(Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government...Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.). (Trong phán quyết vụ xử tờ báo NY Times đăng tải Hồ Sơ Ngũ Giác Đài từ nguồn Daniel Ellsberg năm 1971- do chánh án Hugo Lafayette Black (27-3 1886 –25-9-1971) (New York Times Company v. United States, 1971).
Đó là lời phán quyết của chánh án Hugo Lafayette Black trong vụ án do chính phủ Richard Nixon của Mỹ nỗ lực truy tố tờ báo New York Times vì đã dám đăng tải "tài liệu mật an ninh quốc gia" Hồ Sơ Ngũ Giác Đài do công dân tố cáo Daniel Ellsberg cung cấp. Phán quyết này khẳng định tu chính hiến pháp thứ nhất vể dân quyền:
"Quốc Hội KHÔNG ĐƯỢC LÀM LUẬT về việc thiết lập tôn giáo, hay ngăn cấm việc thực hành tôn giáo, hoặc ngăn chặn tự do ngôn luận, hay tự do báo chí, hoặc quyền tụ tập ôn hoà của người dân, và quyền kiến nghị đến Chính phủ đòi hỏi chỉnh lý những sai trái (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances)Cũng cần phải nhớ rõ rằng, bản Hiến Pháp nước Mỹ khởi đầu KHÔNG CÓ DÂN QUYỀN mà chỉ là qui định những cấu trúc hình thành chính phủ và quyền hạn các ngành của định chế nhà nước cho NHU CẦU ĐỘC LẬP QUYỀN CHÍNH lúc đó sau khi tách khỏi Vương quyền nước Anh mà thôi.
Bản Hiến Pháp nước Mỹ khởi sự hình thành vào ngày 17 tháng 9, 1787 nhưng không được thông qua và ban hành vì lúc đó phe bảo vệ quyền chính và nhóm xiển dương dân quyền tiếp tục tranh luận về vấn đề KHẲNG ĐỊNH RÕ RÀNG DÂN QUYỀN TRONG HIẾN PHÁP. Sau khi phe "bảo thủ quyền lực" nhượng bộ, bị buộc phải chấp nhận KHẲNG ĐỊNH DÂN QUYỀN vào bản Hiến pháp. Do đó bản Hiến pháp chỉ thật sự có giá trị DÂN QUYỀN, rồi được THÔNG QUA và HIỆU LỰC vào tháng 12- 1791, sau khi nó bị BUỘC PHẢI THÊM VÀO 10 TU CHÍNH đầu tiên do khối dân quyền của Jefferson chủ động. Người bị buộc phải thêm 10 tu chính này lại chính là người soạn thảo ra nó! James Madison, người khởi đầu theo chủ trương chỉ cần qui định thẩm quyền chính phủ liên bang- đặt trọng tâm vào chính phủ là đủ, không cần khẳng định dân quyền- 10 tu chính này (bill of Rights) đã dựa theo bản tuyên bố dân quyền của bang Viginia năm 1776 (Virginia’s Declaration of Rights) do Jefferson và George Mason đại diên của bang Virginia chủ xướng. Văn bản Dân Quyền của bang Virginia này cũng là nguồn gợi ý cho bản tuyên ngôn Dân Quyền của Pháp trong cuộc cách mạng 1789.
Chính Thomas Jefferson đã khẳng định rằng : "Tu chính Hiến Pháp về Dân Quyền là cái mà quần chúng được quyền chống lại bất kỳ chính phủ nào, và là điều mà không một chính phủ đúng đắn nào được chối bỏ hay chủ trương xuyên tạc nó (A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.) Thomas Jefferson
Nói một cách khác, cái gọi là bản Hiến pháp nước Mỹ sẽ chẳng còn giá trị gì lớn lao trong tính cách "mẫu mực" mà nhiều quốc gia tiến bộ đã noi theo, nếu không có 10 tu chính dân quyền này. Đó là lý do khi chúng ta nghe bất cứ công dân Mỹ nào, nhà tranh đấu nào, khi kêu gọi bảo vệ Hiến Pháp đều chỉ nhắc đến Tu Chính Dân Quyền (Bill of Rights) này mà thôi!
Và đây cũng chính là lý do các quan chức lớn nhỏ của hệ thống chính phủ Mỹ khi nhậm chức hay trách vụ đều phải tuyên thệ TRUNG THÀNH, không phải với TỔ QUỐC, QUỐC GIA, mà là với BẢN HIẾN PHÁP:
"Tôi long trọng tuyên thệ rằng Tôi sẽ tận tậm thi hành chức vụ... và sẽ tận lực bảo quản, bảo vệ, và chiến đấu bênh vực bản Hiến Pháp nước Mỹ chống lại tất cả kẻ thù trong và giặc ngoài" (I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of ..... and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. against all enemies, foreign and domestic; The Oath - EssentialLiberty.US
Hầu như hiện nay, hầu hết khắp các xứ dân chủ đều hành xử tuyên thệ theo tinh thần Hiến pháp dân quyền kiểu này. Nói ngắn gọn, 10 TU CHÍNH HIẾN PHÁP (Bill of Rights) chính là trung tâm nền tảng của bản Hiến Pháp Mỹ.
Thế nhưng giờ đây, sau vụ 911, Cái dân quyền tối thượng, quyền mẹ của tất cả các dân quyền khác mà bao nhiêu thế hệ con người đã đổ xương máu đấu tranh để buộc định chế chính phủ THỪA NHẬN và GHI RÕ trên văn bản Hiến Pháp cũng như Hiến Chương Liên Hiệp Quốc, đang bị chính nhà nước Âu Mỹ Úc đe doạ nhân danh "nền an ninh quốc gia". Tất cả vì Sợ Hãi. Nhà nước chính phủ là chuyên gia tạo sợ hãi và tận dụng sợ hãi chuyên nghiệp nhất!
Luật sư, ký giả, đều bị đe doạ tù tội khi hành xử quyền hiến định của họ. Như trường hợp Juliian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden.
Một trường họp khác nữa đang diễn ra và khả năng chính phủ Mỹ tống giam người ký giả quả cảm này là ông James Risen, ký giả điều tra của tờ New York Times. Ông đang bị chính phũ Mỹ buộc phải khai ra "nguồn đưa tin" trong những bài tường trình về kế hoạch rình mò trộm cắp thông tin của chính phủ Mỹ nhân danh an ninh quốc gia từ sau vụ 911.
Bối cảnh bảo vệ" Nguồn rò rỉ" vụ án Gián Điệp Trung Cộng Wen Ho Lee
James Risen, trong quá khứ, cũng chỉ vì thiếu kiểm chứng và quá tin vào "nguồn tin chính phủ" đã sa vào bẩy lạm dụng của chính phủ Mỹ, lợi dụng báo chí cho mục tiêu chính trị- trong vụ chính phủ Mỹ vu cáo tội gián điệp cho nhà khoa học vật lý nguyên tử Mỹ gốc Đài Loan- Wen Ho Lee -vì mục tiêu chính trị ngoại giao.Năm 1999, Ông James Risen cùng một cộng sự viên ký giả Jeff Gerth viết tường trình, theo nguồn bật mí từ CIA, rằng giáo sư Wen Ho Lee khoa học gia tại trung tâm nguyên tử Los Alamos, làm gián điệp ăn cắp tài liệu nguyên tử của Mỹ giao cho Trung Cộng.
Giáo sư Wen Ho Lee, bị bắt giam trái phép và bị đối xử như tội nhân tàn tệ trong phòng biệt giam. Sau gần một năm trời chống án và tranh biện với công tố. Phía chính phủ Mỹ không trưng được một bằng chứng cụ thể nào để xác minh 59 tội danh cáo buộc Ông Wen Ho Lee. Cuối cùng chính phủ Mỹ điều đình để ông Wen Ho Lee nhận một tội danh là "bất cẩn trong cách lưu dùng tài liệu mật" còn 58 tội danh kia huỷ bỏ, và Wen Ho Lee được tha bổng.
Năm, 2000, Toà án Mỹ đã chính thức xin lỗi ông Wen Ho Lee và ra lệnh bồi thường thiệt hại cho Wen Ho Lee vì những sai phạm bất công đối với ông, do đã quá tin vào lời chứng của chính phũ Mỹ. Đồng thời 5 tờ báo chính đăng tải kết án ông Wen Ho Lee, trong đó có New York Time, Los Angeles Time, cùng chấp nhận chính thức xin lỗi và bồi thường thiệt hại do hành động XÂM PHẠM QUYỀN RIÊNG TƯ của ông Wen Ho Lee trong các bài tường thuật của James Risen.
Sự Vụ NSA và Xuất bản Sách "Nhà Nước Chiến Tranh (State of War) và " "Trả Bằng Mọi Giá" (Pay Any Price)
Sau sự kiên này, ông James Risen cẩn trọng hơn với nhóm CIA, tình báo mà quen biết giao du. Ông tiếp tục viết điều tra, nhưng lần này tập trung vào cung cách hành xử làm việc của cả hệ thống tình báo an ninh chính phủ Mỹ. Những loạt bài của ông Risen từ năm 2006, trước Snowden khá lâu, đã làm chính phủ Mỹ tức giận. Ông bị chính phủ Mỹ truy tố "vi phạm an ninh quốc gia" và "làm gián điệp" cho ngoại bang theo đạo luật cũ kỹ phi dân quyền Espionage Act of 1917Ông bị đe doạ và bị toà án Tối Cao cũng như đại bồi thầm đoàn ép phải cung khai ra tên tuổi của những người đã cung cấp những tài liệu tội phạm của chinh phủ Mỹ. Nếu không, ông sẽ bị tống giam, mất việc và mất hết sự nghiệp, liên luỵ gia đình!
Ngược lại, nếu ông cung khai, Ông phản bội lại lời tuyên thệ với chức năng ký giả, đạo đức báo chí, là bảo vệ nguồn tin bất cứ giá nào; bảo vệ sức năng động, uy tín của nền thông tin tự do. Một trong những lý lẽ mà chánh án Judge Roger Gregory đã dùng để phán đối phán quyết của đa số chánh án trong tối cao pháp viện khi quyết định theo đòi hỏi của chính phủ tống giam chính ông, ký giả James Risen:
"(Phán quyết của) đa số (chánh án) xiển dương quyền lợi của chính phủ trong khi chà đạp một cách bất xứng những quyền lợi của nền báo chí, và khi làm như vậy, gây ảnh hưởng tai hại trên nền báo chí và sự tự do luân chuyển thông tin trong xã hội chúng ta (The majority exalts the interests of the government while unduly trampling those of the press, and in doing so, severely impinges on the press and the free flow of information in our society."[10][11]
Chính phủ Mỹ tận dụng đám chó săn lùng sục và moi móc thật chi ly những giòng chữ viết trong từng trang sách báo của Ông để minh chứng có "ẩn tàng thông tin gián điệp" của James Risen, hầu tạo lý cớ truy tố ông. (xem ra chẳng khác gì ban an ninh kiểm duyệt báo chí của Việt Cộng hiện hành)
Không chỉ đơn giản là phanh phui những tội phạm chính phủ Mỹ như trong quyển :Nhà nước Chiến Tranh ,State of War: The Secret History of the CIA, trong đó ông tiết lộ CHÍNH NHÀ NƯỚC MỸ CUNG CẤP TÀI LIỆU VŨ KHÍ NGUYÊN TỬ CHO BA TƯ (Iran) vì lý do chính trị khu vực và quyền lợi tập đoàn, chứ không ai khác!..Did the CIA give Iran the bomb? Extracts from New York Times . Quyển sách này đã khiến ông thành kẻ thù của cả chính phủ Mỹ - cả hai chế độ Bush và OBAMA đều nỗ lực truy tố tống giam ông.. James Risen còn phanh phui cả hệ thống chính trị băng hoại của nước Mỹ, mà trong đó các chính trị gia, dân biểu, nghị sĩ, tướng lãnh v.v thật sự nhảy vào chính trường vì quyền lợi cá nhân, chứ chẳng vì xã hội dân chúng.
Theo ông Risen, những món tiền "hối lộ" gọi là ủng hộ chính trị, ủng hộ ứng viên hay đảng phái, thật ra chỉ là biểu kiến và rất nhỏ so với món lợi mà những tướng lãnh quân đội cũng như chính khách nhận được SAU KHI MÃN NHIỆM.
Những món lợi này mới đáng kể. Nó bao gồm LƯƠNG (hàng triệu mỹ kim một năm) và BỔNG, (là những học bổng, những chuyến du lịch tham quan thế giới, những chức vụ công việc đầu tư v.v dành cho con cháu liên hệ) được cung cấp và chu cấp từ các TẬP ĐOÀN ĐẠI CÔNG TY về dầu hoả, hoá chất, cũng như kỹ nghệ chiến tranh.. Và đây chính là lý do tại sao, bất chấp bằng chứng tai hại và sai trái của chiến tranh, chính khách, tướng lĩnh, bỉnh bút v.v nhất nhất bỏ phiếu ủng hộ chiến tranh!!!
"Một thập niên của tuyên truyền sợ hãi hù doạ đã đem quyền lực và giầu có cho những kẻ khôn khéo nhất trong việc nói dối về sự đe doạ khủng bố. Nỗi sợ hãi bán rất chạy. Nỗi Sợ Hãi đã thuyết phục Nhà Trắng và Quốc hội đổ hàng trăm tỉ mỹ kim- nhiều tiền hơn là bất cứ ai có thể nghĩ đến làm gì để tiêu xài hết nó-vào việc chống khủng bố và an ninh nội chính, thường là với rất ít quản trị và giám sát, và thường gây tác hại cho công dân Mỹ những người đúng ra họ phải bảo vệ . Nỗi Sợ Hãi rất khó chất vấn. Nó là cốt lõi quyền lợi tài chính của vô số những viên chức thư lại liên bang, công ty hợp đồng lớn nhỏ, chuyên gia cố vấn, phân tích, bình luận gia. Nỗi Sợ Hãi đẻ ra ngân quỹ!" (một đoạn trong sách "Trả Bất Cứ Già Nào) Ngay như tờ New York Times, đã "đồng hành" với chính phủ Bush, ém nhẹm bài viết về tội phạm "đi đêm" của Bush với Iran, cho đến sau cuộc bầu cử và BUSH vào nhiệm kỳ hai!
Ông James Risen vạch trần hệ thống tam quyền phân lập và tập đoàn lợi nhuận chiến tranh của Mỹ trong quyển sách State of War: The Secret History of the CIA và mới nhất, quyển "Pay Any Price, the War on Terror and Press Freedoms" sách bị đe doạ là nếu phát hành với đầy đủ chi tiết về việc "tham nhũng" giữa báo chí chính qui và chính phủ, những chi tiết tội phạm của các tập đoàn công ty cùng chính khách v.v, thì bản thân ông và gia đình sẽ phải trả giá, đồng nghiệp liên đới với ông trong các tờ báo ông từng làm việc sẽ phải trả giá. Trước mắt là BỊ ĐUỔI VIỆC và sau đó sẽ phải BỊ an ninh Mỹ ĐIỀU TRA, với khả năng bị TỐNG GIAM v.v
Ông đã chần chừ đắn đo không dám viết những chi tiết động trời đó. Ông ưu lo, đắn đo về quyền lợi cá nhân gia đình và xã hội. Ông James Risen đã đem gánh nặng trăn trở này tâm sự với bà vợ của ông, để mong san sẽ và vơi bớt trằn trọc cô độc trong tâm tư, khi phải từ bõ nguyên lý sống vì nỗi sợ mất quyền lợi cho bản thân và gia đình. Và bà vợ ông đã phán một câu rằng:
“Em sẽ không kính trọng Anh, nếu Anh không làm việc đó" ( I won’t respect you if you don’t do that.)Và chỉ với câu nói ngắn gọn dứt khoát của một "người đàn bà", một ký giả đang do dự hèn yếu trở thành can đảm chân chính. Xã hội Mỹ có thêm một thông tin chuẩn xác về tội phạm chính phủ Mỹ và lịch sử xung đột Trung Đông- và trên hết, lịch sử nhân loại nói chung đã không mất đi một chứng cớ về tính bản chất băng hoại của quyền chính, tập đoàn lợi nhuận, và sự thật về chiến tranh, chiến tranh Trung Đông: Nó khẳng định: Chiến tranh bản chất chỉ là trò làm tiền gian manh.
Quyền lực đe doạ kinh khiếp của nhà nước, quyền lợi bao phủ hấp dẫn của tập đoàn .. bỗng chốc trở thành số không chỉ vì một lời nói của một người đàn bà.
Không! không chỉ đơn giản như thế! Không được quyền nhận định hời hợt thiếu lương thiện như thế!
Phải nhấn mạnh rõ rệt rằng tất cả những đe doạ kinh khiếp của nhà nước chính phủ, của tập đoàn lợi nhuận, mà hầu như tất cả nhân loại này đều khuất phục hãi sợ, đã trở thành con số không với ký giả James Risen, chỉ vì tất cả những đe doạ đó đã trở thành con số không với một người đàn bà, trước khi được thốt ra thành lời nói ĐANH THÉP từ CHÂN TÂM VÔ UÝ của một người BẠN ĐỜI đúng nghĩa!
Sau khi nghe câu nói đanh thép này, James Risen cũng đã phải mất ngủ thêm 6 tháng mới đủ can đảm viết sự thật!
Cuối cùng , tất cả chúng ta cần phải ghi nhớ thật rõ rằng một khi quyền tự do ngôn luận bị xâm phạm, thì tất cả các thứ quyền còn lại trên văn bản chỉ là ảo tưởng mà thôi!
8-12-2014
Nguyên Khả Phạm Thanh Chương
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State of War
Risen is the author of the book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (January 2006). The book makes numerous statements about Central Intelligence Agency activities. It states that the CIA carried out an operation in 2000 (Operation Merlin) intended to delay Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program by feeding it flawed blueprints for key missing components—which backfired and may actually have aided Iran, as the flaw was likely detected and corrected by a former Soviet nuclear scientist the operation used to make the delivery.While doing research for the book, Risen's email and phone connections with former CIA Operations Officer Jeffrey Alexander Sterling were monitored by the US federal government.[3][4] The US federal government also obtained Risen's credit and bank records.[5] The CIA Public Affairs Office issued a press release indicating that Risen's book contains serious errors in every chapter.
Risen writes in State of War that, "Several of the Iranian [CIA] agents were arrested and jailed, while the fate of some of the others is still unknown", after a CIA official in 2004 sent an Iranian agent an encrypted electronic message, mistakenly including data that could potentially identify "virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran". The Iranian was a double agent and handed over the information to Iranian intelligence. This also has been denied by an intelligence official. Risen also alleges that the Bush Administration is responsible for the transformation of Afghanistan into a "narco-state", that provides a purported 80% of the world's heroin supply.
The publication of this book was expedited following the December 16, 2005 NSA leak story. The timing of The New York Times story after the Iraq election in mid December 2005 is a source of controversy since the story was delayed for over a year. The New York Times story appeared two days before a former NSA employee, dismissed in May 2005, requested permission to testify to two Congressional intelligence oversight committees. Byron Calame, the Public Editor of The New York Times, wrote in early January 2006 that two senior Times officials refused to comment on the timing of the article. The Department of Justice (DOJ) also conducted an investigation of the sources of the security leak involving the NSA. Risen says this book is based on information from a variety of anonymous sources, that he would protect.
The issue of journalists protecting their anonymous sources was widely discussed during this time period due to the Valerie Plame affair. In that case, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to reveal a source for a story of hers. The Attorney General hinted in a Washington Post article on May 22, 2006 that journalists may be charged for any disclosure of classified national security information. President George W. Bush, in a June 25, 2006 news conference, was critical of the publication of information of classified programs by the New York Times.
United States v. Sterling
Jeffrey Alexander Sterling was being investigated during the Bush administration. In 2010 he was indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917, one of the few people in US history whose alleged contact with a journalist was punished under espionage law.[6]Risen was subpoenaed in relation to the case in 2008.[7] He fought the subpoena, and it expired in the summer of 2009.[8] In what the New York Times called "a rare step," the Obama administration renewed the subpoena in 2010.[8] In 2011 Risen wrote a detailed response to the subpoena, describing his reasons for refusing to reveal his sources, the public impact of his work, and his experiences with the Bush administration.[9]
In July 2013 US Court of Appeals from the Fourth Circuit ruled that Risen must testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling. The court wrote "so long as the subpoena is issued in good faith and is based on a legitimate need of law enforcement, the government need not make any special showing to obtain evidence of criminal conduct from a reporter in a criminal proceeding." Judge Roger Gregory dissented, writing "The majority exalts the interests of the government while unduly trampling those of the press, and in doing so, severely impinges on the press and the free flow of information in our society."[10][11]
The US government stance has been criticized as infringing upon freedom of the press.[12]
The Supreme Court rejected his appeal during June 2014,[13] leaving Risen facing the possibility of jail depending upon whether the federal prosecutors choose to pursue his testimony. He has stated that he will continue to refuse and is willing to go to jail.[14]
In October 2014, Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking at a Washington, D.C. event, stated “no reporter’s going to jail as long as I’m attorney general.” [15]
Wen Ho Lee
In an article that Risen cowrote with Jeff Gerth for The New York Times that appeared on March 6, 1999, they allege that "a Los Alamos computer scientist who is Chinese-American" had stolen nuclear secrets for China.[16][17][18]The suspect, later identified as Wen Ho Lee, pled guilty to a single charge of improper handling of national defense information, the 58 other counts against him were dropped, and he was released from jail. No espionage charges were ever proven.[19] The judge apologized to Lee for believing the government and putting him in pretrial solitary confinement for months.
On September 26, 2000, The New York Times apologized for significant errors in reporting of the case.[20] Lee and Helen Zia would later write a book, My Country Versus Me, in which he described Risen and Gerth's work as a "hatchet job on me, and a sloppy one at that", and he points out numerous factual errors in Risen and Gerth's reporting.[21] The New York Times was one of five newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, which jointly agreed to pay damages to settle a lawsuit concerning their coverage of the case and invasion of privacy.[22][23]
Awards
- 2014 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for investigative journalism, particularly for demonstrating "courage in his commitment to protect his sources and combat pressures that would undermine his work and that of other journalists."[24]
Talking to James Risen About Pay Any Price, the War on Terror and Press Freedoms
James Risen, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for exposing the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, has long been one of the nation’s most aggressive and adversarial investigative journalists. Over the past several years, he has received at least as much attention for being threatened with prison by the Obama Justice Department (ostensibly) for refusing to reveal the source of one of his stories—a persecution that, in reality, is almost certainly the vindictive by-product of the U.S. government’s anger over his NSA reporting.
He has published a new book on the War on Terror entitled Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. There have been lots of critiques of the War on Terror on its own terms, but Risen’s is one of the first to offer large amounts of original reporting on what is almost certainly the most overlooked aspect of this war: the role corporate profiteering plays in ensuring its endless continuation, and how the beneficiaries use rank fear-mongering to sustain it.
That alone makes the book very worth reading, but what independently interests me about Risen is how he seems to have become entirely radicalized by what he’s discovered in the last decade of reporting, as well as by the years-long battle he has had to wage with the U.S. government to stay out of prison. He now so often eschews the modulated, safe, uncontroversial tones of the standard establishment reporter (such as when he called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” and said about the administration’s press freedom attacks: “Nice to see the U.S. government is becoming more like the Iranian government”). He at times even channels radical thinkers, sounding almost Chomsky-esque when he delivered a multiple-tweet denunciation—taken from a speech he delivered at Colby College—of how establishment journalists cling to mandated orthodoxies out of fear:
* * * * *
GREENWALD: This is Glenn Greenwald with The Intercept and I am speaking today with Jim Risen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who has released a new book, the title of which is Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. Hey Jim, thanks so much for taking some time to talk to me.
RISEN: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
GREENWALD: My pleasure. So, I’ve read your entire book, and I have several questions about it, beginning with a general one, which is: there have been a lot of books written about the failures of the War on Terror, deceit kind of embedded with the War on Terror, most of which have taken the war on its own terms, and critiqued it because of strategic failures or of failure to achieve the claims which have been made to justify the war, and I actually have written a couple of books myself about the War on Terror from that perspective. Yours is really one of the first that has focused on a particular part of the War on Terror, namely the way in which economic motives, what you call the Homeland Security Industrial Complex, has driven a huge part of the war, and there’s a lot of new reporting about how that functions.
I wanted to ask you two things about that. One is, is that something that you intended to do; that you set out to do when you began writing the book, and if so, what led you to do that, and the second part of it is, how much of this economic motive is the cause of the fact that we’ve now been at war for 13 years as opposed to traditional war objectives such as increasing domestic power or asserting foreign influence. How big of a role do you think it actually plays?
RISEN: That was my goal. That was one of the key objectives of writing the book, and I think it plays a really central role in why the war is continuing. I think it’s basically that after so many years there’s a whole class of people that have developed. A post-9/11 mercenary class that’s developed that have invested in their own lives an incentive to keep the war going. Not just people who are making money, but people who are in the government who their status and their power within the government are invested in continuing the war.
So I was trying to show that it wasn’t just greed—it was partly greed—but it was also status, and power, and ambition that all intertwined to make it so that there’s very little debate about whether to continue the war, and whether we should have any real re-assessment on a basic level. So you’re right, I was trying to get at those motivations, I was trying to understand how we could have this prolonged period of war with such little debate. And I think it’s both economic incentives and personal power incentives and ambition and status.
GREENWALD: Let’s talk about the economic part of the motive, because obviously one of the most striking things about the war is not just its duration but the fact that it’s continued essentially unimpeded, notwithstanding these wild swings in election outcomes. You have the Republicans, who were in power when the war commenced, get smashed in 2006 and 2008 as a result of, at least primarily, as a result of dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and the general state of things, but then you had the war continue under a president who kind of vowed to reign it all in, and then even when the Democrats get killed in 2010 and then again in 2014, there’s no signs of any of this letting up.
It’s easy to see why there’s this private sector—you know, the weapons manufacturers and the defense contractors, sort of a General Dynamics, Booz Allen world—that want the war to continue. They do really well when they’re selling huge amounts of machinery, weapons, and drones. But what causes the political class to be so willing to serve their interests so brazenly, even when public opinion is so overwhelmingly against it?
RISEN: That’s a question I’ve struggled with myself. I’ve tried to understand. I think we had one or two real moments when we could have gone in a different direction. The primary one was, of course, 2008. I think Obama had a chance. He had a mandate to do something different. And he didn’t do it. I think part of it was that he was never exactly what we thought he was, I think he was never really as liberal as people thought he was. I think a lot of voters invested in him their hopes and dreams without exactly realizing what he really was. I think he was always really more conservative than how he presented himself in 2008.
To give him a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, I think it’s very easy for the intelligence community to scare the hell out of politicians when they come in, and I think that Obama probably got seduced a little bit by the intelligence community when he arrived. All you have to do is look at a lot of raw intelligence to scare somebody. Convince them that “Oh, it’s much worse than you ever realized.” But at the same time, he must take some of the blame. He surrounded himself with a lot of the Bush people from the get-go. Brennan was on his campaign. Most of his team had some ties to the Bush years in the War on Terror.
To me, that’s the hardest thing to really sort out, the factors that led Obama—at that one moment, I think there was one opportunity he had in 2008 to make a significant change and he didn’t do it. And I think historians are going to be struggling with that for a long time.
GREENWALD: Well, let me struggle with that with you for a little bit because the idea, and I think it’s a commonly expressed one—there’s probably an element of truth to it—that a new president who doesn’t really have a great deal of experience with the military or the intelligence community has these impressive generals and CIA people coming in with medals on their chest and decades of experience and, as you say, purposefully scaring them.
But at the same time, anybody who’s remotely sophisticated about the world understands that that’s going to happen. Dwight Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex 50 years ago. And you know that there are factions in Washington who maintain their power by scaring you, and you have your own advisors. If you and I know that so much of that is fear mongering, he has to know, right?
RISEN: Right, and I’m not trying to excuse it at all, and in fact I think it’s what he wanted. My own gut tells me that what he decided to do was in early 2009 was to focus on economic and healthcare policies and that in order to do those things on the domestic side, he had to protect his flank on national security and not fight the Republicans on national security, so I think there was a calculated move by Obama to prolong the War on Terror in order to try to focus on domestic issues. And I think that after a while, he lost control of that narrative.
GREENWALD: It’s always hard to talk about somebody’s motives, right? I think we have a hard time knowing our own motives, let alone other people’s, who are complicated. As you say, he had this great opportunity in 2008 because things like closing Guantanamo and reining in the War on Terror and stopping torture—these were all things that he ran on, and won on, right?
RISEN: Right.
GREENWALD: And you’ve been really outspoken about the fact that it’s not just the continuation of the Bush national security agenda but the even—especially, rather—an escalation of the attack on journalism. I’ve seen you have some pretty extreme quotes on that, that he’s the worst president on press freedom since at least Nixon, maybe worse. Do you think that’s a byproduct of the fact that every president gets progressively worse, or do you think there’s something unique and specific about his worldview and approach that has made him so bad on these press freedom issues?
RISEN: I think one of his legacies is going to be that on a broad scale he normalized the War on Terror. He took what Bush and Cheney kind of had started on an emergency, ad-hoc basis and turned it into a permanent state and allowed it to grow much more dramatically than it ever had under Bush or Cheney, and part of that—I think within that—was his attack on whistleblowers and journalists. I think it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. If you believe in the national security state in the way Obama does, then you have to also believe in squashing dissent.
GREENWALD: And I think that’s part of what makes war so degrading, right, for a political culture and a country is that it always gets accompanied by those kinds of things. Let me ask you a little bit about your own personal experience as part of that war on whistleblowing and journalism.
I know you’re a little constrained because your case is still pending. But one of the things I always find so interesting is that whenever your case is talked about, it always gets talked about in this very narrow sense: that you had a source for a story that you published in your book about some inept and ultimately counterproductive attempts to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear program and the case is about trying to force you to reveal your source, and like every good journalist should, you refuse to do so and therefore face a possibility of being held in contempt of court and being sent to prison.
But the background of your case, that I want to just step back and talk about a little bit, is that you’ve had this very adversarial relationship with the intelligence community, this increasingly adversarial relationship with the intelligence community, as a result of a lot of the reporting that you did, including exposing the warrantless NSA program in 2005, for which you won the Pulitzer Prize.
Can you talk about that, the tensions you’ve had with the government in the War on Terror reporting that you’ve done and how that has manifested and affected your life?
RISEN: Yeah, sure. In fact, I’ve said in affidavits in the case that I believe that the reason they came after me on this subpoena is because of the NSA stories that we did for The New York Times. I’m convinced, and I believe there’s a lot of evidence to show that they decided ultimately not to come after The New York Times on the NSA stories and instead wanted to isolate me by looking at something in my book. In fact, I know for a fact that they conducted leak investigations of at least three or four separate chapters in my book.
They interviewed a lot of people about totally unrelated things to the case that they ultimately came after me on and I think they were looking for something in my book to isolate me from The New York Times, and in their court papers they have repeatedly cited the fact that The New York Times decided not to run the story as one of the arguments for why it’s justified for them to come after me on it. And so I pride myself on the fact that I developed an adversarial relationship with the government because I think that’s what every reporter should do.
GREENWALD: I know from my own experience doing NSA reporting over the last 18 months—and I’ve heard you say before that you’re not going to let these kind of threats and recriminations affect your reporting. That was my mindset as well and I was actually even more determined a lot of times whenever I felt threatened to do the reporting even more aggressively, to make sure that those bullying tactics weren’t going to work. At the same time, when you hear top level government officials openly muse about the crimes that you’ve committed, when you hear privately through your attorney that the Justice Department might arrest you when you come back to the U.S., of course it does have an effect on you. It occupies a mental space. You spend a lot of time talking to your lawyers instead of focusing on journalism.
And one of the things I’ve always found so fascinating about your case is that you have a Pulitzer, you work for The New York Times, you’re one of the best known investigative journalists in the country—one of the most institutionally protected, even though they did separate you from the Times by focusing on your book. Still, though, the fact that they were able to target you this way, for this many years, I thought was a very powerful message that if we can even go after Jim Risen, we can go after anybody.
I know you want to maintain the idea, and I know that it’s true, that none of this consciously deterred you from doing the journalism. But how does being at the center of a case like this, where people are openly talking about you going to prison, including people in the Justice Department—how does this have an effect on your journalism, on your relationship to your sources, just on your ability to do your work?
RISEN: Well, you know, it’s interesting. It affected me a lot at first, for the first couple of years. It’s one of those weird things that I’m sure you know now—these things go on forever and they take a long time and most of the time nobody’s paying any attention except you and your lawyers. During the first several years, nobody paid much attention, and it did have an effect on me then. And it took a long time for me to realize I’ve got to just keep going. But the fact that now a lot of people are supporting me has really helped me, this year in particular.
In the last six months to a year, when I’ve gotten a lot more attention and people supporting me, I feel like now I have to represent the industry, represent the profession, and so it’s changed the way I even think about the case.
GREENWALD: You have become this kind of increasingly prolific user of Twitter, out of nowhere. You were never on Twitter. You were a very late joiner. I clearly see all the signs of addiction forming, and I say this as someone who recognizes it personally. You’ve evolved—you had a Twitter egg for a long time, and now you have a real picture.
RISEN: (Laughs) My son took that picture.
GREENWALD: (Laughs) Alright, well I knew it was going to be somebody else who caused you to leave the egg behind. But one of the things I find really interesting is Twitter is a venue in which you get to speak in a different way about different things than you do, say, in an article that you write for The New York Times, where you’re a little bit more constrained in how you’re talking. And you’ve expressed some ideas that I think are very rare for someone who is a reporter at a large, establishment institution like The New York Times to express, and I want to ask you a couple of questions about that.
You had this multi-part tweet maybe about a month ago. It almost sounded like something Noam Chomsky might say, or other people might say like that, about how the big plague of establishment thought in the U.S. is a fear of deviating from conventional wisdom, and it’s only after generation or two later when people who do that get vindicated, and so there’s this really strong incentive not to do that. Can you elaborate on the kinds of things you were talking about that and what you’ve experienced that has led you to see those things?
RISEN: That was actually part of a speech I gave at Colby College. I think the best thing I’ve written on this whole issue. I compared how Elijah Lovejoy, who was an abolitionist in the 1830s who was murdered because he was trying to run a newspaper in St. Louis that was pro-abolitionism, how he was so far ahead of his time that people thought he was crazy. He was so far outside the mainstream, and people thought abolitionism and the end of slavery was this idea that was insane.
And I was trying to compare that to what we have today, where anybody who says we shouldn’t have a War on Terror is considered delusional. And I was trying to show that conventional wisdom is a creature of our time. It’s not inherently true or not true. And that the mainstream press’s dependence on conventional wisdom ultimately cripples it in a lot of different ways.
GREENWALD: The impression that I have, and I’ve known you personally only for a few years, so it’s more just a speculative observation from having seen your work before that is that a combination of your going through this case with the government where your own liberty is very much at risk as a result of the government’s actions, combined with a lot of the reporting that lead to this book kind of has radicalized you in a way that I think is a pretty common thing that people in the War on Terror have gone through where people look at their country differently, much more so than they ever did before, look at institutions differently.
Am I right about that? Is the Jim Risen of today more willing to experiment with novel ideas that aren’t conventional than the Jim Risen of 20 years ago as a result of those experiences?
RISEN: Probably, probably. I have to think about that. I’m trying to think back. 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.
GREENWALD: I wonder about that a lot. Obviously, I started writing about politics in 2005, and a huge part of it was that perception, that the country had radically changed, that things that we took for granted were no longer the case, and I’ve definitely had a rapid and significant evolution in my views of how I look at those things the more I focus on them and the more the country changed.
But if you go back and look at some media critics of the ’50s and ’60s, people like I.F. Stone who were kind of placed on the outside of conventional wisdom, and were viewed as fringe or crazy at the time—a lot of that can be traced to way before 9/11. Lies about the Vietnam War. The huge military industrial complex around the Cold War. Do you think 9/11 was this radical break from how things were done in the country, or was it more an injection of steroids into processes that were already underway?
RISEN: There have always been problems. But we’ve taken this to a new level. Both because the technology has allowed the government to do things it would never have done before, but also because of the willingness of the country to accept security measures and a reduction in civil liberties that I think would not have been contemplated before. I keep thinking that if you had a Rip Van Winkle from 1995 who woke up today, I don’t think they would really recognize the country. And that’s what I’m trying to write about, and what I view, because that’s the America that I remember.
GREENWALD: There’s this fascinating debate that took place in the ’90s, after the Timothy McVeigh attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, when the Clinton administration introduced these proposals to require backdoors into all encryption, for all computers and internet usage. And it didn’t happen, and the reason it didn’t happen is because all of these Republicans in Congress, led by John Ashcroft, stood up with a bunch of Democrats in alliance with them, saying “We’re not the kind of country that gives the government access to all of our communications. Privacy is actually a crucial value.” And just a few short years later, all of that reversed, and that debate became inconceivable.
RISEN: When Dick Cheney said, “the gloves come off,” I don’t think we realized how important that was, and what that really meant. As I’ve said before, that really meant, “We’re going to deregulate national security, and we’re going to take off all the rules that were imposed in the ’70s after Watergate.” And that was just a dramatic change in the way we conduct foreign policy and national security. And I think it’s been extended to this whole new homeland security apparatus. People think that terrorism is an existential threat, even though it’s not, and so they’re willing to go along with all this, and that’s what’s so scary to me.
GREENWALD: Let me ask you a few questions about some specific examples in your book, including one that relates to what you just said. You kind of have these different wars that you conceive of and one is called the “War on Normalcy.” One of the examples is, there’s this area on the U.S.-Canadian border that used to be kind of tranquil and now there’s a ton of War on Terror money that has gone to the state police there, and it’s kind of militarized that zone, and made it so the citizens are just interfered with in all kinds of ways.
One of the most overlooked trends, I think—you mentioned Cheney taking the gloves off—all of these things we were doing overseas aimed at ostensibly foreign terrorists have now begun to be imported onto U.S. soil, like the militarization of our police force using techniques from Baghdad, the use of drones, that “Collect it All” NSA model, which was first pioneered by Keith Alexander in Baghdad, is now aimed at U.S. citizens. Do you think that’s an important trend? Is that something that’s really happened, that what was the War on Terror aimed outward is now being aimed domestically?
RISEN: Absolutely, and that’s one of the most scary elements of it. To me, when the NSA started spying domestically that was like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. It was a really important shift. People thought that was absolutely forbidden. And when the NSA started doing it, and then when you started fooling around with creating a new Department of Homeland Security, merging all of these departments—creating Immigration and Customs Enforcement and all of this stuff—I think you’ve created a much more efficient federal domestic law enforcement apparatus, and efficiency is not always a good thing when it comes to that.
One of the things I always think about, and one of my earlier books was comparing the CIA and the KGB during the Cold War, and I always remember somebody telling me that the only countries that have really efficient security services are dictatorships.
GREENWALD: Right, and you can basically only have a really efficient security service if you’re willing to at least kind of go into that realm of authoritarianism—they kind of go hand in hand. Let me ask you: there’s this pretty new reporting you have on this company General Atomics, which is the maker of drones, and you kind of describe them as the new oligarchs. In 2001 they had $100 million in government contracts and now in 2012 they have $1.8 billion, an obscene increase. At the same time, coincidentally enough, you cite a good governance group documenting that they’ve spent more to fund congressional staff travel than any other company.
One of the things that always amazes me—I remember that there was this reporting that was done by Wired, during the debate over whether to give immunity to the telecoms that participated in the NSA program that you uncovered. An extraordinary thing to do, to retroactively immunize the biggest companies in the United States, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller became the leading spokesman for it at the time. He was the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and there were studies showing that right around the time when he became the leading proponent of telecom immunity, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint began donating lots of money to his campaign, they threw parties for him, but still, in the context of Jay Rockefeller—a Rockefeller—with a super safe seat in West Virginia, they were pretty trivial amounts to be able to just dominate congressional policy that way. And that was what struck me too about General Atomics. So they fund some congressional staff travel.
What is it about the D.C. culture that lets these kind of seemingly trivial amounts in the scheme of things end up translating into this massive influence?
RISEN: You know, I don’t think that it’s the money that really does the trick. I think what really, you’ve got to look at is that all of the staffers, and all of the members of Congress are thinking about what are they going to do after they leave those jobs. The same is true for military officers. What are you going to do when you retire from the military, or from the House Intelligence Committee, or whatever? You’re going to need a job at a defense contractor. And so I think that the real incentive for a lot of these people is not to upset their potential employers in the future. The campaign contributions themselves are just tokens, as you said.
GREENWALD: To say that, on one hand it seems kind of self-evident, but on the one hand, it’s a pretty extraordinary observation because it’s a form of the most extreme corruption. Public officials are serving the interests of really rich corporations in exchange for lucrative private sector jobs that they get when they leave after serving their interests.
RISEN: What really hit home was when I was working on a chapter on KBR, and one of the guys who I describe was kind of a whistleblower, Charles Smith. He was an auditor for the army who tried to stop about a billion dollars of payments to KBR because they didn’t have any proof that they’d actually spent the money—or they didn’t have sufficient records to prove it—and he lost his job over his fight with KBR, he believes.
And after I started talking to him he said, “There’s this one general you could talk to who was one of my bosses for a while. He was a good guy and he would vouch for me.” So I called that general, and he had since retired, and he said, “Well, I think Charlie was a great guy, but I now work for a contractor that does business with KBR, and I don’t want to say anything publicly about Charlie because that might upset KBR.” And that’s the kind of thing that you see all the time.
GREENWALD: There’s a case that you talk about in the book that’s Burnett v. Al Baraka, where 9/11 families sued the Saudis. There are lots of influential people in D.C., like Sen. Bob Graham, the former head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and others, who have said that the role that the Saudis have played in the War on Terror, and specifically the 9/11 attack, has been really actively suppressed, because of the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia. And there is this sort of bizarre aspect that we’ve gone to war against a huge number of countries, one of the few exceptions to which has been the country that had the most nationals involved in that attack, and whose government has been the most persuasively implicated.
How persuasive or credible do you find those questions about the Saudi involvement in the War on Terror generally, 9/11 specifically, and whether that’s been actively suppressed?
RISEN: Well, as you said, I don’t really get into the substance of that in that chapter because it’s really about this bizarre operation and how crazy that operation became. But I think you’re right. I think it’s one of the unanswered questions of 9/11 that, as you said, Graham became fixated on, and they still have not unredacted parts of that report.
I think the role of the Saudi government is probably different from the role of wealthy people in the Persian Gulf. And that’s the distinction that people have tried to grapple with for a long time. Are these just individually wealthy people in the Gulf, either in Saudi Arabia or in the Emirates, or is there some direction from any of these governments? And that’s the question that the U.S. government has never wanted to address publicly.
GREENWALD: You said in an interview within the last week—it might have been at the Firedog Lake Book Salon, I’m not exactly sure where it was—but you described the period of time in 2004 and 2005 when you were trying to get the NSA eavesdropping story published as one of the most stressful times of your life. I think you even said the quote “most stressful period of your professional life.” The New York Times, to its credit, did eventually publish that story, and did a great job on it, but can you talk a little bit about what you meant by that? Why that period was so stressful?
RISEN: Eric Lichtblau and I were trying to get that in the paper beginning in October 2004, and they killed it, or they stopped it. They agreed with the White House not to run it before the election and then we tried again after the election, and they killed it again, and by that time it was pretty well dead. So I went on a book leave and I put it in my book, and I knew that by doing that, I was putting my career at The New York Times in jeopardy.
It was very stressful about what was going to happen between me, The New York Times, and the Bush administration. I really credit my wife more than anybody else. I told her at one point that if I do this, if I keep it in the book, and the Times doesn’t run it, I’m probably going to get fired, and I remember she told me, “I won’t respect you if you don’t do that.” And so that was enough for me to keep going, but I didn’t sleep for about six months.
GREENWALD: It’s got to be incredibly difficult knowing that you have a story of that magnitude, and that the story has been nailed down and you can’t get it out into the world. Your book, which I literally finished reading about 24 hours ago, is really riveting, and it’s not just a book that is a polemical indictment of the War on Terror, like you’ve read before, it really is an incredible amount of individual reporting on one of the most under-reported aspects of this war, which is just how many people are gorging on huge amounts of profit and waste at the expense of the taxpayer, and what a big part of the war that is. Congratulations on writing such a great book, and I really appreciate your talking to me.
RISEN: Well thank you.
Photo: Alex Menendez/AP
He has published a new book on the War on Terror entitled Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. There have been lots of critiques of the War on Terror on its own terms, but Risen’s is one of the first to offer large amounts of original reporting on what is almost certainly the most overlooked aspect of this war: the role corporate profiteering plays in ensuring its endless continuation, and how the beneficiaries use rank fear-mongering to sustain it.
That alone makes the book very worth reading, but what independently interests me about Risen is how he seems to have become entirely radicalized by what he’s discovered in the last decade of reporting, as well as by the years-long battle he has had to wage with the U.S. government to stay out of prison. He now so often eschews the modulated, safe, uncontroversial tones of the standard establishment reporter (such as when he called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” and said about the administration’s press freedom attacks: “Nice to see the U.S. government is becoming more like the Iranian government”). He at times even channels radical thinkers, sounding almost Chomsky-esque when he delivered a multiple-tweet denunciation—taken from a speech he delivered at Colby College—of how establishment journalists cling to mandated orthodoxies out of fear:
It is difficult to recognize the limits a society places on accepted thought at the time it is doing it. When everyone accepts basic assumptions, there don’t seem to be constraints on ideas. That truth often only reveals itself in hindsight. Today, the basic prerequisite to being taken seriously in American politics is to accept the legitimacy of the new national security state. The new basic American assumption is that there really is a need for a global war on terror. Anyone who doesn’t accept that basic assumption is considered dangerous and maybe even a traitor. The crackdown on leaks by the Obama administration has been designed to suppress the truth about the war on terror. Stay on the interstate highway of conventional wisdom with your journalism, and you will have no problems. Try to get off and challenge basic assumptions, and you will face punishment.I spent roughly 30 minutes talking to Risen about the book, what he’s endured in his legal case, attacks on press freedoms, and what is and is not new about the War on Terror’s corporate profiteering. The discussion can be heard on the player below, and a transcript is provided. As Risen put it: “I wrote Pay Any Price as my answer to the government’s campaign against me.”
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GREENWALD: This is Glenn Greenwald with The Intercept and I am speaking today with Jim Risen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who has released a new book, the title of which is Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. Hey Jim, thanks so much for taking some time to talk to me.
RISEN: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
GREENWALD: My pleasure. So, I’ve read your entire book, and I have several questions about it, beginning with a general one, which is: there have been a lot of books written about the failures of the War on Terror, deceit kind of embedded with the War on Terror, most of which have taken the war on its own terms, and critiqued it because of strategic failures or of failure to achieve the claims which have been made to justify the war, and I actually have written a couple of books myself about the War on Terror from that perspective. Yours is really one of the first that has focused on a particular part of the War on Terror, namely the way in which economic motives, what you call the Homeland Security Industrial Complex, has driven a huge part of the war, and there’s a lot of new reporting about how that functions.
I wanted to ask you two things about that. One is, is that something that you intended to do; that you set out to do when you began writing the book, and if so, what led you to do that, and the second part of it is, how much of this economic motive is the cause of the fact that we’ve now been at war for 13 years as opposed to traditional war objectives such as increasing domestic power or asserting foreign influence. How big of a role do you think it actually plays?
RISEN: That was my goal. That was one of the key objectives of writing the book, and I think it plays a really central role in why the war is continuing. I think it’s basically that after so many years there’s a whole class of people that have developed. A post-9/11 mercenary class that’s developed that have invested in their own lives an incentive to keep the war going. Not just people who are making money, but people who are in the government who their status and their power within the government are invested in continuing the war.
So I was trying to show that it wasn’t just greed—it was partly greed—but it was also status, and power, and ambition that all intertwined to make it so that there’s very little debate about whether to continue the war, and whether we should have any real re-assessment on a basic level. So you’re right, I was trying to get at those motivations, I was trying to understand how we could have this prolonged period of war with such little debate. And I think it’s both economic incentives and personal power incentives and ambition and status.
GREENWALD: Let’s talk about the economic part of the motive, because obviously one of the most striking things about the war is not just its duration but the fact that it’s continued essentially unimpeded, notwithstanding these wild swings in election outcomes. You have the Republicans, who were in power when the war commenced, get smashed in 2006 and 2008 as a result of, at least primarily, as a result of dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and the general state of things, but then you had the war continue under a president who kind of vowed to reign it all in, and then even when the Democrats get killed in 2010 and then again in 2014, there’s no signs of any of this letting up.
It’s easy to see why there’s this private sector—you know, the weapons manufacturers and the defense contractors, sort of a General Dynamics, Booz Allen world—that want the war to continue. They do really well when they’re selling huge amounts of machinery, weapons, and drones. But what causes the political class to be so willing to serve their interests so brazenly, even when public opinion is so overwhelmingly against it?
RISEN: That’s a question I’ve struggled with myself. I’ve tried to understand. I think we had one or two real moments when we could have gone in a different direction. The primary one was, of course, 2008. I think Obama had a chance. He had a mandate to do something different. And he didn’t do it. I think part of it was that he was never exactly what we thought he was, I think he was never really as liberal as people thought he was. I think a lot of voters invested in him their hopes and dreams without exactly realizing what he really was. I think he was always really more conservative than how he presented himself in 2008.
To give him a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, I think it’s very easy for the intelligence community to scare the hell out of politicians when they come in, and I think that Obama probably got seduced a little bit by the intelligence community when he arrived. All you have to do is look at a lot of raw intelligence to scare somebody. Convince them that “Oh, it’s much worse than you ever realized.” But at the same time, he must take some of the blame. He surrounded himself with a lot of the Bush people from the get-go. Brennan was on his campaign. Most of his team had some ties to the Bush years in the War on Terror.
To me, that’s the hardest thing to really sort out, the factors that led Obama—at that one moment, I think there was one opportunity he had in 2008 to make a significant change and he didn’t do it. And I think historians are going to be struggling with that for a long time.
GREENWALD: Well, let me struggle with that with you for a little bit because the idea, and I think it’s a commonly expressed one—there’s probably an element of truth to it—that a new president who doesn’t really have a great deal of experience with the military or the intelligence community has these impressive generals and CIA people coming in with medals on their chest and decades of experience and, as you say, purposefully scaring them.
But at the same time, anybody who’s remotely sophisticated about the world understands that that’s going to happen. Dwight Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex 50 years ago. And you know that there are factions in Washington who maintain their power by scaring you, and you have your own advisors. If you and I know that so much of that is fear mongering, he has to know, right?
RISEN: Right, and I’m not trying to excuse it at all, and in fact I think it’s what he wanted. My own gut tells me that what he decided to do was in early 2009 was to focus on economic and healthcare policies and that in order to do those things on the domestic side, he had to protect his flank on national security and not fight the Republicans on national security, so I think there was a calculated move by Obama to prolong the War on Terror in order to try to focus on domestic issues. And I think that after a while, he lost control of that narrative.
GREENWALD: It’s always hard to talk about somebody’s motives, right? I think we have a hard time knowing our own motives, let alone other people’s, who are complicated. As you say, he had this great opportunity in 2008 because things like closing Guantanamo and reining in the War on Terror and stopping torture—these were all things that he ran on, and won on, right?
RISEN: Right.
GREENWALD: And you’ve been really outspoken about the fact that it’s not just the continuation of the Bush national security agenda but the even—especially, rather—an escalation of the attack on journalism. I’ve seen you have some pretty extreme quotes on that, that he’s the worst president on press freedom since at least Nixon, maybe worse. Do you think that’s a byproduct of the fact that every president gets progressively worse, or do you think there’s something unique and specific about his worldview and approach that has made him so bad on these press freedom issues?
RISEN: I think one of his legacies is going to be that on a broad scale he normalized the War on Terror. He took what Bush and Cheney kind of had started on an emergency, ad-hoc basis and turned it into a permanent state and allowed it to grow much more dramatically than it ever had under Bush or Cheney, and part of that—I think within that—was his attack on whistleblowers and journalists. I think it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. If you believe in the national security state in the way Obama does, then you have to also believe in squashing dissent.
GREENWALD: And I think that’s part of what makes war so degrading, right, for a political culture and a country is that it always gets accompanied by those kinds of things. Let me ask you a little bit about your own personal experience as part of that war on whistleblowing and journalism.
I know you’re a little constrained because your case is still pending. But one of the things I always find so interesting is that whenever your case is talked about, it always gets talked about in this very narrow sense: that you had a source for a story that you published in your book about some inept and ultimately counterproductive attempts to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear program and the case is about trying to force you to reveal your source, and like every good journalist should, you refuse to do so and therefore face a possibility of being held in contempt of court and being sent to prison.
But the background of your case, that I want to just step back and talk about a little bit, is that you’ve had this very adversarial relationship with the intelligence community, this increasingly adversarial relationship with the intelligence community, as a result of a lot of the reporting that you did, including exposing the warrantless NSA program in 2005, for which you won the Pulitzer Prize.
Can you talk about that, the tensions you’ve had with the government in the War on Terror reporting that you’ve done and how that has manifested and affected your life?
RISEN: Yeah, sure. In fact, I’ve said in affidavits in the case that I believe that the reason they came after me on this subpoena is because of the NSA stories that we did for The New York Times. I’m convinced, and I believe there’s a lot of evidence to show that they decided ultimately not to come after The New York Times on the NSA stories and instead wanted to isolate me by looking at something in my book. In fact, I know for a fact that they conducted leak investigations of at least three or four separate chapters in my book.
They interviewed a lot of people about totally unrelated things to the case that they ultimately came after me on and I think they were looking for something in my book to isolate me from The New York Times, and in their court papers they have repeatedly cited the fact that The New York Times decided not to run the story as one of the arguments for why it’s justified for them to come after me on it. And so I pride myself on the fact that I developed an adversarial relationship with the government because I think that’s what every reporter should do.
GREENWALD: I know from my own experience doing NSA reporting over the last 18 months—and I’ve heard you say before that you’re not going to let these kind of threats and recriminations affect your reporting. That was my mindset as well and I was actually even more determined a lot of times whenever I felt threatened to do the reporting even more aggressively, to make sure that those bullying tactics weren’t going to work. At the same time, when you hear top level government officials openly muse about the crimes that you’ve committed, when you hear privately through your attorney that the Justice Department might arrest you when you come back to the U.S., of course it does have an effect on you. It occupies a mental space. You spend a lot of time talking to your lawyers instead of focusing on journalism.
And one of the things I’ve always found so fascinating about your case is that you have a Pulitzer, you work for The New York Times, you’re one of the best known investigative journalists in the country—one of the most institutionally protected, even though they did separate you from the Times by focusing on your book. Still, though, the fact that they were able to target you this way, for this many years, I thought was a very powerful message that if we can even go after Jim Risen, we can go after anybody.
I know you want to maintain the idea, and I know that it’s true, that none of this consciously deterred you from doing the journalism. But how does being at the center of a case like this, where people are openly talking about you going to prison, including people in the Justice Department—how does this have an effect on your journalism, on your relationship to your sources, just on your ability to do your work?
RISEN: Well, you know, it’s interesting. It affected me a lot at first, for the first couple of years. It’s one of those weird things that I’m sure you know now—these things go on forever and they take a long time and most of the time nobody’s paying any attention except you and your lawyers. During the first several years, nobody paid much attention, and it did have an effect on me then. And it took a long time for me to realize I’ve got to just keep going. But the fact that now a lot of people are supporting me has really helped me, this year in particular.
In the last six months to a year, when I’ve gotten a lot more attention and people supporting me, I feel like now I have to represent the industry, represent the profession, and so it’s changed the way I even think about the case.
GREENWALD: You have become this kind of increasingly prolific user of Twitter, out of nowhere. You were never on Twitter. You were a very late joiner. I clearly see all the signs of addiction forming, and I say this as someone who recognizes it personally. You’ve evolved—you had a Twitter egg for a long time, and now you have a real picture.
RISEN: (Laughs) My son took that picture.
GREENWALD: (Laughs) Alright, well I knew it was going to be somebody else who caused you to leave the egg behind. But one of the things I find really interesting is Twitter is a venue in which you get to speak in a different way about different things than you do, say, in an article that you write for The New York Times, where you’re a little bit more constrained in how you’re talking. And you’ve expressed some ideas that I think are very rare for someone who is a reporter at a large, establishment institution like The New York Times to express, and I want to ask you a couple of questions about that.
You had this multi-part tweet maybe about a month ago. It almost sounded like something Noam Chomsky might say, or other people might say like that, about how the big plague of establishment thought in the U.S. is a fear of deviating from conventional wisdom, and it’s only after generation or two later when people who do that get vindicated, and so there’s this really strong incentive not to do that. Can you elaborate on the kinds of things you were talking about that and what you’ve experienced that has led you to see those things?
RISEN: That was actually part of a speech I gave at Colby College. I think the best thing I’ve written on this whole issue. I compared how Elijah Lovejoy, who was an abolitionist in the 1830s who was murdered because he was trying to run a newspaper in St. Louis that was pro-abolitionism, how he was so far ahead of his time that people thought he was crazy. He was so far outside the mainstream, and people thought abolitionism and the end of slavery was this idea that was insane.
And I was trying to compare that to what we have today, where anybody who says we shouldn’t have a War on Terror is considered delusional. And I was trying to show that conventional wisdom is a creature of our time. It’s not inherently true or not true. And that the mainstream press’s dependence on conventional wisdom ultimately cripples it in a lot of different ways.
GREENWALD: The impression that I have, and I’ve known you personally only for a few years, so it’s more just a speculative observation from having seen your work before that is that a combination of your going through this case with the government where your own liberty is very much at risk as a result of the government’s actions, combined with a lot of the reporting that lead to this book kind of has radicalized you in a way that I think is a pretty common thing that people in the War on Terror have gone through where people look at their country differently, much more so than they ever did before, look at institutions differently.
Am I right about that? Is the Jim Risen of today more willing to experiment with novel ideas that aren’t conventional than the Jim Risen of 20 years ago as a result of those experiences?
RISEN: Probably, probably. I have to think about that. I’m trying to think back. 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.
GREENWALD: I wonder about that a lot. Obviously, I started writing about politics in 2005, and a huge part of it was that perception, that the country had radically changed, that things that we took for granted were no longer the case, and I’ve definitely had a rapid and significant evolution in my views of how I look at those things the more I focus on them and the more the country changed.
But if you go back and look at some media critics of the ’50s and ’60s, people like I.F. Stone who were kind of placed on the outside of conventional wisdom, and were viewed as fringe or crazy at the time—a lot of that can be traced to way before 9/11. Lies about the Vietnam War. The huge military industrial complex around the Cold War. Do you think 9/11 was this radical break from how things were done in the country, or was it more an injection of steroids into processes that were already underway?
RISEN: There have always been problems. But we’ve taken this to a new level. Both because the technology has allowed the government to do things it would never have done before, but also because of the willingness of the country to accept security measures and a reduction in civil liberties that I think would not have been contemplated before. I keep thinking that if you had a Rip Van Winkle from 1995 who woke up today, I don’t think they would really recognize the country. And that’s what I’m trying to write about, and what I view, because that’s the America that I remember.
GREENWALD: There’s this fascinating debate that took place in the ’90s, after the Timothy McVeigh attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, when the Clinton administration introduced these proposals to require backdoors into all encryption, for all computers and internet usage. And it didn’t happen, and the reason it didn’t happen is because all of these Republicans in Congress, led by John Ashcroft, stood up with a bunch of Democrats in alliance with them, saying “We’re not the kind of country that gives the government access to all of our communications. Privacy is actually a crucial value.” And just a few short years later, all of that reversed, and that debate became inconceivable.
RISEN: When Dick Cheney said, “the gloves come off,” I don’t think we realized how important that was, and what that really meant. As I’ve said before, that really meant, “We’re going to deregulate national security, and we’re going to take off all the rules that were imposed in the ’70s after Watergate.” And that was just a dramatic change in the way we conduct foreign policy and national security. And I think it’s been extended to this whole new homeland security apparatus. People think that terrorism is an existential threat, even though it’s not, and so they’re willing to go along with all this, and that’s what’s so scary to me.
GREENWALD: Let me ask you a few questions about some specific examples in your book, including one that relates to what you just said. You kind of have these different wars that you conceive of and one is called the “War on Normalcy.” One of the examples is, there’s this area on the U.S.-Canadian border that used to be kind of tranquil and now there’s a ton of War on Terror money that has gone to the state police there, and it’s kind of militarized that zone, and made it so the citizens are just interfered with in all kinds of ways.
One of the most overlooked trends, I think—you mentioned Cheney taking the gloves off—all of these things we were doing overseas aimed at ostensibly foreign terrorists have now begun to be imported onto U.S. soil, like the militarization of our police force using techniques from Baghdad, the use of drones, that “Collect it All” NSA model, which was first pioneered by Keith Alexander in Baghdad, is now aimed at U.S. citizens. Do you think that’s an important trend? Is that something that’s really happened, that what was the War on Terror aimed outward is now being aimed domestically?
RISEN: Absolutely, and that’s one of the most scary elements of it. To me, when the NSA started spying domestically that was like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. It was a really important shift. People thought that was absolutely forbidden. And when the NSA started doing it, and then when you started fooling around with creating a new Department of Homeland Security, merging all of these departments—creating Immigration and Customs Enforcement and all of this stuff—I think you’ve created a much more efficient federal domestic law enforcement apparatus, and efficiency is not always a good thing when it comes to that.
One of the things I always think about, and one of my earlier books was comparing the CIA and the KGB during the Cold War, and I always remember somebody telling me that the only countries that have really efficient security services are dictatorships.
GREENWALD: Right, and you can basically only have a really efficient security service if you’re willing to at least kind of go into that realm of authoritarianism—they kind of go hand in hand. Let me ask you: there’s this pretty new reporting you have on this company General Atomics, which is the maker of drones, and you kind of describe them as the new oligarchs. In 2001 they had $100 million in government contracts and now in 2012 they have $1.8 billion, an obscene increase. At the same time, coincidentally enough, you cite a good governance group documenting that they’ve spent more to fund congressional staff travel than any other company.
One of the things that always amazes me—I remember that there was this reporting that was done by Wired, during the debate over whether to give immunity to the telecoms that participated in the NSA program that you uncovered. An extraordinary thing to do, to retroactively immunize the biggest companies in the United States, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller became the leading spokesman for it at the time. He was the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and there were studies showing that right around the time when he became the leading proponent of telecom immunity, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint began donating lots of money to his campaign, they threw parties for him, but still, in the context of Jay Rockefeller—a Rockefeller—with a super safe seat in West Virginia, they were pretty trivial amounts to be able to just dominate congressional policy that way. And that was what struck me too about General Atomics. So they fund some congressional staff travel.
What is it about the D.C. culture that lets these kind of seemingly trivial amounts in the scheme of things end up translating into this massive influence?
RISEN: You know, I don’t think that it’s the money that really does the trick. I think what really, you’ve got to look at is that all of the staffers, and all of the members of Congress are thinking about what are they going to do after they leave those jobs. The same is true for military officers. What are you going to do when you retire from the military, or from the House Intelligence Committee, or whatever? You’re going to need a job at a defense contractor. And so I think that the real incentive for a lot of these people is not to upset their potential employers in the future. The campaign contributions themselves are just tokens, as you said.
GREENWALD: To say that, on one hand it seems kind of self-evident, but on the one hand, it’s a pretty extraordinary observation because it’s a form of the most extreme corruption. Public officials are serving the interests of really rich corporations in exchange for lucrative private sector jobs that they get when they leave after serving their interests.
RISEN: What really hit home was when I was working on a chapter on KBR, and one of the guys who I describe was kind of a whistleblower, Charles Smith. He was an auditor for the army who tried to stop about a billion dollars of payments to KBR because they didn’t have any proof that they’d actually spent the money—or they didn’t have sufficient records to prove it—and he lost his job over his fight with KBR, he believes.
And after I started talking to him he said, “There’s this one general you could talk to who was one of my bosses for a while. He was a good guy and he would vouch for me.” So I called that general, and he had since retired, and he said, “Well, I think Charlie was a great guy, but I now work for a contractor that does business with KBR, and I don’t want to say anything publicly about Charlie because that might upset KBR.” And that’s the kind of thing that you see all the time.
GREENWALD: There’s a case that you talk about in the book that’s Burnett v. Al Baraka, where 9/11 families sued the Saudis. There are lots of influential people in D.C., like Sen. Bob Graham, the former head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and others, who have said that the role that the Saudis have played in the War on Terror, and specifically the 9/11 attack, has been really actively suppressed, because of the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia. And there is this sort of bizarre aspect that we’ve gone to war against a huge number of countries, one of the few exceptions to which has been the country that had the most nationals involved in that attack, and whose government has been the most persuasively implicated.
How persuasive or credible do you find those questions about the Saudi involvement in the War on Terror generally, 9/11 specifically, and whether that’s been actively suppressed?
RISEN: Well, as you said, I don’t really get into the substance of that in that chapter because it’s really about this bizarre operation and how crazy that operation became. But I think you’re right. I think it’s one of the unanswered questions of 9/11 that, as you said, Graham became fixated on, and they still have not unredacted parts of that report.
I think the role of the Saudi government is probably different from the role of wealthy people in the Persian Gulf. And that’s the distinction that people have tried to grapple with for a long time. Are these just individually wealthy people in the Gulf, either in Saudi Arabia or in the Emirates, or is there some direction from any of these governments? And that’s the question that the U.S. government has never wanted to address publicly.
GREENWALD: You said in an interview within the last week—it might have been at the Firedog Lake Book Salon, I’m not exactly sure where it was—but you described the period of time in 2004 and 2005 when you were trying to get the NSA eavesdropping story published as one of the most stressful times of your life. I think you even said the quote “most stressful period of your professional life.” The New York Times, to its credit, did eventually publish that story, and did a great job on it, but can you talk a little bit about what you meant by that? Why that period was so stressful?
RISEN: Eric Lichtblau and I were trying to get that in the paper beginning in October 2004, and they killed it, or they stopped it. They agreed with the White House not to run it before the election and then we tried again after the election, and they killed it again, and by that time it was pretty well dead. So I went on a book leave and I put it in my book, and I knew that by doing that, I was putting my career at The New York Times in jeopardy.
It was very stressful about what was going to happen between me, The New York Times, and the Bush administration. I really credit my wife more than anybody else. I told her at one point that if I do this, if I keep it in the book, and the Times doesn’t run it, I’m probably going to get fired, and I remember she told me, “I won’t respect you if you don’t do that.” And so that was enough for me to keep going, but I didn’t sleep for about six months.
GREENWALD: It’s got to be incredibly difficult knowing that you have a story of that magnitude, and that the story has been nailed down and you can’t get it out into the world. Your book, which I literally finished reading about 24 hours ago, is really riveting, and it’s not just a book that is a polemical indictment of the War on Terror, like you’ve read before, it really is an incredible amount of individual reporting on one of the most under-reported aspects of this war, which is just how many people are gorging on huge amounts of profit and waste at the expense of the taxpayer, and what a big part of the war that is. Congratulations on writing such a great book, and I really appreciate your talking to me.
RISEN: Well thank you.
Photo: Alex Menendez/AP
Email the author: glenn.greenwald@theintercept.com
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