James Risen, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for exposing
the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, has long been one of the
nation’s most aggressive and adversarial investigative journalists. Over
the past several years, he has received at least as much attention for
being threatened with prison
by the Obama Justice Department (ostensibly) for refusing to reveal the
source of one of his stories—a persecution that, in reality, is almost certainly the vindictive by-product of the U.S. government’s anger over his NSA reporting.
He has published a new book on the War on Terror entitled Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War.
There have been lots of critiques of the War on Terror on its own
terms, but Risen’s is one of the first to offer large amounts of
original reporting on what is almost certainly the most overlooked
aspect of this war: the role corporate profiteering plays in ensuring
its endless continuation, and how the beneficiaries use rank
fear-mongering to sustain it.
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That alone makes the book very worth reading, but what independently
interests me about Risen is how he seems to have become entirely
radicalized by what he’s discovered in the last decade of reporting, as
well as by the years-long battle he has had to wage with the U.S.
government to stay out of prison. He now so often eschews the modulated,
safe, uncontroversial tones of the standard establishment reporter
(such as when he called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” and said about the administration’s press freedom attacks: “Nice to see the U.S. government is becoming more like the Iranian government”). He at times even channels radical thinkers, sounding almost Chomsky-esque when he delivered a multiple-tweet
denunciation—taken from a speech he delivered at Colby College—of how
establishment journalists cling to mandated orthodoxies out of fear:
It is difficult to recognize
the limits a society places on accepted thought at the time it is doing
it. When everyone accepts basic assumptions, there don’t seem to be
constraints on ideas. That truth often only reveals itself in
hindsight. Today, the basic prerequisite to being taken seriously in
American politics is to accept the legitimacy of the new national
security state. The new basic American assumption is that there really
is a need for a global war on terror. Anyone who doesn’t accept that
basic assumption is considered dangerous and maybe even a traitor. The
crackdown on leaks by the Obama administration has been designed to
suppress the truth about the war on terror. Stay
on the interstate highway of conventional wisdom with your journalism,
and you will have no problems. Try to get off and challenge basic
assumptions, and you will face punishment.
I spent roughly 30 minutes talking to Risen about the book, what he’s
endured in his legal case, attacks on press freedoms, and what is and
is not new about the War on Terror’s corporate profiteering. The
discussion can be heard on the player below, and a transcript is
provided. As Risen put it: “I wrote Pay Any Price as my answer to the government’s campaign against me.”
GREENWALD: This is Glenn Greenwald with The Intercept and I am speaking today with Jim Risen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who has released a new book, the title of which is Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. Hey Jim, thanks so much for taking some time to talk to me.
RISEN: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
GREENWALD:
My pleasure. So, I’ve read your entire book, and I have several
questions about it, beginning with a general one, which is: there have
been a lot of books written about the failures of the War on Terror,
deceit kind of embedded with the War on Terror, most of which have taken
the war on its own terms, and critiqued it because of strategic
failures or of failure to achieve the claims which have been made to
justify the war, and I actually have written a couple of books myself
about the War on Terror from that perspective. Yours is really one of
the first that has focused on a particular part of the War on Terror,
namely the way in which economic motives, what you call the Homeland
Security Industrial Complex, has driven a huge part of the war, and
there’s a lot of new reporting about how that functions.
I
wanted to ask you two things about that. One is, is that something that
you intended to do; that you set out to do when you began writing the
book, and if so, what led you to do that, and the second part of it is,
how much of this economic motive is the cause of the fact that we’ve now
been at war for 13 years as opposed to traditional war objectives such
as increasing domestic power or asserting foreign influence. How big of a
role do you think it actually plays?
RISEN:
That was my goal. That was one of the key objectives of writing the
book, and I think it plays a really central role in why the war is
continuing. I think it’s basically that after so many years there’s a
whole class of people that have developed. A post-9/11 mercenary class
that’s developed that have invested in their own lives an incentive to
keep the war going. Not just people who are making money, but people who
are in the government who their status and their power within the
government are invested in continuing the war.
So
I was trying to show that it wasn’t just greed—it was partly greed—but
it was also status, and power, and ambition that all intertwined to make
it so that there’s very little debate about whether to continue the
war, and whether we should have any real re-assessment on a basic level.
So you’re right, I was trying to get at those motivations, I was trying
to understand how we could have this prolonged period of war with such
little debate. And I think it’s both economic incentives and personal
power incentives and ambition and status.
GREENWALD:
Let’s talk about the economic part of the motive, because obviously one
of the most striking things about the war is not just its duration but
the fact that it’s continued essentially unimpeded, notwithstanding
these wild swings in election outcomes. You have the Republicans, who
were in power when the war commenced, get smashed in 2006 and 2008 as a
result of, at least primarily, as a result of dissatisfaction with the
war in Iraq and the general state of things, but then you had the war
continue under a president who kind of vowed to reign it all in, and
then even when the Democrats get killed in 2010 and then again in 2014,
there’s no signs of any of this letting up.
It’s
easy to see why there’s this private sector—you know, the weapons
manufacturers and the defense contractors, sort of a General Dynamics,
Booz Allen world—that want the war to continue. They do really well when
they’re selling huge amounts of machinery, weapons, and drones. But
what causes the political class to be so willing to serve their
interests so brazenly, even when public opinion is so overwhelmingly
against it?
RISEN:
That’s a question I’ve struggled with myself. I’ve tried to understand.
I think we had one or two real moments when we could have gone in a
different direction. The primary one was, of course, 2008. I think Obama
had a chance. He had a mandate to do something different. And he didn’t
do it. I think part of it was that he was never exactly what we thought
he was, I think he was never really as liberal as people thought he
was. I think a lot of voters invested in him their hopes and dreams
without exactly realizing what he really was. I think he was always
really more conservative than how he presented himself in 2008.
To
give him a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, I think it’s very
easy for the intelligence community to scare the hell out of politicians
when they come in, and I think that Obama probably got seduced a little
bit by the intelligence community when he arrived. All you have to do
is look at a lot of raw intelligence to scare somebody. Convince them
that “Oh, it’s much worse than you ever realized.” But at the same time,
he must take some of the blame. He surrounded himself with a lot of the
Bush people from the get-go. Brennan was on his campaign. Most of his
team had some ties to the Bush years in the War on Terror.
To
me, that’s the hardest thing to really sort out, the factors that led
Obama—at that one moment, I think there was one opportunity he had in
2008 to make a significant change and he didn’t do it. And I think
historians are going to be struggling with that for a long time.
GREENWALD:
Well, let me struggle with that with you for a little bit because the
idea, and I think it’s a commonly expressed one—there’s probably an
element of truth to it—that a new president who doesn’t really have a
great deal of experience with the military or the intelligence community
has these impressive generals and CIA people coming in with medals on
their chest and decades of experience and, as you say, purposefully
scaring them.
But
at the same time, anybody who’s remotely sophisticated about the world
understands that that’s going to happen. Dwight Eisenhower warned of the
military industrial complex 50 years ago. And you know that there are
factions in Washington who maintain their power by scaring you, and you
have your own advisors. If you and I know that so much of that is fear
mongering, he has to know, right?
RISEN:
Right, and I’m not trying to excuse it at all, and in fact I think it’s
what he wanted. My own gut tells me that what he decided to do was in
early 2009 was to focus on economic and healthcare policies and that in
order to do those things on the domestic side, he had to protect his
flank on national security and not fight the Republicans on national
security, so I think there was a calculated move by Obama to prolong the
War on Terror in order to try to focus on domestic issues. And I think
that after a while, he lost control of that narrative.
GREENWALD:
It’s always hard to talk about somebody’s motives, right? I think we
have a hard time knowing our own motives, let alone other people’s, who
are complicated. As you say, he had this great opportunity in 2008
because things like closing Guantanamo and reining in the War on Terror
and stopping torture—these were all things that he ran on, and won on,
right?
RISEN: Right.
GREENWALD:
And you’ve been really outspoken about the fact that it’s not just the
continuation of the Bush national security agenda but the
even—especially, rather—an escalation of the attack on journalism. I’ve
seen you have some pretty extreme quotes on that, that he’s the worst
president on press freedom since at least Nixon, maybe worse. Do you
think that’s a byproduct of the fact that every president gets
progressively worse, or do you think there’s something unique and
specific about his worldview and approach that has made him so bad on
these press freedom issues?
RISEN:
I think one of his legacies is going to be that on a broad scale he
normalized the War on Terror. He took what Bush and Cheney kind of had
started on an emergency, ad-hoc basis and turned it into a permanent
state and allowed it to grow much more dramatically than it ever had
under Bush or Cheney, and part of that—I think within that—was his
attack on whistleblowers and journalists. I think it’s all part and
parcel of the same thing. If you believe in the national security state
in the way Obama does, then you have to also believe in squashing
dissent.
GREENWALD:
And I think that’s part of what makes war so degrading, right, for a
political culture and a country is that it always gets accompanied by
those kinds of things. Let me ask you a little bit about your own
personal experience as part of that war on whistleblowing and
journalism.
I
know you’re a little constrained because your case is still pending.
But one of the things I always find so interesting is that whenever your
case is talked about, it always gets talked about in this very narrow
sense: that you had a source for a story that you published in your book
about some inept and ultimately counterproductive attempts to
infiltrate the Iranian nuclear program and the case is about trying to
force you to reveal your source, and like every good journalist should,
you refuse to do so and therefore face a possibility of being held in
contempt of court and being sent to prison.
But
the background of your case, that I want to just step back and talk
about a little bit, is that you’ve had this very adversarial
relationship with the intelligence community, this increasingly
adversarial relationship with the intelligence community, as a result of
a lot of the reporting that you did, including exposing the warrantless
NSA program in 2005, for which you won the Pulitzer Prize.
Can
you talk about that, the tensions you’ve had with the government in the
War on Terror reporting that you’ve done and how that has manifested
and affected your life?
RISEN:
Yeah, sure. In fact, I’ve said in affidavits in the case that I believe
that the reason they came after me on this subpoena is because of the
NSA stories that we did for The New York Times. I’m convinced, and I believe there’s a lot of evidence to show that they decided ultimately not to come after The New York Times
on the NSA stories and instead wanted to isolate me by looking at
something in my book. In fact, I know for a fact that they conducted
leak investigations of at least three or four separate chapters in my
book.
They
interviewed a lot of people about totally unrelated things to the case
that they ultimately came after me on and I think they were looking for
something in my book to isolate me from The New York Times, and in their court papers they have repeatedly cited the fact that The New York Times
decided not to run the story as one of the arguments for why it’s
justified for them to come after me on it. And so I pride myself on the
fact that I developed an adversarial relationship with the government
because I think that’s what every reporter should do.
GREENWALD:
I know from my own experience doing NSA reporting over the last 18
months—and I’ve heard you say before that you’re not going to let these
kind of threats and recriminations affect your reporting. That was my
mindset as well and I was actually even more determined a lot of times
whenever I felt threatened to do the reporting even more aggressively,
to make sure that those bullying tactics weren’t going to work. At the
same time, when you hear top level government officials openly muse
about the crimes that you’ve committed, when you hear privately through
your attorney that the Justice Department might arrest you when you come
back to the U.S., of course it does have an effect on you. It occupies a
mental space. You spend a lot of time talking to your lawyers instead
of focusing on journalism.
And one of the things I’ve always found so fascinating about your case is that you have a Pulitzer, you work for The New York Times,
you’re one of the best known investigative journalists in the
country—one of the most institutionally protected, even though they did
separate you from the Times by focusing on your book. Still,
though, the fact that they were able to target you this way, for this
many years, I thought was a very powerful message that if we can even go
after Jim Risen, we can go after anybody.
I
know you want to maintain the idea, and I know that it’s true, that
none of this consciously deterred you from doing the journalism. But how
does being at the center of a case like this, where people are openly
talking about you going to prison, including people in the Justice
Department—how does this have an effect on your journalism, on your
relationship to your sources, just on your ability to do your work?
RISEN:
Well, you know, it’s interesting. It affected me a lot at first, for
the first couple of years. It’s one of those weird things that I’m sure
you know now—these things go on forever and they take a long time and
most of the time nobody’s paying any attention except you and your
lawyers. During the first several years, nobody paid much attention, and
it did have an effect on me then. And it took a long time for me to
realize I’ve got to just keep going. But the fact that now a lot of
people are supporting me has really helped me, this year in particular.
In
the last six months to a year, when I’ve gotten a lot more attention
and people supporting me, I feel like now I have to represent the
industry, represent the profession, and so it’s changed the way I even
think about the case.
GREENWALD:
You have become this kind of increasingly prolific user of Twitter, out
of nowhere. You were never on Twitter. You were a very late joiner. I
clearly see all the signs of addiction forming, and I say this as
someone who recognizes it personally. You’ve evolved—you had a Twitter
egg for a long time, and now you have a real picture.
RISEN: (Laughs) My son took that picture.
GREENWALD: (Laughs)
Alright, well I knew it was going to be somebody else who caused you to
leave the egg behind. But one of the things I find really interesting
is Twitter is a venue in which you get to speak in a different way about
different things than you do, say, in an article that you write for The New York Times,
where you’re a little bit more constrained in how you’re talking. And
you’ve expressed some ideas that I think are very rare for someone who
is a reporter at a large, establishment institution like The New York Times to express, and I want to ask you a couple of questions about that.
You
had this multi-part tweet maybe about a month ago. It almost sounded
like something Noam Chomsky might say, or other people might say like
that, about how the big plague of establishment thought in the U.S. is a
fear of deviating from conventional wisdom, and it’s only after
generation or two later when people who do that get vindicated, and so
there’s this really strong incentive not to do that. Can you elaborate
on the kinds of things you were talking about that and what you’ve
experienced that has led you to see those things?
RISEN:
That was actually part of a speech I gave at Colby College. I think the
best thing I’ve written on this whole issue. I compared how Elijah
Lovejoy, who was an abolitionist in the 1830s who was murdered because
he was trying to run a newspaper in St. Louis that was pro-abolitionism,
how he was so far ahead of his time that people thought he was crazy.
He was so far outside the mainstream, and people thought abolitionism
and the end of slavery was this idea that was insane.
And
I was trying to compare that to what we have today, where anybody who
says we shouldn’t have a War on Terror is considered delusional. And I
was trying to show that conventional wisdom is a creature of our time.
It’s not inherently true or not true. And that the mainstream press’s
dependence on conventional wisdom ultimately cripples it in a lot of
different ways.
GREENWALD:
The impression that I have, and I’ve known you personally only for a
few years, so it’s more just a speculative observation from having seen
your work before that is that a combination of your going through this
case with the government where your own liberty is very much at risk as a
result of the government’s actions, combined with a lot of the
reporting that lead to this book kind of has radicalized you in a way
that I think is a pretty common thing that people in the War on Terror
have gone through where people look at their country differently, much
more so than they ever did before, look at institutions differently.
Am
I right about that? Is the Jim Risen of today more willing to
experiment with novel ideas that aren’t conventional than the Jim Risen
of 20 years ago as a result of those experiences?
RISEN:
Probably, probably. I have to think about that. I’m trying to think
back. I think my real change came after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. I
was covering the CIA as a beat then. And to me, it was fascinating
talking to CIA people right after the invasion of Iraq and right before
the invasion of Iraq, because it was kind of like privately talking to a
bunch of Howard Deans. They were all radicalized against what Bush was
doing.
To
me it was wild to hear all of these people inside the intelligence
community, especially in 2003, 2004, who were just going nuts. They
couldn’t believe the radical change the United States was going through,
and that nobody was opposed to it. And that led me to write my last
book, State of War,
because I was hearing things from within the intelligence community and
the U.S. government that you weren’t hearing publicly from anybody. So
that really led me to realize—and to step back and look at—the radical
departure of U.S. policy that has happened since 9/11 and since the
invasion of Iraq.
To
me, it’s not like I’ve been radicalized, I feel like I stayed in the
same place and the country changed. The country became more radicalized
in a different direction.
GREENWALD:
I wonder about that a lot. Obviously, I started writing about politics
in 2005, and a huge part of it was that perception, that the country had
radically changed, that things that we took for granted were no longer
the case, and I’ve definitely had a rapid and significant evolution in
my views of how I look at those things the more I focus on them and the
more the country changed.
But
if you go back and look at some media critics of the ’50s and ’60s,
people like I.F. Stone who were kind of placed on the outside of
conventional wisdom, and were viewed as fringe or crazy at the time—a
lot of that can be traced to way before 9/11. Lies about the Vietnam
War. The huge military industrial complex around the Cold War. Do you
think 9/11 was this radical break from how things were done in the
country, or was it more an injection of steroids into processes that
were already underway?
RISEN:
There have always been problems. But we’ve taken this to a new level.
Both because the technology has allowed the government to do things it
would never have done before, but also because of the willingness of the
country to accept security measures and a reduction in civil liberties
that I think would not have been contemplated before. I keep thinking
that if you had a Rip Van Winkle from 1995 who woke up today, I don’t
think they would really recognize the country. And that’s what I’m
trying to write about, and what I view, because that’s the America that I
remember.
GREENWALD:
There’s this fascinating debate that took place in the ’90s, after the
Timothy McVeigh attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, when the
Clinton administration introduced these proposals to require backdoors
into all encryption, for all computers and internet usage. And it didn’t
happen, and the reason it didn’t happen is because all of these
Republicans in Congress, led by John Ashcroft, stood up with a bunch of
Democrats in alliance with them, saying “We’re not the kind of country
that gives the government access to all of our communications. Privacy
is actually a crucial value.” And just a few short years later, all of
that reversed, and that debate became inconceivable.
RISEN:
When Dick Cheney said, “the gloves come off,” I don’t think we realized
how important that was, and what that really meant. As I’ve said
before, that really meant, “We’re going to deregulate national security,
and we’re going to take off all the rules that were imposed in the ’70s
after Watergate.” And that was just a dramatic change in the way we
conduct foreign policy and national security. And I think it’s been
extended to this whole new homeland security apparatus. People think
that terrorism is an existential threat, even though it’s not, and so
they’re willing to go along with all this, and that’s what’s so scary to
me.
GREENWALD:
Let me ask you a few questions about some specific examples in your
book, including one that relates to what you just said. You kind of have
these different wars that you conceive of and one is called the “War on
Normalcy.” One of the examples is, there’s this area on the
U.S.-Canadian border that used to be kind of tranquil and now there’s a
ton of War on Terror money that has gone to the state police there, and
it’s kind of militarized that zone, and made it so the citizens are just
interfered with in all kinds of ways.
One
of the most overlooked trends, I think—you mentioned Cheney taking the
gloves off—all of these things we were doing overseas aimed at
ostensibly foreign terrorists have now begun to be imported onto U.S.
soil, like the militarization of our police force using techniques from
Baghdad, the use of drones, that “Collect it All” NSA model, which was
first pioneered by Keith Alexander in Baghdad, is now aimed at U.S.
citizens. Do you think that’s an important trend? Is that something
that’s really happened, that what was the War on Terror aimed outward is
now being aimed domestically?
RISEN:
Absolutely, and that’s one of the most scary elements of it. To me,
when the NSA started spying domestically that was like Caesar crossing
the Rubicon. It was a really important shift. People thought that was
absolutely forbidden. And when the NSA started doing it, and then when
you started fooling around with creating a new Department of Homeland
Security, merging all of these departments—creating Immigration and
Customs Enforcement and all of this stuff—I think you’ve created a much
more efficient federal domestic law enforcement apparatus, and
efficiency is not always a good thing when it comes to that.
One
of the things I always think about, and one of my earlier books was
comparing the CIA and the KGB during the Cold War, and I always remember
somebody telling me that the only countries that have really efficient
security services are dictatorships.
GREENWALD:
Right, and you can basically only have a really efficient security
service if you’re willing to at least kind of go into that realm of
authoritarianism—they kind of go hand in hand. Let me ask you: there’s
this pretty new reporting you have on this company General Atomics,
which is the maker of drones, and you kind of describe them as the new
oligarchs. In 2001 they had $100 million in government contracts and now
in 2012 they have $1.8 billion, an obscene increase. At the same time,
coincidentally enough, you cite a good governance group documenting that
they’ve spent more to fund congressional staff travel than any other
company.
One of the things that always amazes me—I remember that there was this reporting that was done by Wired,
during the debate over whether to give immunity to the telecoms that
participated in the NSA program that you uncovered. An extraordinary
thing to do, to retroactively immunize the biggest companies in the
United States, and Sen. Jay Rockefeller became the leading spokesman for
it at the time. He was the Democratic chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, and there were studies showing that right around
the time when he became the leading proponent of telecom immunity,
AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint began donating lots of money to his
campaign, they threw parties for him, but still, in the context of Jay
Rockefeller—a Rockefeller—with a super safe seat in West Virginia, they
were pretty trivial amounts to be able to just dominate congressional
policy that way. And that was what struck me too about General Atomics.
So they fund some congressional staff travel.
What
is it about the D.C. culture that lets these kind of seemingly trivial
amounts in the scheme of things end up translating into this massive
influence?
RISEN:
You know, I don’t think that it’s the money that really does the trick.
I think what really, you’ve got to look at is that all of the staffers,
and all of the members of Congress are thinking about what are they
going to do after they leave those jobs. The same is true for military
officers. What are you going to do when you retire from the military, or
from the House Intelligence Committee, or whatever? You’re going to
need a job at a defense contractor. And so I think that the real
incentive for a lot of these people is not to upset their potential
employers in the future. The campaign contributions themselves are just
tokens, as you said.
GREENWALD:
To say that, on one hand it seems kind of self-evident, but on the one
hand, it’s a pretty extraordinary observation because it’s a form of the
most extreme corruption. Public officials are serving the interests of
really rich corporations in exchange for lucrative private sector jobs
that they get when they leave after serving their interests.
RISEN:
What really hit home was when I was working on a chapter on KBR, and
one of the guys who I describe was kind of a whistleblower, Charles
Smith. He was an auditor for the army who tried to stop about a billion
dollars of payments to KBR because they didn’t have any proof that
they’d actually spent the money—or they didn’t have sufficient records
to prove it—and he lost his job over his fight with KBR, he believes.
And
after I started talking to him he said, “There’s this one general you
could talk to who was one of my bosses for a while. He was a good guy
and he would vouch for me.” So I called that general, and he had since
retired, and he said, “Well, I think Charlie was a great guy, but I now
work for a contractor that does business with KBR, and I don’t want to
say anything publicly about Charlie because that might upset KBR.” And
that’s the kind of thing that you see all the time.
GREENWALD: There’s a case that you talk about in the book that’s Burnett v. Al Baraka,
where 9/11 families sued the Saudis. There are lots of influential
people in D.C., like Sen. Bob Graham, the former head of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, and others, who have said that the role that
the Saudis have played in the War on Terror, and specifically the 9/11
attack, has been really actively suppressed, because of the U.S.
alliance with Saudi Arabia. And there is this sort of bizarre aspect
that we’ve gone to war against a huge number of countries, one of the
few exceptions to which has been the country that had the most nationals
involved in that attack, and whose government has been the most
persuasively implicated.
How
persuasive or credible do you find those questions about the Saudi
involvement in the War on Terror generally, 9/11 specifically, and
whether that’s been actively suppressed?
RISEN:
Well, as you said, I don’t really get into the substance of that in
that chapter because it’s really about this bizarre operation and how
crazy that operation became. But I think you’re right. I think it’s one
of the unanswered questions of 9/11 that, as you said, Graham became
fixated on, and they still have not unredacted parts of that report.
I
think the role of the Saudi government is probably different from the
role of wealthy people in the Persian Gulf. And that’s the distinction
that people have tried to grapple with for a long time. Are these just
individually wealthy people in the Gulf, either in Saudi Arabia or in
the Emirates, or is there some direction from any of these governments?
And that’s the question that the U.S. government has never wanted to
address publicly.
GREENWALD:
You said in an interview within the last week—it might have been at the
Firedog Lake Book Salon, I’m not exactly sure where it was—but you
described the period of time in 2004 and 2005 when you were trying to
get the NSA eavesdropping story published as one of the most stressful
times of your life. I think you even said the quote “most stressful
period of your professional life.” The New York Times, to its
credit, did eventually publish that story, and did a great job on it,
but can you talk a little bit about what you meant by that? Why that
period was so stressful?
RISEN:
Eric Lichtblau and I were trying to get that in the paper beginning in
October 2004, and they killed it, or they stopped it. They agreed with
the White House not to run it before the election and then we tried
again after the election, and they killed it again, and by that time it
was pretty well dead. So I went on a book leave and I put it in my book,
and I knew that by doing that, I was putting my career at The New York Times in jeopardy.
It was very stressful about what was going to happen between me, The New York Times,
and the Bush administration. I really credit my wife more than anybody
else. I told her at one point that if I do this, if I keep it in the
book, and the Times doesn’t run it, I’m probably going to get
fired, and I remember she told me, “I won’t respect you if you don’t do
that.” And so that was enough for me to keep going, but I didn’t sleep
for about six months.
GREENWALD:
It’s got to be incredibly difficult knowing that you have a story of
that magnitude, and that the story has been nailed down and you can’t
get it out into the world. Your book, which I literally finished reading
about 24 hours ago, is really riveting, and it’s not just a book that
is a polemical indictment of the War on Terror, like you’ve read before,
it really is an incredible amount of individual reporting on one of the
most under-reported aspects of this war, which is just how many people
are gorging on huge amounts of profit and waste at the expense of the
taxpayer, and what a big part of the war that is. Congratulations on
writing such a great book, and I really appreciate your talking to me.
RISEN: Well thank you.
Source: Firstlook.org