State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration
by James Risen
A Second Draft of History
A review by Anna Godbersen
In December of last year, James Risen was one of two New York Times reporters to break the story of the National Security Agency's vast, unprecedented, and, depending on your political point of view, illegal domestic spying program. His new book State of War fills in the back story and future prospects of the Bush administration's fraught (to understate the situation) relationship with intelligence. Risen places the NSA's warrant-less espionage (the agency is now "eavesdropping on as many as five hundred people in the United States at any given time," he writes) within the larger story of a CIA in decline. He draws a picture of George Tenet, former Director of the CIA, as a politic man too concerned with being liked; Tenet ultimately cedes independence and power to the cagey, dogged and bullying Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The result is a dysfunctional culture with a president isolated in a "sphere of deniability," an administration dominated by neo-cons obsessed with Iraq and WMD, but averse to "nation building," and a cowed CIA that suppressed all dissenting information. Risen connects this power imbalance to the greatest foreign policy failures of recent history: Colin Powell's disastrous pre-war UN speech, an out of control post-invasion Iraq, and the development of a narco-state in Afghanistan.
State of War covers history in the making, and so it is by necessity incomplete while many of the anecdotes cover familiar terrain. (For instance, the missed opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11.) But this is a scary kind of familiar, as the breakdowns described have a frightening way of repeating themselves. James Risen's book is a hugely important account of the systemic intelligence failures, secret machinations and abuses of power of the presidency to date.
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