanish-language posts in addition to their English translations. Truth is risky, and sometimes it’s also harsh.  Dying for the Truth addresses narco-censorship, government corruption, and an ever-rising death toll all driven by American demand for the products controlled by the cartels and their government collaborators.  Blog Del Narco has fought back, and in turn, created hope in its people and an immense cult following for truth.

The anonymous author is the only person in Mexico daring to write the truth about the violence and corruption of the horrifying drug war in a country that is quickly becoming one of the most dangerous in the world.  Her life has been threatened dozens of times, and her informants have often been killed. It’s a certainty she will be horribly murdered. Both the cartels and the government have searched for her. Her crime: reporting the truth.

 

“What can happen to one can happen to all.”
—  Publilius Syrus, 1^stcentury B.C.

Tyler E. Boudreau is a twelve-year veteran of the Marine Corps infantry. He trained and committed himself physically and intellectually to the military life. Then his intense devotion began to disintegrate, bit by bit, during his final mission in Iraq.

After returning home, he discovered a turmoil developing in his mind, estranging him from his loved ones and the bill of goods he eagerly purchased as a Marine officer.

Packing Inferno is the spectacularly written story of the ordeal of a Marine officer in battle and then coming home. It is the struggle with a society resistant to understand the true nature of war. It is the fight with combat stress and an exploration into the process of recovery. It is the search for conscience, family, and ultimately for one’s essential self. Here are the reflections of a man built by the Marine Corps, disassembled by war, and left with no guidance to rebuild himself.

Tyler Boudreau was recently in Jordan with a veterans’ organization investigating solutions to the Iraqi refugee crisis. Tyler’s blog can be found at http://www.tylerboudreau.com/journal-psychatrix/

PRAISE FOR PACKING INFERNO

“I don’t know another book on any subject, let alone on war, let alone on Iraq or the Corps, that combines such breathtaking candor and self-awareness with such impressive insight (and extremely good writing, as well). Riveting, engrossing, simply terrific, a page-turner.”
—Daniel Ellsberg

“Packing Inferno represents an extraordinary meditation on the lethal contradictions of war and a grunts-eye view of the debacle in Iraq. Tyler Boudreau is that rare creature: a literate observer of the absurdities and tragedies of modern combat (American-style), and a no-holds-barred participant in the carnage of Iraqi urban warfare. Forget the high-falutin’ tomes on America’s mission in Iraq; this book really explains why the U.S. strategy was doomed to failure.”
—Michael T. Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy

“Packing Inferno is a wonderfully written, deeply passionate account of one man’s journey to the “Foyer to Hell,” as Tyler Boudreau describes war. Tyler draws the reader into the subtleties of his “everyman” tale of conflict until it is too late, and we are trapped in a journey up the Euphrates River valley, a Mesopotamian Heart of Darkness which leads us straight into Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, a place reserved for traitors.

“It is here, in the unmaking of a Marine, that it becomes clear that Tyler Boudreau has jumped from the Foyer to Hell into Hell itself. Denied the brotherhood of the Corps which sustained him for so long, Boudreau must navigate his own way out of Hell, a journey upon which he is still embarked. This is what makes Packing Inferno so heartbreaking, because the reader knows that Tyler Boudreau has taken them on a journey which has no end. And while the reader in some way becomes trapped along with Tyler by reading Packing Inferno, we are traitors to humanity if we don’t.”
— Scott Ritter, Former Major, United States Marine Corps, and Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq, 1991-1998

“Tyler Boudreau is the real deal. His personal story of what it’s like to know the ‘ground truth’ of the war in Iraq chills the soul. This is a must read for any of us who care about our country and our soldiers in harms way.”
—Max Cleland

“Eloquent, impassioned, written in the moments, written after, before, and around the moments, dripping with the blood of pain and seeking the blood of breathing, Boudreau has written from the zones of war under the guns and from the zones of war beyond the guns and from the zones of war in our hearts and minds — and in our memories and agendas — and he hasn’t just written from those realms, about the culture, the training, the killing, the being killed, the coming home and not being home, he has displayed it all, dissected it all, unmercifully and mercifully relived and explored it all. Only a human ostrich can avoid these truths — don’t be one. Read this.
—Michael Albert, Co-founder of Z Magazine and South End Press

“Tyler Boudreau lives now to help the rest of us see the monstrous face of war as clearly as he does. Alas, it is our own face, which we fail to recognize. This bravely truthful book is an urgently needed cure for America’s chosen blindness about the war to which this nation condemns its young.”
—James Carroll, author, House of War

* * *

“Tyler Boudreau has written a different war story which chronicles his journey of conscience. His feat is to survive the inferno of relentless anger to reach an understanding of what war entails. His is also an investigation into the morality of war, with all its quagmires and self-justifications. Soldiers must come to terms with their war to truly survive it, and Boudreau offers great insight into the hurdles facing returning veterans as well as advice for those who would help them.”
—Elise Tripp, author of Surviving Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories

“What do you get when you combine The Things They Carried and Dispatches with the unblinking, crystalline style of Friedrich Nietzsche? You get Packing Inferno. Boudreau has a gift for vivid scene and narrative pace, and brings those together with something very rare: an unblinking sight of what’s right and what’s not in this war, in his Marines, and in himself. There is a clarity in his words that will not leave you alone.”
—Jonathan Shay, MD, PhD, author of Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America, MacArthur Fellow

“This book is angry and funny and insightful, about war and those whom war envelopes. It will bring knowing nods of recognition from veterans; it may shock others. To all of us, Tyler Boudreau offers a profound gift: the moral clarity we need to welcome the warriors back home.”
—David Bowne Wood, National Security Correspondent, The Baltimore Sun, author of A Sense of Values: American Marines in an Uncertain World

Aleister Crowley is best today as a founding father of modern occultism. His wide, hypnotic eyes peer at us on the cover of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his influence can be found everywhere in popular culture.

“The Great Beast” has been the subject of several biographies, some painting him as a misunderstood genius, others as a manipulative charlatan. None of them have looked seriously at his career as an agent of British Intelligence.

Using documents gleaned from British, American, French and Italian archives, Secret Agent 666 sensationally reveals that Crowley played a major role in the sinking of the Lusitania, a plot to overthrow the government of Spain, the thwarting of Irish and Indian nationalist conspiracies, and the 1941 flight of Rudolf Hess.

Author Richard Spence argues that Crowley—in his own unconventional way—was a patriotic Englishman who endured years of public vilification in part to mask his role as a secret agent.

The verification of the Great Beast’s participation in the twentieth century’s most astounding government plots will likely blow the minds of history as well as occult aficionados.

Author Richard B. Spence has been seen on various documentaries on The History Channel and is a consultant for Washington D.C.’s International Spy Museum. He is also the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House).

Kim Jong Il’s People’s Republic of North Korea is a gigantic installation, a simulation, a play. Eva Munz, Christian Kracht and Lukas Nikol traveled to this land to take pictures of a country from which there are no pictures. What they show in The Ministry of Truth is a window view of the gigantic 3D production of Kim Jong Il, who writes the nation’s statistics and authors its film script.

Here is the state as the ultimate environmental art, a living dispute to American propaganda.

Heidi Rikan was an ex-stripper, working for the mob in Washington D.C.  White House Call Girl tells how a call girl operation she was running at the time led to the Watergate break-in, which brought down Tricky Dick Nixon himself. If soft curves and round, plump nipples offend your sense of historical propriety, just take a deep breath and think of this book as documentary evidence – because that’s what it is. Needless to say, this is not part of the Watergate story that has come down to us over the decades. It is also only fair to point out that most of the more conventional Watergate histories — especially the designated official version as propounded by the Washington Post — dismiss this out of hand as dangerous “revisionist” history. If you’re not careful, you might end up being called a “conspiracy theorist.” You can also be called crazy – which is what happened to a young lawyer named Phillip Bailley, one of the principal witnesses to this ignored bit of American history. When he was foolish enough to blow the whistle on Heidi and her call girl ring, he was locked up at St. Elizabeth’s, the District of Columbia’s mental hospital, in the ward for the criminally insane.

For forty years we’ve only heard the Woodward and Bernstein perspective on Watergate. Finally we get to hear (and see) the other version. We’ve got the photos. What’s more, we’ve got Heidi’s little black book.

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