Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

War corrupts. Endless war corrupts absolutely. Ever since 9/11 America has fought an endless war on terror, seeking enemies everywhere and never promising peace. In Pay Any Price, James Risen reveals an extraordinary litany of the hidden costs of that  from squandered and stolen dollars, to outrageous abuses of power, to wars on normalcy, decency, and truth. In the name of fighting terrorism, our government has done things every bit as shameful as its historic wartime abuses — and until this book, it has worked very hard to cover them up. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. FDR authorized the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans. Presidents Bush and Obama now must face their own reckoning. Power corrupts, but it is endless war that corrupts absolutely.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, War, Journalism, Military Fiction, Terrorism

285 pages, Hardcover

First published October 14, 2014

About the author

James Risen covers national security for The New York Times.

He was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2002 for coverage of September 11 and terrorism, and he is the coauthor of Wrath of Angels and The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB.

He lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife and three sons.

Reviews

[Always Pouting · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading investigative journalism always depresses me because it's all overwhelming and leaves me frustrated by my lack of ability to really do anything about the situation. I think though that I agree with the sentiment in the afterword that the only thing we can all do is keep talking about it and bringing awareness to what's happening. The best way to balance the amount of access the government has to our personal information honestly is just to try to force more visibility on the government. At least that way people can be held accountable or maybe not because most of this book is about people not being held accountable for thier actions. Oh well, I would still reccomend reading the book even though it's hard to face these things I think it's more important to know what's going on no matter how uncomfortable.

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

America has become accustomed to a permanent state of war. Only a small slice of society - including many poor and rural teenagers - fight and die, while a permanent national security elite rotates among senior government posts, contracting companies, think tanks, and television commentary, opportunities that would disappear if America was suddenly at peace. To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

Risen thinks that the War on Terror has gone on too long and that it is hurting America.

He starts out by saying that Obama did not reject the power Bush had accumulated and he has continued the War on Terror.

This is true, many Democrats voted for Obama thinking that he was a dove. In actuality he has been a hawk. This has disappointed and disillusioned many who voted for Obama in hopes of future peace.

This book is poorly edited and poorly put together. Risen is a strong writer; he is a journalist and he has a lot of good points to make here. This book is full of information that the American public should know and theoretically this is a book that everyone should read.

However, either Risen or his editor made the poor decision to put the boring chapters first. Chapters one through six are eye-glazingly dull unless you are deep into government or deep into conspiracy theory. These chapters are almost inaccessible to Joe and Jane Citizen. Risen discusses policies, meetings, and key figures that you've never heard of in your life, and acts as if you are on a familiar first-name basis with them.

The last three chapters of the book are stellar, accessible and interesting to the average citizen, and very well-written and hard-hitting. Why are these chapters buried at the back of the book? Risen or his editor should have chosen to lead with one of these punch-to-the-gut chapters in order to hook readers and get them interested early on. Instead, he leads with the most eye-glazing stuff, leading many readers to give up on the book before they even get to 'the good stuff.'

The last three chapters are
Chapter 7 about torture and Guantánamo Bay.
Chapter 8 about the restriction of freedom of movement of American citizens due to terrorist threat.
Chapter 9 about Internet data collecting and wiretapping done by the U.S. government, touching on Roark and Snowden.

These three chapters MAKE THE BOOK. I read the first six chapters and was like, "I'm giving this book one star. I can barely keep my eyes open while reading this." However, then I got to Chapter 7 and suddenly I was extremely engaged and interested, and this continued until the book ended. For the life of my I cannot understand why Risen chose to get off to such a poor start.

So it's hard for me to choose how to rate this. I genuinely believe every American should read the last three chapters of this book, whether they end up agreeing with Risen or not. He's very knowledgeable and he has some excellent points about what is going on in America today. On the other hand, the first six chapters (while they might be fascinating to people who are more 'in the know' in American government) are not constructed to interest or engage the average American citizen.

The entire book as a whole will leave you paranoid and very upset. However, I think it's important. I would recommend it with the caveat that you turn to the back and start reading the last three chapters first, then decide if you want to continue / finish / bother with the first six depending on if they interest you or not. It's almost as if Risen has written 9 individual NY Times pieces and put them all together with no coherence, and the last three are the best.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am the first to admit that it can be very difficult to determine truth from spin. Having said that, this book is just too important to dismiss. The case laid out in this book is nothing short of the dismantling of the American way of life.

Do I know if his claims and explanations are accurate? No, I have no way of determining that with such limited information. However, the growing body of evidence suggests that we had better listen to Mr. Risen very closely.

This is my true concern ; Not that the word won't get out, but that nobody will be listening.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is there anything more awful being a shady peddler to the war industry? This book highlights some of the pieces of work who make the thing run. However, I didn't love that it was mostly personal profiles and fewer industry analysis. How do these contracts get made and funded? What are the various networks of companies involved? Etc.

[Bobbi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read about flagrant, needless spending, corruption, and malfeasance around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is filled with terrible anecdotes that will haunt you, from the literal truckload of money shipped to Baghdad that ended up in a cave somewhere in Lebanon to the sad electrocution of a US soldier in a barracks where subcontractor had failed to properly install the wiring (because subcontractors and contractors were all over the place in Iraq not doing the work for which they'd been hired). Here too are the soldiers poisoned by open pit waste burning because the food/supplies contractor failed to follow environmental mandates. They were supposed to use incinerators, but that would have cost money! In other cases, we meet hooligans and con men worming their way into the Homeland Security and military contracting honey pots, a cast of characters that Elmore Leonard might have made up - except they're real. Meet the war machine corporate welfare cases. They're on a much bigger payroll than you ever imagined.

[John Behle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is hard-hitting, exposed truth journalism by a writer willing to go to prison for the honor of the right of free speech.

This book covers many topics, from shipping $100 bills by the C-17 full to Iraq, the definition of torture to warrantless wiretaps of Americans. The summation of the War On Terror, now 13 years in, in Risen's words, could be called, "Where Is The Money In It For Me."

Read this book and get ready to be wind whipped by his revelations of Greed, Power, and Endless War. Risen does not hold back. He is willing to Pay Any Price.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every American should read this book, regardless of their political affiliations or preferences.

James Risen's previous book, "State of War", was an eye-opener. This one is not quite as explosive, but has information of which every citizen should be aware.

He puts his freedom on the line to get these stories to us. Thanks, James.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

James Risen has an ax to grind with the Bush and Obama administrations due to their lengthy legal battles relating to an earlier book written by Risen. Unfortunately Risen is unable to set aside his personal animosities in this polemic against the U.S. national security apparatus.

Pay Any Price is bloated with loaded adjectives aimed at Risen’s bad guys to the point of annoying distraction. He treats the reader with no respect by using an overbearing style that shamelessly overwhelms the tone of the book. The unfortunate thing is that there are some interesting ideas and ugly truths that are worth knowing about. His section on the inability of torture to elicit valuable intelligence made me want to know more about the subject. From somebody else.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't say enough about this book. It's a piece of courageous and well researched writing that exposes things about our government that need to be known. Too often we shrug these things off. The least we can do is to keep ourselves informed.

[Scott Whitmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regardless of your political persuasion, you should feel some anger after reading James Risen’s Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War.

The fact is the U.S. Government’s Global War on Terror has made more than a few people very rich. Seemingly overnight a new security industry sprung up to support the — admirable and understandable in light of 9/11 — aims of keeping Americans safe and getting the bad guys. From intelligence collection and analysis to killer drones, the U.S. Government opened the coffers to anyone with a promising idea or piece of software. And now, 15 years later, those benefiting from this industry have a clear interest in ensuring the Global War on Terror continues.

Divided into three sections outlined in the subtitle Greed, Power and Endless War, the author tells of events that would seem unbelievable if found in a novel, but then real life often is. Charlatans hawking phony programs and when their unfulfilled promises were questioned by one agency they simply move to another in the alphabet-soup world of Homeland Security. Real-life Catch-22 situations where secret programs funded through “black” budgets are immune from oversight. Inside the government, there was waste, mismanagement, and even some outright theft.

Set aside your feelings about the Iraq War started in 2003 for a moment and consider this:

Within weeks of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square in April 2003, a televised event that came to symbolize the ouster of Saddam’s regime in Iraq by the U.S.-led military coalition, unmarked trucks started backing up to the loading docks at the East Rutherford Operations Center. There, they were filled end to end with dozens of pallets of shrink-wrapped $ 100 bills. The trucks then moved out, down the New Jersey Turnpike, carrying billions of dollars in cash. … Between $ 12 and $ 14 billion, mostly in $ 100 bills, was taken from East Rutherford and flown into the war zone of Iraq in 2003 and 2004, with virtually no supervision or safeguards. Another $ 5.8 billion was sent from the New York Federal Reserve to Baghdad by electronic funds transfers. All told, approximately $ 20 billion was sent to Iraq without any clear orders or direction on how the money was to be used. The controls on the money were so lax that few credible records exist of exactly how much cash there was or where the cash went once it arrived in Baghdad. Almost certainly, a portion of it ended up in the hands of some of the most powerful Iraqi leaders of the post-Saddam era. Billions of dollars in cash were wasted. And billions more simply disappeared.

— Risen, James (2014-10-14). Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (pp. 4-5). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

I suspect those on the right, politically, will dismiss Risen as simply a member of the “lame-stream media” but he is careful to point out programs started by the Bush administration were continued and in many cases expanded under President Obama. Yes, the Bush folks lost those billions in Iraq but the Obama folks have made their own costly mistakes; Risen, ever the investigative journalist who cares only about the truth, spares neither side.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

It feels a little *off* criticizing anything by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen, whose excellent investigative work into (among other things) all of the horribleness within the CIA and NSA over the past fifteen years or so is about 8,000 times more interesting and important than anything I'll accomplish in my own professional life. But whatever: Pay Any Price basically isn't the book it promises to be--or, maybe more honestly, the book I want it to be--which is an exploration on how greed and a lust for power by the very few have actually been the driving forces behind what has become, since 9/11, an endless, global war "on terrorism". Put another way: our national-security-industrial-complex is just too profitable, and too much of a political and/or bureaucratic king-maker, for anyone with any kind of power (or ambitions thereof) to seriously consider either 1. living in actual peace 2. restoring the civil liberties that were stolen from us in the name of security back in 2001. It's not about protecting people, not really, not any more; it's about making money. I believe that all of that is true, and was excited that here was a whole book by a respected journalist backing me up! But although Risen says these things, in welcome bursts of outrage, several times throughout Pay Any Price, he generally doesn't deliver with specific content. Instead we get, for example, and for at least an entire third of the book, the story of the somewhat shady guy whose name I can't remember because, really, he didn't do anything that was particularly interesting or scandalous, just maybe worked for lawyers bringing a civil suit on behalf of "the 9/11 families" against the Saudi Arabian government and, at the same time, the NSA, or maybe the FBI. It was unclear for most of these 100 pages why we were even talking about this, other than Risen thought it would lead somewhere explosive, reported the hell out of it, and didn't want to waste all of that time and effort. The guy is somewhat emblematic of the greedy (and ineffective) national security mercenary that has become a familiar figure in certain parts of our planet (Pakistan, Iraq, Washington DC), but I almost quit Pay Any Price a couple of times during this part. Better was the stuff on KBR, a one-time subsidiary of Halliburton who received an exclusive contract to do just about every rear-echelon thing for the US Armed Forces, and made (and continues to make) billions and billions when we went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, with almost no oversight or accountability. That their shoddy work and, for example, open burn pits have directly resulted in the deaths and disability of soldiers doesn't seem to matter; they still pocket a huge amount of our tax dollars. But this, like all the big-picture material in Pay Any Price, ended way too soon, and then it was back to, for example, a detailed account of several seemingly minor figures in the NSA meta-data domestic spying scandal, for which you should watch the excellent documentary on Edward Snowden Citizenfour instead.

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone concerned about the development of the military-industrial complex that has developed over the years, especially since 9/11. Much of the impetus behind the continued funding of Homeland Security is fear, and billions of dollars a year are spent, or more accurately, wasted in overkill. We are not safer, as a result, we are just poorer as a nation and our freedoms have been increasingly curtailed.

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pay Any Price is one the most cynical and darkly funny titles for a recent book. It sounds like a patriotic assertion ("I'll pay any price to defend my people!"), but actually refers to the American public's apparently willingness to pay for... huge amounts of corruption, graft, outright theft, and surveillance in the name of the war on terror. If not willingness, then mere acquiescence, which works out as well in the end.

This James Risen book is a collection of articles, really, accounts of several crimes or scams surrounding America's post-9-11 global war. Stories describe $20 billion in cash which went missing in Iraq, a shady transportation service, a mysterious contractor, a seeming IT wizard whose well-capitalized products never actually worked, a building shared by two cross-border towns cleaved by new security arrangements, a fumbling if not criminally dangerous private contractor, and a torturer wracked by guilt. These are snapshots of a historical moment, small or at most medium-impact tales of what we just lived through and still endure.

A key argument of Pay Any Price is that the federal government, business, and parts of civil society combine to enable these crimes. Risen identifies some "new oligarchs" (54ff), entrepreneurs who made fortunes by exploiting war's chaos and a government's well-funded credulity. He offers new background on the NSA's mass surveillance of Americans, which was impractical before September 11th (230ff). He argues for the complicity of the American Psychological Association in torture (193ff). Many of the bad actors spent time in the financial sector, intriguingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your perspective).

Heroic figures brighten up this sad account, or sometimes. Risen takes care to develop stories of whistleblowers stymied or blocked, or who simply died before success could happen. He celebrates those who actually got the word out about malfeasance.

One of those figures is himself, although Risen barely toots his horn at all. His account of being harassed by two presidents occupies only the four-page Afterword.

One unheroic person in Pay Any Price is president Obama. Risen portrays the Bush(2) administration as the fountainhead of war on terror mistakes and crimes, but he also denounces the current president for largely continuing or expanding the bad policies of the Bush(2) administration.

As president, Barack Obama quickly abandoned many of his 2008 campaign positions on national secuity and worked assiduously to burnish his reputation as a warrior president... He continues most of the national security policies of George W. Bush, and even intensified the use of some of the most controversial... (225)

Obama performed a neat political trick: he took the national security state that had grown to such enormous size under Bush and made it his own. In the process, Obama normalized the post-9/11 measures that Bush had implemented on a haphazard, emergency basis. Obama's great achievement -- or great sin -- was to make the national security state permanent. (xiii)

In the years since [2008] the government's surveillance capabilities have expanded radically, as the NSA documents leaked by Snowden reveal. In fact, the ability of both government and business to track the daily activities of Americans, in something close to real time, has been developed, refinsed, and expanded over the past few years, with little public debate. A decade of technological change and the rise of social media have shredded the traditional concept of privacy in America. One NSA contrctor observed that Americans are now living in a "post-privacy age". (262)

[A] draconian crackdown on leaks by the Obama administration has made it far more difficult for the public to find out how electronic surveillance and domestic spying have grown. (263-4)

This stuff is now bipartisan, in short.

Risen lays all of this out with very clear prose. Each chapter neatly unspools a narrative thread. It's a cliche to say this, but the book reads like parts of a thriller. Very accessible.

That prose does not admit much emotion, being fairly clipped. This shouldn't dissuade the reader from feeling pity and horror. The story of a torturer so wracked by guilt that he wins full disability from the Veterans Administration (for having been a torturer!) is one such sad account. The failure of Diane Roarke to inform the public - heck, to tell most of the government - about domestic spying, and the way the state retaliated on her retirement, is heartbreaking and perhaps chastening.

Recommended. We need more Risen.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pay Any Price is a collection of investigative pieces centered around the financial and moral corruption engendered by America's "war on terror", which, as Risen points out, is really a war on decency, normalcy, privacy, government transparency, and human rights and democracy generally. In each chapter, Risen addresses specific areas of corruption embarked upon by the Bush Administration - torture, flushing away of billions of dollars given to con men or simply "unaccounted for"(and winding up in pallets in a bunker in Lebanon), the cancerous spread of the security state, massive spying on US citizens - and often continued by Obama. If you want to be outraged, just pick up this book. As long as the US continues to believe the best way to solve foreign and domestic problems is by throwing billions of dollars and mindless violence at a problem without any oversight or responsibility, we will continue to screw up our country and the rest of the world.

[Wesley Roth · Rating 2 out of 5]

"This was an eye-opening book on the explosive growth of the "homeland-security complex" during the Bush and Obama administrations. Risen provides solid reporting on this topic. Anyone interested in more oversight and reigning in government spending should read this book and Risen' s reporting."

Disclaimer: I won a copy of this book in a Goodreads Giveaway, but that had no influence in my review.

[Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to put this book down at times because it got me so riled up... If you want to have the inside scoop on what happened to 4 trillion dollars that we have waisted since 9/11 this book is for you. Very interesting stuff...

[Robert Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great book by Mr. Risen who once again proves Power corrupts and in the wrong hands, really corrupts. I have a very high regard for Americans and especially the people in this book who stood up and tried to tell the truth despite the personal cost. Great read.

[Lizanne Whitlow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Should be required reading for all Americans. Distressing information.

Be sure to see "Killing the Messenger" with Jeremy Renner while you're catching up on our recent shenanigans.

[Raghu Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author James Risen's book shows us Americans that the `war on terror' is actually much like the famous Matryoshka Nesting Russian doll. If the outer most doll is the War on Terror, then the nested inner dolls are fear mongering, profiteering, corruption of power, suppression of democratic rights and finally spying on one's own citizens like what an authoritarian state does. This book is a scathing indictment on how the `war on terror' has morphed over the past fifteen years into a greed for piles of money, power and scant respect for law by external contractors as well as the State apparatus like the Courts, the NSA, the CIA and the Law Enforcement Agencies. Pursuing terrorists becomes a hugely profitable enterprise when it is accompanied by an unlimited amount of money for which there is no oversight and accountability. All that is required is to create an atmosphere of fear, secrecy, intimidation and surveillance so that monitoring is minimized and breaking one more law becomes that much easier.

When the national landscape is dominated by such fear, a democratic society deteriorates, with people self-censoring themselves and being afraid to speak out the truth and dreading consequences if they did so. The author shows convincingly that this is what has happened to us in the US since the beginning of the 21st century and that there is no end in sight yet as the `cyber-industrial complex' is gearing up to prolong this endless war for another decade, ostensibly to fight the ISIS. This book is in the finest traditions of investigative journalism and author James Risen deserves to be bracketed with legendary journalists such as Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Seymour Hersh.

In the first part titled `Greed', there is the stunning revelation that as much as 12 to 14 billion of dollars were loaded into the cargo of C17 air force transport planes , all in piles of $100 bills, from a Federal Reserve warehouse in New Jersey and delivered to Baghdad, mainly to rebuild the country after the war. Lack of supervision and accountability and prevalence of rampant corruption resulted in two billion dollars out of them being carted out and stashed away in secret bunkers in Lebanon along with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold, stolen from Iraqi banks and government in one of the major robberies ever in history. Even though both the Bush and Obama administrations knew about it, they wouldn't go after it, ostensibly out of fear of what the sordid affair would expose.

The book documents a number of individual scamsters, con men and hustlers who profited from the war as well. Dennis Montgomery, a self-styled software expert, scammed the White House, the Intelligence and the Defense Dept into believing that he had developed technology to decode messages from Al-Qaeda, hidden in Al-Jazeera TV broadcasts. Based on this, the US government even prevented Air France flights bound from Paris to the US. Ultimately, fed-up French intelligence officials asked CIA to share with them the 'secret intelligence' and then exposed it all as a scam because they found that there were not enough pixels in the Al-Jazeera TV broadcasts to hide any coded al-Qaeda messages!
Then, we have the case of Mike Asimos, who cashed out on the `counter-terrorism gold rush`, as the author puts it beautifully, by fronting a Palestinian named Nazem Houchaimi to set up an intelligence operation in Jordan and letting him indulge in anything from money laundering to illicit arms trading, costing the Pentagon hundreds of thousands of dollars.

However, the book is not all about crooks and scamsters alone. There were a number of conscientious whistle blowers as well, who tried tracking down all these scams and more. Stuart Bowen of the US Treasury tried to go after the billions hidden in Lebanon but was stone-walled all through. Diane Roark's case provides a background as to why Edward Snowden later ran away to Hong Kong and Moscow in order to expose the unconstitutional actions of the NSA. Roark was a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, who was convinced after her discussions with Bill Binney, a NSA senior manager, that the NSA spying operations on US citizens was in violation of the Constitution. She tried to stop the snooping on US citizens by bringing the matter to both Republican and Democratic members on the Intelligence committee, then to various branches of the government and even to a District court judge but all to no avail. She even tried her hand with a federal judge as well as officials at the CIA and the White House. It turned out that practically everyone was already in on this program and all they wanted Roark to do was to keep quiet without stirring the pot. There were also a couple of other NSA officials namely Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe, both of whom tried to stop the NSA snooping but ended up with retaliation by the government and eventually getting their careers ruined.

When one takes a step back and looks at it all, it seems there has been a conscious effort during the past fifteen years of `war on terror' to hoodwink the people with false information and get them to support a greater and greater Orwellian state in not only the US, but in other Western democracies as well. Consider the following: We were told that Iraq had WMDs and so a case was made to go to war and destroy that nation, only to find that Saddam Hussein was telling the truth after all on the WMDs. We were told that the NSA spies only on foreign countries but then it panned out that it was spying on all of us, including law-abiding citizens, illegally. We were told that we don't torture prisoners but found that the CIA was doing it anyway in Bagram and Abu Ghraib. We were told that torture was necessary to enable CIA to get valuable intelligence but now the Senate committee report says that it wasn`t true. One would think that all this would make the system stop its deception.

But, no! The Obama administration was at it again last year in Syria. Chemical weapons using sarin gas was found to have been used on civilians in the town of Ghouta in Syria in 2013. The US, French and the British governments blamed the Bashar-al-Assad regime for using chemical weapons on civilians, killing 1429 people, including 426 children. John Kerry used this in Congress to drum up support for bombing Syrian government positions. However, not everyone bought the story. Two independent investigations, one by journalist Seymour Hersh and another by MIT experts Prof. Theodore Postol and Richard Lloyd , cast major doubts on various aspects of the theory, pointing to possibilities of Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda having carried out the attack.

After reading this book, one wonders whether one can trust the government or the corporate media to tell the truth again. Author James Risen shows both NY Times and Washington Post in poor light as cheerleaders for what he calls the Cyber-industrial complex. How many of us have the time and capabilities to research every major pronouncement of the government or the corporate media? By default, the average citizen will be forced to distrust the leaders he elects and much of the press as well, which is not a healthy trend for democracy.

As I finished the book, it made me realize and appreciate the enormous courage and principled stands of whistle blowers like Edward Snowdon, Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald of `The Guardian`. Author James Risen himself has been hauled over the coals by the administration for his previous book `State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration'. This book is an important reminder to all of us that democracy will degenerate in a culture of fear, surveillance and secrecy and it is ever more necessary to commit ourselves to stand up against such a trend. One must not forget Glenn Greenwald's argument, which I am paraphrasing here: "...even during the cold war, when we were ranged against a nuclear powered enemy, it was necessary to get a court order to open our postal mails or listen in on our phone conversations. How come then we can't have those same civil liberties when we are confronted by a bunch of guys sitting in a cave in Afghanistan, using fairly primitive weapons by comparison?"

[David Szatkowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

While a bit dated, much of the book considers actions of the Bush and Obama administrations, the points the book makes are as relevant now as then. The discussion of security vs liberty, what is necessary, what is showmanship, what is outright waste is a worthy and necessary public discussion. I think this book contributes to that discourse. I would encourage anyone to read this book and consider seriously the implications and actions of our society.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazone

Essential reading

Pay Any Price, the title of James Risen's new book documenting the U.S. security state, has a number of significances, from the ironic to the literal.

The irony comes from the title's origin. JFK's inaugural address in 1961 is best known for his "ask not" challenge to America, but the speech also contained this passage: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

In "Pay Any Price," Risen shows with disheartening detail that much of the price of securing the U.S. against the enemies who brought down the "twin towers" and ended the nation's illusions of invulnerability has been "the survival and success of liberty." In the years since 9/11, the U.S. has become a country where security trumps liberty.

Another, more concrete way that the title describes the current state of American affairs is the enormous, almost unfathomable cost of assembling and maintaining the new security state. Risen writes that "By 2014, three years after Osama bin Ladens death, there was still no sign that the business of fear was slowing down. One research and consulting firm predicted that the global market for homeland security and public safety would continue to undergo dramatic growth for years to come, and would reach $546 billion by 2022."

Direct spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been more than compounded by the billions of dollars that have been distributed to government, military, and (preferentially) corporate entities dedicated to protecting Americans by enclosing them in a fortress of fear, distrust, and surveillance. As Risen writes: "Fear sells. Fear has convinced the White House and Congress to pour hundreds of billions of dollar smore money than anyone knows what to do with into counterterrorism and homeland security programs, often with little management or oversight, and often to the detriment of the Americans they are supposed to protect."

The third meaning of the phrase "pay any price" is less directly calculable but far more troubling. The public ideals of the United States have been thoroughly violated by drone strikes, rendition, torture, corruption, and, not often discussed but greatly significant, "neocon" politics and market-driven capitalism.

Perhaps Risen's most telling criticism is the fact that the "war on terror" has become a permanent, self-perpetuating crisis, a never-ending conflict in which Americans accept their loss of liberty, of privacy and freedom of action, as the price of a dubious security. Starting when George W. Bush decided to treat 9/11 as a military attack and not a criminal act, this eternal battle has now become self-propelled and self-justifying. And Barack Obama, who was so quickly and so thoroughly recruited into the culture of conflict in the American government that the prison at Guantanamo, due to be closed as his first executive action, is still open almost six years later, has only perpetuated and strengthened the fear-driven security state of which he is the titular head. Risen writes:

"President Obama's decision to launch airstrikes against ISIS in the summer of 2014 raised the potential for a completely new war on terror, without ever having declared an end to the previous one. It also signified a questionable whack-a-mole strategy, in which the U.S. targets Islamic militant insurgencies before they ever attack the United States, just in case they might do so in the future. That strategy would almost guarantee that those groups will eventually turn against us, and that the endless war on terror would remain endless."

It's one thing to make claims like these, quite another to prove them. This Risen does, using his journalistic skills and sources to document his charges, working primarily through extensively detailed exemplary cases. Instead of just tossing around the usual liberal complaints against the security state, Risen gives us the nuts and bolts of government documents, court cases, military reports, and interviews with principal players. This rich detailing raises his accusations above protest to the level of the best investigative reporting.

"Pay Any Price" is an important and troubling documentation of our neighbour nation's self-harming. It should be read by everyone who wishes to get beyond the hype and the rhetoric and see the true scope of the costs of the permanent "war on terror."

ronbc

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Better Than His Last One - Imagine What He'll Write From Prison

When New York Times report James Risen published his previous book, State of War, the Times ended its delay of over a year and published his article on warrantless spying rather than be scooped by the book. The Times claimed it hadn't wanted to influence the 2004 presidential election by informing the public of what the President was doing. But this week a Times editor said on 60 Minutes that the White House had warned him that a terrorist attack on the United States would be blamed on the Times if one followed publication, so it may be that the Times' claim of contempt for democracy was a cover story for fear and patriotism. The Times never did report various other important stories in Risen's book.

One of those stories, found in the last chapter, was that of Operation Merlin, possibly named because only reliance on magic could have made it work, in which the CIA gave nuclear weapon plans to Iran with a few obvious changes in them. This was supposedly supposed to somehow slow down Iran's nonexistent efforts to build nuclear weapons. Risen explained Operation Merlin on Democracy Now this week and was interviewed about it by 60 Minutes which managed to leave out any explanation of what it was. The U.S. government is prosecuting Jeffrey Sterling for allegedly being the whistleblower who served as a source for Risen, and subpoenaing Risen to demand that he reveal his source(s).

The Risen media blitz this week accompanies the publication of his new book, Pay Any Price. Risen clearly will not back down. This time he's made his dumbest-thing-the-CIA-did-lately story the second chapter rather than the last, and even the New York Times has already mentioned it. We're talking about a "torture works," "Iraq has WMDs," "let's all stare at goats" level of dumbness here. We're talking about the sort of thing that would lead the Obama administration to try to put somebody in prison. But it's not clear there's a secret source to blame this time, and the Department of So-Called Justice is already after Sterling and Risen.

Sterling, by the way, is unheard of by comparison with Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden or the other whistleblowers Risen reports on in his new book. The public, it seems, doesn't make a hero of a whistleblower until after the corporate media has made the person famous as an alleged traitor. Sterling, interestingly, is a whistleblower who could only be called a "traitor" if it were treason to expose treason, since people who think in those terms almost universally will view handing nuclear plans to Iran as treason. In other words, he's immune from the usual attack, but stuck at the first-they-ignore-you stage because there's no corporate interest in telling the Merlin story.

So what's the new dumbness from Langley? Only this: a gambling-addicted computer hack named Dennis Montgomery who couldn't sell Hollywood or Las Vegas on his software scams, such as his ability to see content in videotape not visible to the naked eye, sold the CIA on the completely fraudulent claim that he could spot secret al Qaeda messages in broadcasts of the Al Jazeera television network. To be fair, Montgomery says the CIA pushed the idea on him and he ran with it. And not only did the CIA swallow his hooey, but so did the principles committee, the membership of which was, at least for a time: Vice President Dick Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, So-Called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Tenet plays his usual role as dumber-than-a-post bureaucrat in Risen's account, but John Brennan is noted as having been involved in the Dennis Montgomery lunacy as well. The Bush White House grounded international flights as a result of Montgomery's secret warnings of doom, and seriously considered shooting planes out of the sky.

When France demanded to see the basis for grounding planes, it quickly spotted a steaming pile of crottin de cheval and let the U.S. know. So, the CIA moved on from Montgomery. And Montgomery moved on to other contracts working on other horse droppings for the Pentagon. And nothing shocking there. "A 2011 study by the Pentagon," Risen points out, "found that during the ten years after 9/11, the Defense Department had given more than $400 billion to contractors who had previously been sanctioned in cases involving $1 million or more in fraud." And Montgomery was not sanctioned. And we the people who enriched him with millions weren't told he existed. Nothing unusual there either. Secrecy and fraud are the new normal in the story Risen tells, detailing the fraudulent nature of drone murder profiteers, torture profiteers, mercenary profiteers, and even fear profiteers. companies hired to generate hysteria. So forcefully has the dumping of money into militarism been divorced in public discourse from the financial burden it entails that Risen is able to quote Linden Blue, vice chairman of General Atomics, criticizing people who take money from the government. He means poor people who take tiny amounts of money for their basic needs, not drone makers who get filthy rich off the pretense that drones make the world safer.

The root of the problem, as Risen sees it, is that the military and the homeland security complex have been given more money than they can reasonably figure out what to do with. So, they unreasonably figure out what to do with it.

This is compounded, Risen writes, by fear so extreme that people don't want to say no to anything that might possibly work even in their wildest dreams, or what Dick Cheney called the obligation to invest in anything with a 1% chance.

isen told Democracy Now that military spending reminded him of the Wall Street banks. In his book he argues that the big war profiteers have been deemed too big to fail.

Risen tells several stories in Pay Any Price, including the story of the pallets of cash. Of $20 billion shipped to Iraq in $100 bills, he writes, $11.7 billion is unaccounted for, lost, stolen, misused, or dumped into a failed attempt to buy an election for Ayad Allawi. Risen reports that some $2 billion of the missing money is actually known to be sitting in a pile in Lebanon, but the U.S. government has no interest in recovering it. After all, it's just $2 billion, and the military industrial complex is sucking down $1 trillion a year from the U.S. treasury.

When Risen, like everyone else, cites the cost of recent U.S. wars ($4 trillion over a decade, he says), I'm always surprised that nobody notices that it is the wars that justify the "regular" "base" military spending of another $10 trillion each decade at the current pace. I also can't believe Risen actually writes that "to most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable." What? Of course it's extremely profitable for certain people who exert inordinate influence on the government. But "most of America"? Many (not most) people in the U.S. have jobs in the war industry, so it's common to imagine that spending on war and preparations for war benefits an economy.

In reality, spending those same dollars on peaceful industries, on education, on infrastructure, or even on tax cuts for working people would produce more jobs and in most cases better paying jobs, with enough savings to help everyone make the transition from war work to peace work. Military spending radically increases inequality and diverts funding from services that people in many less-militarized nations have. I also wish that Risen had managed to include a story or two from that group making up 95% of U.S. war victims: the people of the places where the wars are waged.

But Risen does a great job on veterans of U.S. torture suffering moral injury, on the extensiveness of waterboarding's use, and on a sometimes comical tale of the U.S. government's infiltration of a lawsuit by 9/11 families against possible Saudi funders of 9/11, a story, part of which is given more context in terms of its impact in Afghanistan in Anand Gopal's recent book. There's even a story with some similarity to Merlin regarding the possible sale of U.S.-made drones to U.S. enemies abroad.

These SNAFU collection books have to be read with an eye on the complete forest, of course, to avoid the conclusion that what we need is war done right or, for that matter, Wall Street done right. We don't need a better CIA but a government free of the CIA. That the problems described are not essentially new is brought to mind, for me, in reading Risen's book, by the repeated references to Dulles Airport. Still, it is beginning to look as if the Dulles brothers aren't just a secretive corner of the government anymore, but the patron saints of all Good Americans. And that's frightening. Secrecy is allowing insanity, and greater secrecy is being employed to keep the insanity secret. How can it be a "State Secret" that the CIA fell for a scam artist who pretended to see magical messages on Al Jazeera? If Obama's prosecution of whistleblowers doesn't alert people to the danger, at least it is helping sell Jim Risen's books, which in turn ought to wake people up better than a middle-of-the-night visit in the hospital from Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card.

There's still a thin facade of decency to be found in U.S. political culture. Corrupt Iraqi politicians, in Risen's book, excuse themselves by saying that the early days of the occupation in 2003 were difficult. A New York Times editor told 60 Minutes that the first few years after 9/11 were just not a good time for U.S. journalism. These should not be treated as acceptable excuses for misconduct. As the earth's climate begins more and more to resemble a CIA operation, we're going to have nothing but difficult moments. Already the U.S. military is preparing to address climate change with the same thing it uses to address Ebola or terrorism or outbreaks of democracy. If we don't find people able to think on their feet, as Risen does while staring down the barrel of a U.S. prison sentence, we're going to be in for some real ugliness.

David Swanson

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Part II below

[Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

From http://weeksnotice.blogspot.com/2014/...

Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen's Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (2014) is an angry book, and you'll get annoyed--you'd better get annoyed--reading it. The book's core message can be summed up as follows:

"A decade of fear-mongering has brought power and wealth to those who have been the most skillful at hyping the terrorist threat" (p. 203).

The post-9/11 period, and especially the Iraq War, has destroyed many thousands of lives, greatly damaged the civil liberties of average Americans, all the while making many criminals, snake oil salesmen and shysters rich. It's this last point that Risen probes in particular, using investigative journalism to show how the U.S. government showered billions of dollars with almost no oversight to anyone who could lend support to the Global War on Terror.

He shows how we get "unsmiling men with shaved heads" and a testosterone-pumped sense of self-righteousness who are empowered to push people around in the name of national security. Abroad these same kinds of men torture and kill. Resistance will bring you threats and/or imprisonment. Meanwhile, the government has stripped away rights and spies on everyone without restriction.

He write about how the American Psychological Association abets torture to maintain government contracts; architects focus on security for the same reason; people work for shady private contractors because they're showered in cash from the US government; self-proclaimed terrorist experts go on TV spouting on about threats and thereby get contracting gigs; and we all dutifully do absurd things like meekly take off our shoes in order to get on airplanes. Talk back and you'll get arrested. Spread the truth and you will find, as Risen has, that the government will come after you.

Profiteering is nothing new, but the Bush Administration took it to entirely new criminal heights. Unfortunately, since then it doesn't matter who controls the White House or Congress--it goes on unchecked. And that's the really depressing conclusion of the book.

[William Kirkland · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my daily reading of the news coming from Washington D.C. and around the world I had thought it would be difficult to get more depressed about the governing classes of the United States: the just released Senate summary of U.S. torture, the torrent of revelations about governmental spying on citizens accused of nothing, the growing political power of a fabulously wealthy oligarchy, etc, etc. Well, I was wrong and I am. I’ve just finished James Risen’s Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War.

The book is divided into three sections: Greed, Power, and Endless War. Like the old saw goes — three creatures, each more frightening than the other. The fourth monster, though un-named, is almost as bad: sheer, blinding incompetence, the inability, or lack of capacity, to know what tools are at hand, to use them properly or organize them into coherent large-scale systems, the inability, or incapacity to create feedback systems to analyze failure and success in order to rectify and improve national security while lowering costs. The free-market ideology which has gripped the governing classes since the Reagan presidency has set entrepreneurs aflame with financial possibilities, often unsupervised or even understood by those paying their invoices. The good news is, and Risen is happy to present it, that there are some honest and brave folks who have stood up and tried to stop terrible policies or to raise the alarm The bad news, on top of the really bad news, is that they have by and large failed.

- See more at: http://www.allinoneboat.org/2014/12/1...

[Jared · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pay Any Price started out with a lot of promise, but ended up being something of a let-down. The whole premise behind the book is that many fortune (and fame) seekers have used the post 9/11 security apparatus as a means by which they can enrich themselves. Through the book, Risen provides various instances in which corporations, individuals, and government organizations have benefitted for the free-flowing of funds to prevent the next terror attack from occurring. The reader will be shocked to see how freely their tax dollars (and civil liberties) are easily given up under the pretense of greater security. The situation results in a 'gold rush' of sorts where certain people make off like bandits.

The accounts portrayed in the book are certainly eye-opening but there is not much new that hasn't been said better (or more thoroughly) elsewhere. Towards the end of the book I was convinced that the author had run out of material; likely a re-hash of his previous books. After I read the books's Afterword, I felt contempt for the author. In his closing remarks, Risen chose to tell the reader in a self-aggrandizing manner that he is essentially a journalistic martyr who was persecuted by the government for not revealing his sources and for bringing the NSA story to light.

Do yourself a favor and skip this one.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Following up on his 2006 publication State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, James Risen here concentrates on exposing, in many different facets, the immense costs of the still ongoing and seemingly endless US war on terror - in lives, in money, in humanity, and in personal freedoms. An eye-opener, whether you're familiar with the subjects he tackles or not. Am I appalled by what I've read here, regarding both stories I knew about and such I did not? Very much so. Am I surprised by any of them? Nope, not even a little. Like State of War, very much worth the read.

[Uwe Hook · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to many members of Congress, the U.S. can't afford to maintain our country's infrastructure, can't afford to provide even the most basic medical and dental care to our children, can't afford to provide decent health care to our veterans and senior citizens, can't afford to provide social security to poor elderly citizens, can't afford to provide college scholarships to deserving poor students, etc.
At the same time, Congress lavishes billions of dollars on the military-industrial complex and now the homeland security-industrial complex. Now Americans are spied upon by at least 15 different US government spy agencies, threatened at border crossings and at at checkpoints miles away from the border by Homeland Security agents, humiliated and x-rayed during the farce of "airport security theater" by the TSA agents, as we are slowly but surely being conditioned to be unquestioning sheep in a USA security state.
James Risen bravely investigates and reports on the outrageous frauds perpetrated on the people of the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks by virtually every level of the Federal government, especially Homeland Security. He reports that both Bush and mister "hope & change" Obama are equally to blame for these assaults on our freedom.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

All of my stars are awarded for the first three chapters of the book that sets up a hard-hitting expose in a series of stories. Then the book seems to fall off a high expectations cliff. There follows 4 more meandering stories that read like the slice-of-life stories that I usually skip in the Sunday Magazine. It is a Family Circus tour of our bureaucracy within a bureaucracy, wrapped in controversy, and law bending. I was hoping the final two, more timely pieces would teach me something. There is not much new in this book for anyone that hasn't lived in a mass media deflecting bubble in the past decade. Within a book format, I expect more time-agnostic and deeper analysis than the daily newspaper caliber writing (which in my not-so-humble-opinion is mostly drivel) that I find in the daily papers. There is no solution short of mass protest presented in what appears to be a structural, monied, bipartisan, conspiracy-level problem. If the author seeks to provoke any solution to the problem, a book of this type is not the most effective way to deliver to the masses or the bookish audience.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Risen is a controversial figure, so reading a whole book of his requires a little Suspension of Credulity. :-) But if even a fraction of what he reports is true, it's enough to make us question whether we really want to live in a "state of war" against all terrorists everywhere for the rest of our lives. Our children's lives. Our grandchildren's lives. He details corruption, questionable figures with outsize influence on policy, the damage done to people fighting the "war", and what it's causing us to become--the liberties we have let slip away with hardly a whimper. I figure he must be doing something right since the government is clearly trying to shut him up at any price. :-) Definitely worthwhile reading--are we really willing to pay ANY price? Hope this helps spur some discussion about what we really are after here.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Within the compilation if facts that are laid out, the same information was repeated enough times in the book to become annoying. The facts as presented are so very troublesome to comprehend as an American, regarding our government and those contractors who scammed so much money from we taxpayers. On top of that, leading to more mistrust of what goes on that, we the people, have no knowledge or power over. Most appalling though have been the cover ups regarding unnecessary deaths and injuries to our troops who were victims of lowlife government contractors most concerned with corruption and coverup than serving as helpful allies in our service to the troops. This book was hard to read, I had to put it down many times as it would make me feel very sick and sad and disgusted and angry.

[Iain · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Risen delivers a blow for blow account of the sacrifices to the freedoms enjoyed by Americans since 9/11 and the liberties the government Republican and Democratic have taken in the name of "protecting" those said freedoms. Risen shines a light onto the level of greed, corruption, and reactionary policy making that has engulfed the U.S. government over the past decade and a half. The amount of money spent without proper oversight or accountability in mind boggling. What is being done in the name of protecting democracy is at times insanely hypocritical. The title of the book "Pay Any Price", alluding to security, well one must ask, how high a price is a society of free people willing to pay in order to feel secure? The old mantra of "trust us" from people placed in authority is not acceptable as power needs be kept in check.

An excellent and revealing book.