The Scoop from 'State of War'

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted January 5, 2006.

I don't want to review New York Times reporter James Risen's book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, as much as share the raw, new powerful allegations it contains.

But there are two things about Risen's work that bear mentioning up front. First, it reads like one long reported news article, and not like a hot current affairs book loaded with flair and color. So it's boring in long stretches (yet unlike Kitty Kelly's book, The Family, which was supposed to stop George Bush in his tracks in the 2004 election, it is devastating).

The second, and more grave point is that James Risen is a complete sucker for Bush's tonic for the terrorist threat against America and the prevailing White House rationale for the invasion of Iraq: that we must spread the wings of democracy across the Middle East.

How a reporter can get so close to the White House Big Dogs and reveal such devastating evidence about their cynical geopolitical schemes while at the same time swallow the big narrative that underwrites them all is frankly quite stunning.

Here's Risen in the prologue: "President Bush certainly deserves credit for making the spread of democracy a centerpiece of his agenda. Eventually, the president's ambitious dream may turn out to be right -- perhaps the war in Iraq will turn out to have been the event that broke the decades-long political stagnation in the Arab world. Perhaps that, in turn, will lead to progress in Arab-Israeli relations and a broader sense of hopefulness that will compete with extremism and terror."

Perhaps Risen was laughing out loud when he typed this, but my guess is that, like a lot of national affairs reporters, he's desperately looking for some reason to believe in what he spends his life writing about.

Or it could be that the explanation is closer to how author John Dolan explained the mind of another establishment journalist, the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum: that her consciousness "contains at least one huge, highly adaptive amnesiac blob." It could be that Risen has delusions that permit him to both believe in Nixon-rate lies that justify horrific realities, and unload Watergate-scale facts that eventually destroy the actors who tell those lies.

But enough of this. If you want to read a nuanced exploration of Risen's writing, go read Jack Shafer's critical inquiry at Slate into book standards vs. newspaper standards and what that means for the veracity of Risen's reporting. From here on out, however, it's just the facts, ma'am -- at least the ones that struck me.

**

Prologue and Chapter 1: "Who Authorized Putting Him on Pain Medication?"

Risen starts out with an account of George Bush hanging up on his father, the former president, in a phone conversation in 2003. Bush I spoke to the "same concerns that were being voiced at the time by his son's public critics." What were his concerns? "George Herbert Walker Bush was disturbed that his son was allowing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a cadre of neoconservative ideologues to exert broad influence over foreign policy," ignoring other voices on his team like Colin Powell. "Later, the president called his father back and apologized for hanging up on him, and no permanent rift developed, according to sources familiar with the incident."

**

"There never was a formal meeting of all the president's senior advisors to debate and decide whether to invade Iraq, according to a senior administration source. And the most fateful decision of the post invasion period -- the move by proconsul L. Paul Bremer to disband the Iraqi army -- may have been made without President Bush's advance knowledge, according to a senior White House source." Risen writes that the decision was "almost certainly coordinated with Rumsfeld," and contradicted recommendations by an interagency group chaired by the National Security Council.

**

Risen makes much of an anecdote he heard from one of his trusty White House sources about a conversation in 2002 between then-CIA director George Tenet and George Bush after the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, a known and high-ranking al Qaeda operative. Tenet was briefing Bush on the matter, explaining that not much intelligence had been pulled from Zubaydah in the early stages because he had been put on pain medication to deal with the injuries he sustained during capture. Bush asked Tenet: "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?" Risen speculates whether Bush was "implicitly encouraging" Tenet to order the harsh treatment of a prisoner "without the paper trail that would have come from a written presidential authorization." Risen writes, "If so, this episode offers the most direct link yet between Bush and the harsh treatment of prisoners by both the CIA and the U.S. military."

Risen does say that sources close to Tenet have challenged this account, but spends pages after writing about the significance of Zubaydah's interrogation as "the critical precedent for the future handling of prisoners both in the global war on terror and in the war in Iraq." Risen writes, "The harsh interrogation methods the CIA used on Zubaydah prompted the first wide-ranging and legal policy review establishing the procedures to be followed in the detention of future detainees. 'Abu Zubaydah's capture triggered everything,' explained a CIA source." Risen describes a turf war process that eventually had the CIA in charge of all the high-profile al Qaeda prisoners.

Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.

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