On December 22, 1974, in a front-page article in the New York Times, Seymour M. Hersh broke the story of the domestic spying that was being carried out by the CIA during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.
The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed Government sources.
[...]
In addition, the sources said, a check of the C.I.A.’s domestic files ordered last year by R. Helms’s successor, James R. Schlesinger, produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities by members of the C.I.A. inside the United States, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping and the surreptitious inspection of mail.
Unlike another
Times reporter writing 40 years later, Hersh was not subpoenaed to reveal his sources. As a matter of fact, Idaho's Democratic senator, Frank Church, convened the committee that would bear his name and began investigating what the CIA had done to circumvent the law. Those were the days when our elected leaders actually did more than pay lip service to the Constitution.
As a result of what the Church Committee and Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate Committee discovered about domestic surveillance, as well as the covert assassination and government overthrow attempts and plans, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 became law.
How far have we come through the looking glass when leaked information of government wrongdoing no longer results in action to correct the wrongs uncovered, but instead focuses on destroying the lives of those brave enough to blow the whistle?
On December 16, 2005, after holding the story for over a year at the request of the Bush White House, the CIA, and the NSA, the New York Times finally published the news of the domestic wiretapping that was being done in the name of national security. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau collaborated on that story and tried twice to get the Times to publish it before Risen decided to take a leave and include the information in a book he was writing. That book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, exposed the illegal wiretapping as well as a botched attempt to derail the Iranian nuclear program by the CIA. It was the upcoming publication date of that book that forced the Times to publish the article.
The book has led to a prolonged legal battle between Risen and the federal government, under two different administrations, as he stubbornly refuses to reveal his sources. From Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War:
In 2009, when the new Obama administration continued the government’s legal campaign against me, I realized, in a very personal way, that the war on terror had become a bipartisan enterprise. America was now locked into an endless war, and its perverse and unintended consequences were spreading.
And so my answer —both to the government’s long campaign against me and to this endless war— is this new book, Pay Any Price.
Please follow me below the fold to learn more about his answer.
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
October 14, 2014
304 pages
In Pay Any Price, Risen condenses the last 13 years of the war on terror, what it has cost us, and who it has profited, into a big, fast-paced, eminently readable book. Using the stories of the individuals involved, he gives the war, and its price, a human face.
He starts with the $20 billion that was sent to Iraq, $12 to $14 billion of it on pallets of shrink-wrapped, $100 bills. Once the Coalition Provisional Authority moved in with its starry-eyed vision of a Republican capitalist utopia, representatives of the Treasury Department were moved out. And with their removal went any oversight or accounting for the billions of dollars sent to Iraq. We still don't know what happened to most of it, but investigators have located about a billion-and-a-half in a bunker in rural Lebanon. Neither the U.S. government nor the Iraqi government appears to be terribly concerned about the money and no attempt to recover it has been made.
As the war on terror progressed, an almost panicked Congress threw money at the intelligence agencies. Con men and contractors flooded the agencies, hoping to show them how to spend it.
Dennis Montgomery was one such. A failed gambler, he somehow managed to convince the CIA that he had a computer program that was capable of decoding the secret messages that al Qaeda was sending to its members in the banner of Al Jazeera broadcasts. Seriously. Osama bin Laden was controlling his network using the pixels in the on-screen graphics of Al Jazeera.
If that wasn't bizarre enough, George Tenet raced the raw intelligence that Montgomery provided to the White House, without any review or vetting by CIA analysts—which would be merely amusing and/or annoying, if it hadn't led to the grounding of a dozen airline flights to the U.S. over the 2003 Christmas holiday season. And to a White House discussion of the president's authority to shoot down civilian aircraft over the Atlantic.
Risen turns next to those who are the "true winners of the war on terror," the new oligarchs:
There is an entire class of wealthy company owners, corporate executives, and investors who have gotten rich by enabling the American government to turn to the dark side. ...
They are the beneficiaries of one of the largest transfers of wealth from public to private hands in American history. America’s richest discovered that the hottest way to make money was to get inside Washington’s national security apparatus. With new regulations, Wall Street is no longer quite as attractive as it was before the banking crisis, so the nation’s most clever men have targeted the steady flow of billions into counterterrorism programs. Washington’s partisan budget battles have left counterterrorism spending largely unscathed.
There are others who looked to the everlasting war on terror for power as much as for wealth. Like Michael Asimos. Hired as an investigator for the law firm that was suing the financiers of Osama bin Laden on behalf of the 9/11 families, he later claimed that Paul Wolfowitz hired him to infiltrate the law firm to provide intelligence for the Pentagon. His byzantine journey through the various intelligence services of our government, moving from one to the other, was made possible by the fierce secrecy of absolutely everything and the compartmentalization of intelligence within each agency.
KBR, once a part of Halliburton, was the largest of the defense contractors that allowed the United States to go to war without needing the draft. Supplying everything from faulty showers to hot dinners, contractors outnumbered U.S. troops. Being so large and having become so essential to the American war effort, no real attempts at oversight were successful. This was partly due to the friends KBR had in high places, the hopes of serving military officers for future employment, and the overwhelming scale of the outsourcing to private contractors that defeated auditors and contract managers.
It was a lawsuit brought by Cheryl Harris, whose son was electrocuted in one of the faulty showers that KBR installed in Iraq, that caused the contractor to fix this hazard to the troops. Using open burn pits, according to Risen, "KBR burned everything, from plastic bottles and food trash to computers, ammunition, oil, paint, medical waste, solvents, dead animals, batteries, appliances, and reportedly even amputated human body parts," and caused long-lasting damage to the lungs of the servicemen and women stationed nearby.
Arial view of the CIA Headquarters, Langley, VA
Risen looks at torture as a sanctioned activity of the United States government, all the way from the enlisted service members who were sent to places like Abu Ghraib as interrogators, and the price they paid, to those at the very top who profited handsomely from the program.
Risen profiles James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two psychologists who worked to develop torture techniques, using those of military's SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) that were never designed to elicit intelligence. The SERE techniques were based on the torture that was used by the North Koreans, Chinese, and Soviets. But those countries never used them to obtain accurate intelligence:
They had been designed to break men. They had been used to silence dissidents, to force false confessions out of political rivals and prisoners of war.
But that did not stop the CIA from contracting with Mitchell and Jensen for their services. Worse than the behavior of the two psychologists, however, were the changes made in the ethical code of the American Psychological Association that supported them and provided cover to the Bush administration.
In other words, a psychologist could engage in activities that the U.S. government said were legal— such as harsh interrogations— even if they violated the APA’s ethical standards. This change introduced the Nuremberg defense into American psychology—following lawful orders was an acceptable reason to violate professional ethics. The change in the APA’s ethics code was essential to the Bush administration’s ability to use enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees.
At home, we have gone from an open society to one in which barricades have been erected in the name of national security, a society in which fear has been stoked by those who stand to profit from it. Homeland Security has spent millions of dollars protecting the people of Vermont from Canadians who used to share their library. Our public buildings are protected by Jersey barricades and armed guards. Our police forces are equipped with military vehicles. And our peaceful protests are treated as terrorist threats and spied upon by the FBI.
FBI agents in New York and across the country conducted surveillance on the Occupy movement and shared information with businesses, universities, and local police and other law enforcement agencies. In Indianapolis, the FBI issued a “potential criminal activity alert” even before any protests were scheduled there. In Syracuse, New York, the Joint Terrorism Task Force sent information about Occupy protests to campus police at colleges in the region.
Headquarters of the NSA, Fort Meade, MD
But the master at spying on Americans is the NSA, and Risen devotes his final (and most powerful) chapter to what has happened to those who have tried to slow the loss of our Fourth Amendment protections. He carefully lays out the story of Diane Roark, whom he calls "the most courageous whistleblower of the post-9/11 era." A staff member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, she followed all of the proper channels in her attempt to expose the illegal operations of the NSA, to no avail.
Secrecy continues to shield the NSA from uncomfortable questions about the growing role of the agency and its contractors in data mining and the burgeoning field of cybersecurity. The only way the American public ever learns what the NSA is doing to them is from whistleblowers, including, most recently, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked documents about the rise of the NSA’s massive data-mining operations during the Obama administration.
We now have a society in which the government acts as if it has a right to spy on us but puts up a fierce battle to make sure that we never learn about its actions. And the Obama administration has been ardent in its prosecution of leakers, prosecuting more than all other administrations combined.
According to Gabe Rottman, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office:
Partially because of press freedom concerns, sentencing in media leak cases has historically been relatively light. Not so under President Obama. When it comes to sending these folks to jail, the Obama administration blows every other presidency combined out of the water—by a lot.
By my count, the Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution. It's important – and telling – to note that the bulk of that time is the 35 years in Fort Leavenworth handed down to Chelsea Manning.
Risen's future is still uncertain as he and his lawyers wait to learn if federal prosecutors still intend to subpoena him in the
Jeffery Sterling case scheduled to begin jury selection on January 8, 2015.
As for the illegal domestic wiretapping by the NSA, which was prohibited by FISA and other laws and regulations, no charges have been brought.