For the NYTimes, Thomas E. Ricks, no pacifist, reviews James Risen’s new book:
In “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, sets out to portray the many seamy sides of the war on terror during the past 13 years…
We are plunged into an unsettled noirish world in which scam artists and thieves swarm government agencies, peddling phony software and other novel tools for the war against terror. The Bush administration was throwing money at the terrorist problem, and plenty of people were willing to catch a few bundles. Mr. Risen begins by following about $2 billion from the United States to Baghdad, which was then stolen, with much of it ending up in a bunker in Lebanon “in what may be one of the largest robberies in modern history.”…
The best section of the book is probably the last, about the trespasses against the United States Constitution committed by the National Security Agency. Here, Mr. Risen’s style becomes clearer and his narrative surer. The tale of Diane Roark, who worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee, is both hair-raising and representative of the post-Sept. 11 era, in which accountability and transparency in government, basic elements of a functioning democracy, were badly eroded. When she realized that the N.S.A. was collecting data on American citizens, she tried to find out more, and then to warn people. She assumed that she had stumbled across a rogue operation. She asked members of Congress about it, and got nowhere. She then contacted a federal judge who oversaw intelligence matters, only to have the judge report her to the Justice Department. She went to officials she knew at the C.I.A. and the White House.
Ms. Roark eventually realized that all these people had known about the N.S.A. program, and effectively approved of it. She retired from her Congressional job and moved to Oregon, only to wake up one morning in July 2007 to find F.B.I. agents with a search warrant and a sealed affidavit that allowed them to go through her house, apparently to look for evidence that she leaked data about the N.S.A. to newspaper reporters. Mr. Risen notes that others who discussed their concerns about the N.S.A.’s constitutional transgressions received similarly harsh handling, one reason that Edward J. Snowden fled overseas when he leaked documents about United States intelligence agencies’ surveillance of American citizens…
… “We have scared the hell out of ourselves,” he quotes an expert on terrorism as saying. That conclusion is a fitting epitaph for the first decade of the current century. Mr. Risen certainly makes the case in this book that America has lost much in its lashing out against terrorism, and that Congress and the people need to wake up and ask more questions about the political, financial, moral and cultural costs of that campaign.
Josh Gerstein, Politico‘s court reporter, shares a different angle:
Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson said in an interview released Sunday that she regrets not pushing the Times to publish a story by national security reporter James Risen about a reportedly flawed CIA effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program — an account that unleashed a nearly seven-year drive by the U.S. government to force Risen to identify his sources.
Risen elected to put the story in a book he wrote, “State of War,” which was published in 2006, several years after the Times elected not to detail the saga in which the CIA was said to have botched an operation to provide flawed nuclear blueprints to Tehran through an intermediary…
Prosecutors have suggested in court filings that Risen’s decision to publish the story despite the Times’s refusal to do so undercuts his grounds for defying subpoenas demanding the identities of his confidential sources. After a series of court battles that Risen ultimately lost, the government is again considering issuing a fresh subpoena to him to testify at the trial of a CIA officer accused of providing him with classified information, Jeffrey Sterling. The trial is now set for January 2015.
Abramson’s stance could help bolster Risen’s argument that the information was newsworthy, particularly as concern about Iran’s nuclear program ramped up in the past decade…
In the “60 Minutes” broadcast Sunday, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden said he would not be pressing the effort to force Risen to divulge his sources…
The “60 Minutes” story referred at several points to the possibility that Risen might end up jailed for refusing to reveal his sources. Unmentioned in the program was that Attorney General Eric Holder has indicated on several occasions that he will not take part in sending a journalist to jail over his reporting and that President Barack Obama has made a similar statement.
It is most sincerely to be hoped that the current administration is wise enough to leave this particularly fetid chunk of Security Theatre to the slow judgement of history, but when it comes to Michael Hayden, well… as the saying goes, if he shakes your hand, count your fingers afterwards.