by CKR
If Risen is right, the US is in deep trouble. Our government is collecting our electronic communications, lying to us in multiple ways, losing Afghanistan to drugs, and giving blueprints of nuclear weapons to the Iranians.
The trouble is, it’s not possible to judge the truth of Risen’s allegations. Most of his sources are anonymous, as they obviously must be if the allegations are true. He identifies them as far as he can (from NSC, State, CIA, and NSA) and quotes authoritative people who were willing to go on the record with supporting material. Presumably he wants to protect his reputation. And we see news reports every day that support some of what Risen says.
But, as helmut says,
Of course, now no one knows up from down, day from night, good from bad.I’ve been feeling that way lately, too.
We’ve seen Judith Miller and Bob Woodward apparently protecting sources whose objective was to plant administration spin in the media. We’ve seen a government that is willing to plant propaganda at home (here, here, and here). We’ve seen the Washington Post ombudsman stonewall the fact she might have seemed just a little biased. And, of course, questions continue to swirl around Risen’s story itself and the long delay in publishing the NSA story in the Times.
Risen’s book is slender; I read it in a single evening. It has the feel of being written in a hurry. The support for assertions and completeness of the stories is highly variable. There are numerous copyediting problems including inconsistent handling of acronyms and spelling (Mukabarat and Mukabarrat in a single paragraph). Continuity between chapters is variable, and the later chapters in particular seem to be extended versions of individual news stories that the New York Times may have found not fit to print.
The obvious questions are
Why the delay in publishing the NSA story, then apparent hurry in publishing the book?
Why was this material not fit to print in the New York Times?
Since the initial uproar about Risen’s story on NSA eavesdropping and the delay imposed by the Times, we haven’t heard much from Risen or the Times. (Possibly more to come soon.) Risen has done a few book-tour-type interviews, and there have been a few words about disagreements between Risen and the Times that might result in legal action.
The stories Risen presents are, in the order in which they appear,
1. George Tenet’s development of his relationship with George Bush
2. Possible torture of Abu Zubaydah and other prisoners
3. NSA eavesdropping
4. Power relations within the Bush administration during the runup to the Iraq war
5. Intelligence gathering and analysis during the runup to the Iraq war
6. Recruitment of US-based relatives of Iraqis who might have been working on WMD and their findings
7. CIA reporting and intelligence gathering during and after the initial attack on Iraq
8. The lack of planning for the postwar period and reception of intelligence during that time
9. The rise of the opium industry in Afghanistan
10. Connections between Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden
11. The passing of nuclear weapons blueprints containing errors to Iranian operatives – MERLIN
Most of these stories have been covered to some degree by the media. Risen presents many new details. Two stories, numbers 6 and 11, haven’t been covered—the ones apparently not fit to print.
If thirty-some people were sent to Iraq before the war; if all returned with information that their relatives in Iraq were not working on WMD and knew that there were no significant WMD programs, that seriously undercuts the Bush administration claim that “everyone” believed that Iraq had stocks of chemical and biological weapons and was working on developing nuclear weapons. We need to hear more about this.
The idea of passing erroneous information to slow technical progress is not new. It is a species of disinformation. We may ask how much good information about nuclear weapons design was also passed in the erroneous blueprints, and whether this information was new to the Iranians. We are not likely to know much more about this for some time, perhaps many years, unless someone comes forward from the intelligence community or from Iran.
Neither of these reports has been substantiated by other sources. Risen is working from closely-protected information in the shadow of an administration whose penchant for overclassification is well known. This makes it extremely difficult to judge the quality of the information. So far, no Daniel Ellsberg has emerged with reams of reports.
It’s clear in many places in the book that the CIA’s story is being told, or at least the story of some CIA analysts. This is not an indication of truth or falsity; in a large and secretive organization, multiple stories may circulate that are mutually contradictory but individually have the ring of truth. Figuring out the truth may be difficult, even for an insider.
News stories have set Risen’s number of sources at twelve, a fairly large number of people willing to talk to a reporter about closely-held information. If Risen has followed responsible journalistic practice, he has confirmation among those sources for what he has published in this book.
I found that Risen answered my questions about how George Tenet managed to survive into an administration bound and determined to erase all traces of the previous one. He answered others of my questions about internal dynamics of the Bush administration.
But the book raises far more questions than it answers, compounded by the Times’s holding back the NSA story for a year. Byron Calame, the Times's Public Editor, seems to have disappeared since January 4, even though I pitched him a softball e-mail detailing the mistakes in their Sillamäe story. Perhaps it’s the threat of an investigation into the leaks that has the lawyers telling everyone to keep quiet. Perhaps it’s something legal between Risen and the Times.
There are many questions to be answered, and we must hope that Risen and others are pursuing them.