PAY ANY PRICE
Greed, Power, and Endless War
James Risen
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 285 pages; $28
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.
Those willing to overlook his occasionally lumpy prose will be rewarded with a memorable chronicle of the long-range consequences of the panicky reaction of top American officials to the September 11 attacks, from lost billions in taxpayer dollars to the lost life of a former torturer and the smashed dreams of an intelligence whistle-blower.
We are plunged into an unsettled noirish world in which scam artists and thieves swarm government agencies, peddling phoney 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".
In this world, it is often unclear who is the handler and who is the stooge. Dennis Montgomery was just another overweight gambler in the casinos of Reno, Nevada, until he claimed to have developed a technology that could decode secret messages embedded in the videotapes of Osama bin Laden that were broadcast on the Al Jazeera news network. On the basis of that claim, he won millions of dollars in government contracts. Mr Risen says that around Christmas of 2003, Mr Montgomery influenced the Bush administration to seriously consider shooting down civilian airliners. After French government investigators concluded that Mr Montgomery's operation was a hoax, Mr Risen reports, the C I A quietly dropped him. Mr Montgomery then moved on to the United States Special Operations Command, which paid his company $9.6 million for a facial recognition technology that supposedly could identify terrorists observed by cameras attached to drones. Mr Montgomery's company eventually collapsed in a welter of debts and legal claims.
Mr Risen also delves into the human wreckage left behind by the war on terror, portraying the hellish post-Army life of Damien M Corsetti, a soldier who, by Mr Risen's account, engaged in torture at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. He illustrates what the United States Army should have known before going into Iraq, that torture has two victims: the one who suffers it and the one who inflicts it. Mr Corsetti is shown living in Savannah, Georgia, having kicked an addiction to heroin, but living in a cloud of marijuana smoke with post-traumatic stress disorder. "He is one of the first veterans known to have been given full disability based on PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] suffered while conducting harsh interrogations in the war on terror," Mr Risen writes.
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-September 11 era, in which accountability and transparency in government, basic elements of a functioning democracy, were badly eroded. When she realised 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 realised that all these people had known about the N S A programme, 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.
To follow Mr Risen on this journey, the reader must hack through some undergrowth. For example, is it really necessary to write twice that "crazy became the new normal in the war on terror"?
Mr Risen also sometimes overreaches. He states flatly, "Every general in the military hoped to cash out by going to work for a major defense contractor as soon as he or she retired from active duty." This is true of too many retired generals and admirals, but hardly all. Large numbers go into non-profit work or academia. For example, off the top of my head, I know of a Marine general who joined a drug addiction rehabilitation charity and an Army lieutenant general who just finished a doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins University on "just war" theory in ancient Greek philosophy.
Mr Risen also discloses the ethically questionable move of misrepresenting himself in an effort to interview two people involved in a front company established for the Special Operations Command. "I did not identify myself as a journalist or author; instead, I simply told them I was an investor interested in what they were doing." This was a firing offence at the last newspaper where I worked. (I am assured by an editor at The Times that this did not occur in the course of reporting for the newspaper.)
Still, his core message resonates. "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.
Greed, Power, and Endless War
James Risen
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 285 pages; $28
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.
Those willing to overlook his occasionally lumpy prose will be rewarded with a memorable chronicle of the long-range consequences of the panicky reaction of top American officials to the September 11 attacks, from lost billions in taxpayer dollars to the lost life of a former torturer and the smashed dreams of an intelligence whistle-blower.
We are plunged into an unsettled noirish world in which scam artists and thieves swarm government agencies, peddling phoney 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".
In this world, it is often unclear who is the handler and who is the stooge. Dennis Montgomery was just another overweight gambler in the casinos of Reno, Nevada, until he claimed to have developed a technology that could decode secret messages embedded in the videotapes of Osama bin Laden that were broadcast on the Al Jazeera news network. On the basis of that claim, he won millions of dollars in government contracts. Mr Risen says that around Christmas of 2003, Mr Montgomery influenced the Bush administration to seriously consider shooting down civilian airliners. After French government investigators concluded that Mr Montgomery's operation was a hoax, Mr Risen reports, the C I A quietly dropped him. Mr Montgomery then moved on to the United States Special Operations Command, which paid his company $9.6 million for a facial recognition technology that supposedly could identify terrorists observed by cameras attached to drones. Mr Montgomery's company eventually collapsed in a welter of debts and legal claims.
Mr Risen also delves into the human wreckage left behind by the war on terror, portraying the hellish post-Army life of Damien M Corsetti, a soldier who, by Mr Risen's account, engaged in torture at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. He illustrates what the United States Army should have known before going into Iraq, that torture has two victims: the one who suffers it and the one who inflicts it. Mr Corsetti is shown living in Savannah, Georgia, having kicked an addiction to heroin, but living in a cloud of marijuana smoke with post-traumatic stress disorder. "He is one of the first veterans known to have been given full disability based on PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] suffered while conducting harsh interrogations in the war on terror," Mr Risen writes.
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-September 11 era, in which accountability and transparency in government, basic elements of a functioning democracy, were badly eroded. When she realised 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 realised that all these people had known about the N S A programme, 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.
To follow Mr Risen on this journey, the reader must hack through some undergrowth. For example, is it really necessary to write twice that "crazy became the new normal in the war on terror"?
Mr Risen also sometimes overreaches. He states flatly, "Every general in the military hoped to cash out by going to work for a major defense contractor as soon as he or she retired from active duty." This is true of too many retired generals and admirals, but hardly all. Large numbers go into non-profit work or academia. For example, off the top of my head, I know of a Marine general who joined a drug addiction rehabilitation charity and an Army lieutenant general who just finished a doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins University on "just war" theory in ancient Greek philosophy.
Mr Risen also discloses the ethically questionable move of misrepresenting himself in an effort to interview two people involved in a front company established for the Special Operations Command. "I did not identify myself as a journalist or author; instead, I simply told them I was an investor interested in what they were doing." This was a firing offence at the last newspaper where I worked. (I am assured by an editor at The Times that this did not occur in the course of reporting for the newspaper.)
Still, his core message resonates. "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.
©The New York Times News Service 2014