James Risen, the New York Times reporter who has become emblematic of the Obama administration’s crackdown on leakers and the journalists who report their whistle-blowing stories, has won his long battle to protect his sources. The Justice Department has accepted his refusal to testify against a former CIA agent accused of leaking, and won’t call on Risen at the trial.
Risen’s fight for journalistic principle has gone on for seven years, and its ending sets no precedent and settles nothing. But Risen has published a new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War, that amounts to a defiant flag nailed to the mast to signal the threat posed to America by the government’s war on terror.
The title is an ironic play on John F. Kennedy’s famous promise that America would “pay any price, bear any burden” to preserve liberty. Risen’s book makes a powerful case that the ultimate price of the war on terror threatens to be liberty itself.
On a more prosaic level, the reckoning begins in dollars – more than $4 trillion, Risen says, in tax dollars and rising national debt, from the trauma of Sept. 11, 2001, through 2012. That cost keeps mounting. While it was President George W. Bush who began the war on terror, Barack Obama has pursued it with equal determination. “Obama’s great achievement – or great sin,” Risen writes, “was to make the national security state permanent.”
In all, Risen says, Washington sent nearly $20 billion in cash and electronic deposits to Baghdad, and has no accounting for the amazing sum of $11.7 billion. Not all of that money was stolen, but a great deal of it was. Risen’s sources told him of a warehouse in Lebanon that is still stuffed with nearly $2 billion in $100 bills and gold, siphoned off by powerful Iraqis in what became the Baghdad kleptocracy. Nobody in the U.S. government shows any interest in retrieving it, Risen says; why relive old embarrassments?
But planeloads of cash were just for starters. “The hottest way to make money was to get inside Washington’s national security apparatus,” Risen writes, to tap into the billions being handed out for weapons, intelligence services and the everyday costs of fighting a war. He tells a ludicrous story of con men persuading the CIA that their nonexistent secret technology could perform such wonders as finding Al Qaeda’s coded instructions in Al Jazeera broadcasts. But the war’s biggest beneficiary was Houston-based KBR, which held the contract to feed and supply U.S. troops, build their bases and perform all the rear-echelon tasks formerly done by the military services themselves.
The Financial Times has estimated that the KBR contract produced revenues of $39.5 billion. The company was literally too big and influential to be fired, even when it performed so shoddily that a soldier was electrocuted taking a shower in barracks wired by incompetent subcontractors. A Pentagon auditor said KBR had been linked to the “vast majority” of war-zone fraud cases referred to investigators, Risen says, but its political clout gave it immunity. When the Defense Department’s supervisor of the giant contract tried to crack down, demanding detailed accounting for the bills KBR was submitting, he was replaced and forced to retire.
However vast, these costs of the war are measured only in money – that and the psychic and civic drain of cynicism and corruption. Risen goes on to document the war’s more serious and lasting price.
He retells the all-too-familiar story of the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the way a program to teach soldiers how to endure torture was perverted to inflict torture on America’s prisoners. The story of one of the torturers, now a tormented wreck who relies on marijuana to keep his demons at bay, illustrates how “torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.” But not all the perpetrators suffered. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the psychologists who sold their torture tactics to the CIA, walked away with millions in classified contracts. And the American Psychological Association, salivating to the scent of government money, amended its code of ethics to protect its members who joined in the torture program.
Risen also deplores the way the war has eroded Americans’ freedom in the name of security – not just hassling travelers at airports, but encroaching on everyday life to “transform the United States from an open society to a walled fortress.” In downtown Manhattan, 35 percent of the civic center, around the federal buildings and courthouses, is now a security zone banned to ordinary citizens, and 23 acres of Los Angeles have been similarly closed off. In Bethesda, Maryland, the formerly open campus of the National Institutes of Health has been completely walled in behind security gates and ten-foot fences. The neighbors can no longer stroll in its parks and use its facilities for picnics, outdoor film festivals, amateur plays and concerts.
The most Orwellian feature so far of the war on terror is the warrantless wiretapping and domestic spying of the National Security Agency, begun soon after the 9/11 attacks but secret until Risen and Eric Lichtblau exposed them in The Times in December, 2005. In the wake of that story, which Risen amplified in his 2006 book State of War, the government began a leak investigation that zeroed in on Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent who had been Risen’s source for an earlier exposè. In Sterling’s trial, prosecutors said they couldn’t prove his guilt unless Risen testified that Sterling was his source for the book’s story about the CIA’s plot to plant nuclear disinformation in Iran. Just before the trial on Jan. 12, Risen was told he wouldn’t be called to the stand.
Attorney General Eric Holder has said reporters should not be jailed for doing their jobs, and he approved a compromise under which Risen would not be asked directly whether Sterling was his source. At this week’s federal court hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, prosecutors held to that precarious bargain, but gave no sign whether Risen would be called to testify at the trial.
Risen’s book isn’t perfect. He has the investigative reporter’s penchant for emptying his notebook in long, intricate accounts of inconclusive plots; only aficionados should plod through the 50-page chapter titled Rosetta. Nor is his accounting of the war’s damage complete: For one example, he doesn’t mention prisoners held for a decade without trial or even formal charges. And Risen touches only fleetingly on a development that may prove at least as sinister as the NSA’s excesses, the spreading use of secret laws and court decrees to justify government intrusions. He tells of former Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden’s frustration in warning that the administration had secretly reinterpreted the USA Patriot Act of 2001 to extend its surveillance powers. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden couldn’t spell out chapter and verse – and it wasn’t until the NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew his piercing whistle that the NSA’s use of the secret law was exposed.
Risen maintains that the war on terror has actually been won and should be declared over. Even if outrages like this week’s massacre of journalists in Paris weren’t going on, that isn’t likely to happen. And in any case, as Risen notes, the war on terror is already being supplanted by a new war against cyberattacks, which is generating its own gusher of federal spending and its own “cyber-industrial complex” to keep the gusher flowing. The NSA has grabbed control of cybersecurity and threatens, Risen says, to “have access to all of the digital data of all Americans.”
In May of 2013, President Obama said that “America is at a crossroads” and that it was time to rethink the war on terror. “We must be mindful,” he said, “of James Madison’s warning that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” But this war has no end, and powerful forces line up to keep it going. Will we pay any price for liberty if the price is our liberty?