Briody, Dan

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Briody, Dan

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Office—InfoWorld Media Group, 501 Second St., San Francisco CA 94107. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 111 River Street, 5th Floor, Hoboken, NJ 07030.

CAREER: Business journalist and writer. Infoworld, editor-at-large.

WRITINGS:

The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group, J. Wiley (New York, NY), 2003.

The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money, Wiley (Hoboken, NJ), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Forbes, Wired, Red Herring, and Industry Standard.

SIDELIGHTS: Journalist Dan Briody has written two books pointing out problematic connections among the U.S. government, military, and corporate interests. In The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group he suggests that many political figures have profited from their connections to the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that often invests in defense businesses. Briody criticizes the laws that allow politicians to favor companies like Carlyle and make lucrative connections with them. Those linked to Carlyle as investors or employees have included the bin Laden family and Saudi royals, former defense secretary Frank C. Carlucci, former British Prime Minister John Major, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, and Presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush.

While The Iron Triangle identifies real problems, it falls short of being completely convincing, according to some reviewers. A critic for the Economist called the book "useful reading for anybody interested in American politics today," but expressed concern about Briody's novelistic approach: "Instead of expanding in an unrelenting tone of shocked disapproval, the author could have offered a serious view on a number of difficult questions." In a review for the New York Times, Alison Leigh Cowan wrhote that Briody neglected to "weed out apparent conflicts of interest from actual ones and coincidences from conspiracies." Among the book's strengths, she named the chapters documenting favorable treatment of the Carlyle Group by certain public officials and how quickly they became affiliated with the firm after leaving public office.

Concerns about corporate links to the White House are also part of The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money. In this critique of the defense contractor and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root, Briody examines company history beginning in the Texas oil fields and extending through Halliburton's involve-ment in Vietnam, the Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, and the war in Iraq. The enormous "no-bid" contracts given to Halliburton resulted in tremendous profits and scandals about pricing.

Booklist reviewer David Siegfried called Briody's work a "timely expose." The Halliburton Agenda "raises an important question," according to a Publishers Weekly writer: "have military matters become so efficient and profitable for companies like Halliburton that war itself is easier to wage?"