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.
Southern Beale
I’m too busy to look it up but yesterday’s NY Times had a story on all of that missing U.S. cash the Bushies had flown into Baghdad on C-17 transport planes, pallets of U.S. $100 dollar bills shrink-wrapped, and I’m talking BILLIONS of dollars worth. My Congresscritter was one of the ones who saw this stuff just lying around ready for anyone to take, on one of his trips to Baghdad. He was appalled. And then of course, billions of dollars of it disappeared. Turns out some of it was found in Lebanon. I wonder how much else ended up in the hands of folks like ISIS?
I love how Repukes always say “you can’t throw money at a problem,” when that is exactly all they know to do. I’ve just always been amazed that this hasn’t been a bigger story. I mean, Teanuts rallied against Obamacare but the fucking graft and grift that was the “rebuilding” of Iraq should have sent their tricorner hats spinning.
Corner Stone
Sounds like Ms. Roark got what she had coming. Should have known better than to talk about dudebro problems.
Corner Stone
$2B? Ha! Chump change.
Audit: U.S. lost track of $9 billion in Iraq funds
“Nearly $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for because of inefficiencies and bad management, according to a watchdog report published Sunday.”
Corner Stone
With no apparent slowing down in the second decade of the current century.
Villago Delenda Est
Gerstein needs to be vivisected on live nationwide TV, right after the deserting coward and the Dark Lord are.
boatboy_srq
As if Blackwater and Custer Battles weren’t proof that the GWoT was nothing but grift for the right people.
@Southern Beale: True that. It’s amazing how public largesse can be had for any Teahadist pet project, but the moment one suggests doing something remotely responsible with the funds, the suggestion is greeted by shrieks of “we’re broke”. Somebody with a major publisher behind him/her should point out that all the “we’re broke” shouting is directly related to all the spending elsewhere, and that the Teahad would rather ship taxpayer dollars (both in materiel and, as you pointed out, in bundles of nonsequential large bills neatly shrinkwrapped and palletted) outside the country than spend them at home.
Villago Delenda Est
@Southern Beale:
Vile shitstains are projecting.
For the Nth Millionth time.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Judging from the campaign commercials I’m seeing, it’s not over. ISIS is coming to lop your head off in your sleep! And your Senator and or Congressman did NOTHING ABOUT IT!
jl
They also peddle ignorant dangerous sloppy facts and BS ideas and fake insights. Which encourages us to do and say things that blow up in our faces.
And example from the ‘The Problem with those Muslins’ genre is ‘What Islam needs is a Reformation’.
Josh Marshall had an informative commentary on that a while ago.
You Say You Want a Reformation
Josh Marshall TPM
If we insist that the Muslim world has to follow this model, what’s happening right now actually looks fairly similar [to the Reformation].
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-say-you-want-a-reformation
Not sure I agree with everything Marshall says, but he is far closer to the mark on Islam and Reformation than the BSers in corporate media.
kindness
wash your hands vigorously and repeatedly.
Howard Beale IV
Let’s see…
LIBOR rigging? Yawn.
Fraudulent sales of toxic mortgages to Fannie and Freddie? Sniff.
Municipal debt bid-rigging? Throat-clearing.
Fraudulent foreclosures? Coughs.
Cyber attacks against J. P. Morgan? IT’S THE APOCALYPSE!!!!!
Film at 11.
srv
@Corner Stone: ISIL very fashionably chose black for their flag.
Even Archer is afraid:
No word if Snowman will make an appearance this season.
MattF
Count your fingers, toes, and pints of blood.
Villago Delenda Est
@jl: The Reformation wasn’t exactly a peaceful, civilized debate between people who were inclined to agree to disagree.
There’s a reason why Europeans are, on the whole, not all that religious. The impulse was bred out of them. There are towns in Germany that have yet to recover from the 30 Years War.
schrodinger's cat
@jl: I agree with Marshall. Also too, if Islam and all Muslims are to blame for ISIS then why can’t we blame Christianity for the ills of colonialism and both the World Wars?
MattF
@Villago Delenda Est: Also, the eastern half of Europe has yet to recover from the 20th century. And may never.
Corner Stone
@srv: “There was a Black Flag on my morning, there was a Black Flag on my day!”
MattF
@jl: My own view is that Islam’s big misfortune is the West. Not a lot they can do about that.
Bobby B.
@srv: Archer already ordered a dozen black turtlenecks with Isis writing on it because it’s super uber cool…c’mon everybody how is this turtleneck not awesome!?!?
StringOnAStick
@MattF: Perhaps we should change that to “Islam’s biggest misfortune is having something the West wants”, namely oil. Once that’s all gone, everything should be just peachy!
Baud
I think it’s time for another hearing about how the GSA spent $1 million on a conference.
Another Holocene Human
Yes. This. Don’t forget the myriad bogus “training” classes, still being sold.
At one point the DoD bought a whole lot of dousing rods. Of course they were very scientificky electramabobs with wires and chips and suchlike.
I don’t know if this link is the same scam or ANOTHER scam, it references the UK but I’m pretty sure the US had their own stock they blew millions on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
Kyle
Certain authoritarian creeps and profiteers found it very useful to stoke the country into constant fear so it could be easily manipulated and exploited, and too many gutless institutions and hacks went along with it for personal advantage or moral cowardice.
Another Holocene Human
@Baud: Spending money on developing your human capital is theft.
Which isn’t to say the GSA conference might have been a little out of line, but remember how pissed some conservatives were at the IRS spending $$$ on team-building exercises? Apparently if morale isn’t completely in the shitter then something is horribly wrong.
These jamokes would’ve condemned Jesus Christ Himself for “hundreds of meetings with tax collectors”.
Mike in NC
@Corner Stone:
Perhaps half the money went to Halliburton and the rest is sitting in a vault in the basement of the George W. Bush Library.
Another Holocene Human
@StringOnAStick: Louisiana and West Virginia (coal) also, too.
Schlemazel
So far I see no lessening in the bed-wetting fear. Sadly, Dems have either willingly or reluctantly been dragged along and appear as guilty as the goopers. It does not matter the motivation for their joining the mass hysteria, it only matters that there is no relief in sight. We can focus on ISIS and all the other bullshit terrorist threats while we blithely kill ourselves with climate change and economic destruction.
gene108
I think the lack of neighbors makes Americans collectively jittery, when people come calling. I don’t mean individuals. I mean America has no neighbors to the East or West, other than thousands of miles of open water.
To the North is a sparsely populated country, which we have had peaceful relations with for about 150 years.
To the South is a bit more densely populated country, with which we have also maintained peaceful relations with for 150 years or so.*
I do not think America can grasp what it is to live in the Middle East or Europe, where you have many neighbors to the North, South, East and West of you and sometimes they become hostile.
We’re just so isolated from real danger at home that when something looks dangerous far away we poop our pants.
We did this with The Red Scare, in the late 1940’s and through the early 1990’s, when the Eastern Bloc fell apart.
We’re doing it again after 9/11/01.
I do wonder how the Canadians keep so calm, since they have fewer neighbors than we do.
* Yeah, we fought a war with Mexico in 1848, but we also fought a war with Canada in 1812, in which we got our assess kicked. We had border issues with both countries but settled those a long time ago.
Another Holocene Human
@MattF: Depends what you mean by recover, I mean in terms of national sovereignty and self-determination things have never been better in parts of Central Europe but yeah, in light of the Holocaust, you can’t put that omelette back into the shell. (Also the Holomodor and the forced resettlements that occurred during the 20th Cent.)
Another Holocene Human
@Howard Beale IV:
History is written by the winners, my friend.
Rafer Janders
Dudebros, huh?
Another Holocene Human
@gene108:
They have to share a border with us.
Elie
Unfortunately, the fear habit is pretty easy to get and hard to get rid of…
We have had several hospitals treat several Ebola patients without incident. So far, one nurse in one hospital gets the disease and suddenly NO hospital can safely take care of them. Its ridiculous! I am ashamed of some of my fellow nurses who posted comment after comment on the NYT about how no one has shown them anything and they don’t know nothing about birthing no babies… sigh. As professionals, I expect them to stay cool — yes, press for information and procedures they need to clarify, but sheesh, we can’t come across like that and command respect and fight ignorance
MattF
@Another Holocene Human: Timothy Snyder is the great scholar of all that. There’s an area centered on Belarus and Ukraine that was run over three times during WWII. We shouldn’t wonder that the survivors and their descendants are unhappy.
Howard Beale IV
@Another Holocene Human: How convenient that you ignored my main thesis. This skirmish is ongoing with no endpoint in sight.
burnspbesq
Risen and a whole bunch of other journalists have engaged in activities that look an awful lot like violations of 18 U.S.C. 793(c), and aiding and abetting violations of 18 U.S.C. 641 and other subsections of 793 (conspiracy and lying to the FBI may also be in play in some cases). Betting that you won’t be indicted because DOJ will shy away from a highly public fight over a difficult con law issue isn’t exactly risk-averse behavior. They knew or should have known the risk they were taking. If you get indicted, move to dismiss on First Amendment grounds, and take that fight all the way to the Supremes. But don’t whinge about it.
Betty Cracker
@Elie: There’s no point in shitting our collective pants, but I don’t blame rank-and-file nurses for worrying about Ebola. It’s not like tens of thousands of Ebola patients have been treated in the US and only one care team member contracted the disease. As far as we know, only one person has entered the US healthcare system with Ebola who wasn’t flown to a specialized facility precisely for treatment of that disease, and one of his nurses contracted it. You don’t have to be a hysterical idiot to be concerned about the risk.
Another Holocene Human
@Elie:
These are probably the same nurses who threaten to walk off the job every year during flu vaccination time. One wonders how they got through nursing college and passed their boards while being so profoundly ignorant of basic biology.
Another Holocene Human
@MattF: That shit is by no means over, the fact that some Ukrainian nationalists attempted to form an alliance of convenience with Nazis because they were more afraid of Stalin (due to recent history) is being used as a cudgel to this day to incite actual violence between different segments of Ukrainian society.
Tom
The quality and frequency of your contributions, Anne Laurie, are nothing short of amazing. Brava.
Another Holocene Human
@Howard Beale IV: I didn’t ignore your thesis. I’m stating that the people in power who are raping our economy are still in power and two popular elections have utterly failed to dislodge them.
Power is power, doesn’t make what they do any less wrong, just we shouldn’t be surprised when the news is all about EBOLAGHAZI!!!! and nothing is being done about these legal frauds and outrages.
Jim C
Scared the hell out of ourselves?
Oh, no: We scared the hell into ourselves.
“[Bob Rumson] is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.” – President Andrew Shepherd, The American President
Russ
This,
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-usafs-much-maligned-a-10-warthogs-are-deploying-to-1640395280
tells me that somebody knows what they are doing and the deployment of these might go against some Pentagon lifers opinions.
Another Holocene Human
Howard,
We live in an evil world. There’s a kid who got sent to prison for guessing Sarah Palin’s email password and sharing the contents of her gmail. Meanwhile there are a bunch of creeps who hacked and doxxed Zoe Quinn and other targets of reactionary white male hetero gamers’ ire and total crickets from law enforcement.
Hack a bank, go to prison. Hack a private citizen, get protected by LEOs that don’t care. They’ll tell the victim they can’t file a police report in their home jurisdiction, that FBI doesn’t investigate such cases, that the actions of the hacker weren’t actually illegal, etcet, & so forth & so on.
scav
@Elie: I wondered if at least some of it is professionally motivated buck-passing and tactical re-phrasing. It’s not the nurses (I’m including the Spanish ones) that made mistakes, it’s that they weren’t trained. That’s nicely abstract, diffuse and non-personal as a reason (with a grain of reason, there’s likely been skimping on refresher-training as in everything with permanent budgetary and personnel cutbacks), although it really reduces to essentially the same thing practically speaking to effect a correction. Top-down, bottom-up, internally- or externally- motivated, take this thing seriously and think about, learn about and execute what needs to be done. It’s far from impossible.
Mandalay
@gene108:
Yep. Iran has five near neighbors with nuclear weapons: Israel, Russia, China, Pakistan and India. And all five of them display the traits of a psychofuck from time to time. Those running Iran would be dangerously incompetent to choose not to acquire nuclear weapons.
And note carefully which countries whine and scream loudest about countries acquiring nuclear weapons: those who already have them.
Villago Delenda Est
@Russ: Air Force generals are for the most part utter idiots. They know nothing of actual on the ground military operations, and it badly shows. One of their chief cheerleaders is failed Naval aviator John McCain….’nuff said!
Villago Delenda Est
@Mandalay:
Well, who likes to have to wait to get a cocktail weenie at the club? With just the right people, less crowding!
Cervantes
@Jim C: Fiction? Truth may be just as good. After WWII Arthur Vandenberg and a number of other isolationists in the Senate refused to go along with Truman’s Marshall Plan (or was that Marshall’s Truman Plan?) — until Dean Acheson and other Wise Men were called in to animate the specter of communist governments in Greece and all over Western Europe — at which point Vandenberg told Truman that to get what he was asking, he would have to “make a personal appearance before Congress and scare hell out of the country” — which, with a vengeance, Truman and his aides did, and to this day we have still not recovered.
Rafer Janders
@Mandalay:
Six neighbors, actually: the nuclear-armed US Navy patrols the Persian Gulf, and the US military also occupies Iran’s northeast neighbor Afghanistan and until recently occupied Iran’s western neighbor Iraq.
Mandalay
@Rafer Janders: Nope, none of that makes the United States a neighbor of Iran.
Roger Moore
@Russ:
The Air Farce doesn’t get Donald Rumsfeld’s comment that you fight a war with the military you have, not the one you wish you had. They seem dead set on fighting with the planes they wish they had and ignoring the ones they have but don’t like.
MomSense
@Mike in NC:
Think Dan Senor walked away with some? I don’t know but I would at least have liked one journalist to ask him.
Mike J
@Russ: Everything in that article about how great A-10s are (and they are) can also be applied to what makes drones so valuable.
Elie
@Another Holocene Human:
Again, I am not trying to negate their concerns — just have them be leaders for cooling down the hysterics. We have idiots saying that only “special”hospitals should treat Ebola patients but realistically, every hospital should have the capability of identifying and making sure appropriate quarantine and early treatment like fluids is done. Sheesh.Tb is much more contagious and airborne and you don’t see people falling out on the floor. These days its pretty difficult to treat due to resistance. Why can’t we be adults? Why is fear and outrae our most dominant emotion?
Elie
@Betty Cracker:
Of course you don’t — I guess I just want the tone to be different, Betty. Who needs to feed the hysteria machine? Don’t we have enough of that? Sure, we have been warned and could have more infections from Mr.Duncan. We could also only have one, a direct result of inadvertant self contamination…. something I or any nurse or other care giver could do. You learn from it if everyone stays cools and we have the opportunity to collect facts and make decisions and adjustment to procedures based on those facts. Instead I hear the shoe pounding on the desk about how the CDC lied or doesnt know stuff… instead that this is real life and in real life s–t happens and you have to adjust with the best information and highest order of professionalism. May I also take the opportunity to point to Medicins sans frontieres who have been in the “hot zone” for Ebola for months in many times primitive conditions. They just now had their first doctor infected. That’s a lot of PPE changes that they successfully negotiated.
Folks have every right to be concerned but no one should be hysterical — especially any professional health care worker.
schrodinger's cat
@Rafer Janders: India and Iran do not share a common border, Pakistan is between India and Iran.
scav
@schrodinger’s cat: As far as the neighbors definition goes, I’m not sure if a strict common-border limitation is most relevant — “within range” works as “neighborhood of concern” possibly. Strict neighbors is more plausible for ground invasion (but still see Germany wwii), less so for missile strikes. And it’s not as though we only count our next door neighbors as being part of the neighborhood in any case.
karen
When I was living in Takoma Park, MD, my landlord was Susan Lindauer. She was serving her time while she was my landlord. Her experience taught me that the government will turn on you once you’re no longer useful to them. Any government and any politician whether they’re GOP, Dems or Greens or anyone.
schrodinger's cat
@scav: AFAIK, Iran and India have always been allies, since mostly Sunni Pakistan has been a thorn in both their sides.
scav
@schrodinger’s cat: Could entirely be, that’s entirely outside anything I’ve ever paid attention to. My attention was just caught by the variable and context-sensitive definition of neighbors. Also, I suppose a case could be made for even the capabilities of allies influencing desires for national capabilities, in case they cease to be friendly or in case they start getting bossy and demanding — but again there, I’ve a clue about the specifics of the local situation and actors.
gratuitous
I got stuck on the introductory sentence: If a pacifist had reviewed James Risen’s book, would the review be invalidated because the reviewer is a pacifist? Or is criticism of the MIC and the intelligence apparatus reserved only to members of the High Church of Redemptive Violence?
Mnemosyne
@gratuitous:
I think it’s, Even someone deep inside the military-industrial complex can see how fucked up it is.
Cervantes
@gratuitous: What difference did you intend between the two alternatives?
@schrodinger’s cat:
“Always” here is a relative term, so to speak. Pahlavi Iran and post-British India were, indeed, allies, from the ’50s through the ’70s. Plus the Shah and particularly his Empress Farah were stars in Indian popular media in the ’60s, much as JFK and Jackie were around the world.
FrY10cK
@Southern Beale: Littlegreenfootballs, a website I’ve never had an affinity for, was I think named for the little bundles of cash thrown around after the C-130 landed.
I too am mystified about the lack of information about this loss of, what’s the rumor? How many billions?
Oh wait. I forgot. Investigative journalism went out of style in 1987 when the Reagan admin wrote the Fairness Doctrine out of FCC regs.