I’m an incredible news junkie. I have at least 10 news sites that I read multiple times each day. Legitimate news sites, not blogs. And I read a ton more infrequently. Consequently I’m not a huge reader of the books that normally go in the Current Events
section at your local book store. A lot of those books are opinion. Messed up opinion at that. There are a few fact-based books as well, most of them lately focusing on shortcomings of the Bush administration. While I’m fairly far to the left on the political scale, I don’t need the equivalent of a left-wing echo chamber of material to make me feel better about where I sit.
Nevertheless, James Risen’s reporting impressed me. I’m not sure if I even read a piece by him, but several items he uncovered got big play last year. Foremost among those was the revelation that the N.S.A. has been eavesdropping on the American public for 5 years without warrants. So I picked up his book, thinking that it would be covered in greater depth here.
I was wrong. No greater details did I learn.
In fact, most of the book covers the same sort of ground that many others have covered: what went wrong with the C.I.A. to make it think that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The book is more focused on the C.I.A. and less on the high level personalities than anything by Bob Woodward, so it’s a plus in that regard. But it still had the feel of gloss to me.
In addition, I have to take everything Risen writes with a grain of salt. The New York Times, for whom Risen reports, botched it’s Iraq reporting, though that was primarily other reporters. But I can’t help but wonder if it’s the same fact-checkers who checked his stuff as checked the other reporting. Risen doesn’t have the best track record around. He was one of the main reporters to target Wen Ho Lee as a spy for the Chinese. The New York Times had to write a large mea culpa piece to attempt to atone for all the mistakes it and Risen made in reporting on that case, which ended up ruining Lee’s career.
Anyway, to someone not as much of a news junkie as I am, this would probably be a good book. To me, it was just middling.
Title: State of war: the secret history of the CIA and the Bush administration
Author: James Risen
Imprint / publisher: Free Press / Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 2006
Format: Paperback
Length: 248 p., includes index
ISBN-10: 0-7432-7067-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7067-0
Subject: Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946-
Subject: Bush, George, 1924-
Subject: United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
Subject: United States — Politics and government — 1989-
LC Classification: JK468.I6 R57 2006
