by digby
Here’s a must read interview with James Risen from Elias Isquith at Salon:
James Risen, the New York Times reporter responsible in part for the 2005 Times bombshell on the Bush administration’s use of warrantless surveillance — which is widely seen as one of the seminal pieces of journalism of its era — has plenty of experience when it comes to battling the federal government. Not only in his celebrated investigative reports but, perhaps more prominently, in the courts, where for years he’s held his ground in refusing government demands that he reveal a confidential source.
For Risen, in other words, fighting the post-9/11 national security state is a full-time job, albeit one for which he never truly applied. But while he may be at a profound disadvantage when it comes to defending himself (and, some would say, his profession) in our federal courts, “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” his new exposé of the malfeasance and waste behind the war on terror, offers ample evidence that he’s still a Pulitzer Prize winner when it comes to combat on the page…
So here we are, more than a decade into the war on terror, and I’d guess that a lot of people think that at this point they know everything they need to know about how our government conducts counterterrorism and the growth of the national security state. But considering you wrote this book — which features a lot of new information — I’m guessing you’d disagree.
Yes. I felt like we had this whole period, 13 years now, where we essentially “took the gloves off,” in Dick Cheney’s famous words, in order to fight a global war on terror. And what Cheney meant by that was deregulating national security, and what that meant was eliminating or reducing or relaxing the rules that had been put in place for 30 years, from the post-Watergate era, which were
At the same time, we were pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the war on terror, and what, to me, had not been getting much attention is how the combination of deregulating national security while pouring massive amounts of money into a new national security state was having enormous unintended consequences and leading to bizarre operations and a runaway new national security state. And I felt like that was not being reflected in a lot of the things people were writing about.
It just seemed to me the war on terror was becoming increasingly bizarre, and I didn’t feel like that was being captured in the press.
I can’t wait to read his book because this subject is what animates me the most as I think about the War on Terror and America’s role in it — this idea of the expansions of the Deep State, without restraint, oversight or accountability. It’s not just about money, it’s about this organism (for lack of a better word) just operating on its own, with its own logic at the hands of individuals who might each have perfectly good motives but which ends up creating a monster nonetheless.
The problem is the empire and until we grapple with that we’ll just be trying to contain this around the edges. It’s important to try to contain it, of course. Every effort from the press or from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden helps curb its power. But we won’t solve this without a thorough reassessment of our place in the world. And I have no idea how that’s going to happen.
Anyway, it’s good to see that Risen is talking about this. It’s not new but the post 9/11 ramp up after a period of slight calm after our long Cold War was over needs to be discussed.
As I said, it’s not new…