James Risen's book! You won't believe this one! Holy crap!

in_cog_ni_to

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Fri Jan-13-06 09:18 PM
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James Risen's book! You won't believe this one! Holy crap!

We should make this a BESTSELLER! OMG...this is explosive! Have you read James Risens' book yet??? See below what we gave to IRAN!.....

The yes man and the thug
Posted: 01/13

<snip>
Risen's bombshell disclosures have to do with that agency, including new details on the CIA's interrogation practices and its stable of secret prisons. In addition, we learn that in the months before the United States invaded Iraq, the CIA obtained and then ignored specific intelligence pointing to the absence of weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein, and that, as the famous Downing Street memo noted, the CIA was essentially fixing data around what it knew to be an inevitable war. In what may be the book's most sensational claim, Risen writes that as part of a bizarre, almost unbelievably ill-conceived attempt to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, the agency recently provided the Iranian government with highly sensitive technical designs for making part of a nuclear bomb -- and then lost track of what the Iranians did with the blueprints.

The trouble is, for all the news in "State of War," you can't help feeling there's an even bigger story in what's not here. Risen's astounding findings are, for the most part, just skeletons of disaster and doom; in many cases, limitations inherent to national security journalism -- spymasters like to keep mum -- kept him from learning many of the details surrounding the programs he uncovers, and his account is often incomplete. He reports that in early 2005, members of a Defense Department intelligence unit "working in Latin America killed a man outside a bar," but he can tell us nothing more about that incident. He suggests that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the central planner of the 9/11 attacks who's now in U.S. custody, was treated so harshly by his CIA interrogators that he initially gave them false information just to stop the torture; more recently, he has disavowed his earlier testimony. But Risen, a careful journalist who always comes clean about his ignorance, makes clear he doesn't know what Mohammed is now recanting, how important his reversals may be in the war on terrorism, and whether the incident actually proves that torture yields bad information from detainees. Thus, the book reads more like a collection of disparate anecdotes about national security difficulties -- almost all from anonymous sources, and sometimes reported with little context -- than a coherent story of what's wrong with the American spy business. At times, it feels like all tip and no iceberg.

To the extent that Risen does put forward a theory for why U.S. intelligence has failed so frequently and so spectacularly under George W. Bush, the story focuses on two key players. The first is George Tenet, the former CIA director, whom Risen paints as a feckless yes man, a pusillanimous glad-hander who ruined the agency's credibility and integrity because he could never stand up to others in the administration. "George Tenet liked to talk about how he was a tough Greek from Queens, but in reality, he was a pussy," one former CIA insider tells Risen. "He just wanted people to like him."

Then there's Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the yin to Tenet's yang. Rumsfeld is a renegade who steps over just about everyone in the administration, including Tenet, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and even Bush himself, to get his way. Aided by Vice President Dick Cheney and influenced by Defense Department neoconservatives, Rumsfeld manages to wrest control of every aspect of American international affairs. "To others in the administration, mystified by the process -- or lack of a process -- it eventually became clear that Cheney and Rumsfeld had a backchannel where the real decision making was taking place," Risen writes. "The result was that the Bush administration was the first presidency in modern history in which the Pentagon served as the overwhelming center of gravity for U.S. foreign policy."<snip>

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