This is a roundup about the new book by James Risen, "State of War : The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration", published on January 3 and currently in the overall top 50 on Amazon and number 16 on the NYT nonfiction list. In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers reviews the book and offers additional commentary in his article, The Biggest Secret. He writes: Far from being a "vital tool," as described by President Bush, the program was a distracting time waster that sent harried FBI agents down an endless series of blind alleys chasing will-o'-the-wisp terrorists who turned out to be schoolteachers. And far from saving "thousands of lives," as claimed by Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2005, the NSA program never led investigators to a genuine terrorist not already under suspicion, nor did it help them to expose any dangerous plots. So why did the administration continue this lumbering effort for three years? Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly. ... The systematic exaggeration of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq and the flouting of FISA both required, and got, a degree of resolution in the White House that has few precedents in American history. The President has gotten away with it so far because he leaves no middle ground—cut him some slack, or prepare to fight to the death.
The book is also reviewed, here by Walter Isaacson, in today's New York Times. This explosive little book opens with a scene that is at once amazing and yet not surprising. It is riveting, anonymously sourced and feels slightly overdramatized, but it has the odious smell of truth. Risen appears to feel that if something is secret and interesting, it should be exposed. Risen's archvillain is George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, whom Risen portrays, through a brutal procession of leaked anecdotes, as so eager to be liked by Bush that he prostitutes his agency. So what are we to believe in a book that relies heavily on leaks from disgruntled sources? As long as we remember that the truth these days comes not as one pronouncement but as part of a process, we can properly value "State of War" for being not only colorful and fascinating, but also one of the ways that facts and historical narratives emerge in an information-age democracy. So let the process begin!
NYT offers an excerpt from the first chapter of "State of War": Charlie Allen, the CIA's assistant director for collection and a legendary figure within the agency, was the highest-ranking CIA official willing to try to do something about the problem. Allen had carved a unique niche for himself within the U.S. intelligence community. He looked for collection "gaps," intelligence targets that were not being adequately covered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. He realized that Iraqi WMD represented an enormous intelligence gap. While other top CIA officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt, dithered and failed to mount any serious operations to get more spies into Iraq to find out what was going on, Allen, an old hand who had little time for Tenet and the circle of yes-men and yes-women on Tenet's senior staff, began a renegade effort to search for new sources of information.
Robert Steele offers a five-star review at Amazon. | 
