He didn’t become radical, the country did
by digby
If you read nothing else this evening, read this fascinating interview with James Risen at The Intercept. Those of you who’ve been reading blogs for a while will understand what I mean when I say he’s very “shrill.” (For those of you who haven’t been reading blogs for years, that’s a good thing.)
He says many interesting things in the course of the interview, and it will be worth going back to next week to discuss some of them in greater depth. But one observation amazed me. He’s been quoted before saying that the Obama administration normalized the War on Terror with all that that implies. With the exception of John Yoo’s version of legal torture, the radical GWOT tactics were continued.
Risen was reporting on this stuff for the NY Times right after 9/11 and this is what he remembers:
I think my real change came after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. I was covering the CIA as a beat then. And to me, it was fascinating talking to CIA people right after the invasion of Iraq and right before the invasion of Iraq, because it was kind of like privately talking to a bunch of Howard Deans. They were all radicalized against what Bush was doing.
To me it was wild to hear all of these people inside the intelligence community, especially in 2003, 2004, who were just going nuts. They couldn’t believe the radical change the United States was going through, and that nobody was opposed to it. And that led me to write my last book, State of War, because I was hearing things from within the intelligence community and the U.S. government that you weren’t hearing publicly from anybody. So that really led me to realize—and to step back and look at—the radical departure of U.S. policy that has happened since 9/11 and since the invasion of Iraq.
To me, it’s not like I’ve been radicalized, I feel like I stayed in the same place and the country changed. The country became more radicalized in a different direction.
I feel the same way. There are a lot of reasons for that, I think, not the least of which is that having two presidents of different parties operate under the same logic makes a whole lot of people assume it must be the right logic. When no house cleaning was done after a Democrat took charge the bipartisan National Security consensus was sealed once again.
Anyway, read the whole interview if you have time and get Risen’s book. One of the main themes is how the economic incentives of the National Security State warp our policies. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I’ve been writing about the problem of “If you build it, they will use it” for a very long time. We just kept building it.
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