BOOK REVIEW: 'State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Adm

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The New York Times reporter indicts the White House for the troubled state of the CIA and Afghanistan's degeneration into a narco-state.

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BOOK REVIEW
Looking closely at this tangle

By Tim Rutten Times Staff Writer January 20, 2006

'State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration'
James Risen Free Press: 242 pp., $26

James RISEN'S "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" is a damning and dismaying book.

Its underlying thesis is that the Bush administration has mucked up virtually everything it has touched when it comes to terrorism, the international Sunni Muslim insurgency created by jihadism and nuclear proliferation.

As a national security reporter for the New York Times, Risen has produced some of this era's best journalism on the Central Intelligence Agency and the dysfunctional relationship between the White House and the U.S. spy community.

"No other institution failed in its mission as completely during the Bush years as did the CIA," Risen writes. "It was already deeply troubled by the time he took office in 2001.... By the end of Bush's first term, the CIA looked like the government's equivalent of Enron, an organization whose bankruptcy triggered cries for reform."

Some of the counts supporting that indictment are now familiar ground: how the CIA enabled the administration to make the case for the invasion of Iraq by falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction as well as conducting warrantless electronic spying inside the United States by the National Security Agency at Bush's behest.

Still, Risen provides valuable and troubling detail on both those situations, particularly with regard to the treatment of intelligence and diplomatic professionals whose analysis contradicted what the White House wanted to hear. For example, the CIA's post-invasion station chief in Baghdad was dismissed when he insisted on telling the truth about how the overthrow of Hussein had plunged the country into chaos and had turned it, in fact, into a center for an Al Qaeda-backed insurgency with regional and global implications.<snip>