State Of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

This book is a sympathetic view of the CIA under the directors Tenet and Hayden. The book offers no identified sources which makes it interesting but ultimately unreliable. Tenet is seen as a chameleon who desired to reestablish a personal relation with George Bush at the expense of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. The neglect of human intelligence led to the CIA being absolutely blind on whether Iraq had WMD, leaving Tenet to assume a "slam dunk" on finding them ex post facto. Cheney and Rumsfeld are portrayed as denuding the CIA for finding no link from 9/11 to Iraq. The author holds that the CIA was established to provide the nation with independent intelligence. The damage done to it is lain at the feet of Rumsfeld for militarizing American intelligence. A very restrained estimation of the events leading up to and following upon the Iraqi Invasion. Index, no bibliography. ( )

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.

To someone not as much of a news junkie as I am, this would probably be a good book.

(Full review at my blog) ( )

4168 State of War The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, by James Risen (read 29 May 2006) This is a book by a New York Times reporter, without footnotes and relying mostly on undisclosed sources. I presume most of what he says is true, and it seems clear Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush were bent on war with Iraq, and eagerly sought justification for such which they did not have. It further shows how the Iraq invasion deflected from the more important hunt for Osama bin Laden, who, all these years after 9/11, lives free, the author believes in Pakistan. This book seems to show that Rumsfeld is hugely responsible for the many dumb things Bush has done. ( )

Written by the NY Times journalist who broke the the Bush administration's illegal domestic surveillance program, this book documents the transformation of the CIA from the independent and usually reliable foreign intelligence masters, into the political puppets of its neo-conservative foreign policy masters. Enabled by Clinton holdover George Tenet, who was more interested in providing his superiors with the intelligence they wanted than the intelligence they needed to further his own career, the CIA has become essentially a bureaucratic sidebar to Rumsfeld's Defense department, used when they give up the information the Defense Department wants, and sidelined when they offer up anything that challenges the conservative's agenda.

James Risen outlines the hows and whys of the domestic spying scandal, the deliberate ignoring of intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq, the administration's blind eye in foreseeing the violent aftermath of the Iraq invasion, and a continuing string of failures that may ultimately take us into Iran. The book ends with a stunning account of the CIA handing over the technology for nuclear weapon triggers to the Iranians!

Curiously absent from any significant discussion in this book, is W himself. It appears that he is either genuinely out of the loop and letting Rumsfeld and Cheney run the show, or these guys have done a masterful job of providing this president plausible deniability of any of the major decisions and actions of his administration. It will be fascinating, and undoubtedly sad and disturbing, to read the histories to be written about the Bush administration 20 years from now.

Read this book! It reads, logically, more as a piece of investigative journalism than as history. The sourcing is obscure, but it probably has to be considering the sensitive and classified nature of the CIA and the intelligence community. But, there's no doubting that Risen's account rings true to everything we've hear, read and see from the cabal of criminals running this administration. ( )