State of War or Man the State and War

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

Author: James Risen

With relentless media coverage, breathtaking events, and extraordinary congressional and independent investigations, it is hard to believe that we still might not know some of the most significant facts about the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet beneath the surface events of the Bush presidency lies a secret history -- a series of hidden events that makes a mockery of current debate.

This hidden history involves domestic spying, abuses of power, and outrageous operations. It includes a CIA that became caught in a political cross fire that it could not withstand, and what it did to respond. It includes a Defense Department that made its own foreign policy, even against the wishes of the commander in chief. It features a president who created a sphere of deniability in which his top aides were briefed on matters of the utmost sensitivity -- but the president was carefully kept in ignorance. State of War reveals this hidden history for the first time, including scandals that will redefine the Bush presidency.

James Risen has covered national security for The New York Times for years. Based on extraordinary sources from top to bottom in Washington and around the world, drawn from dozens of interviews with key figures in the national security community, this book exposes an explosive chain of events:

• Contrary to law, and with little oversight, the National Security Administration has been engaged in a massive domestic spying program.
• On such sensitive issues as the use of torture, the administration created a zone of deniability: the president's top advisors were briefed, but the president himself was not.
• The UnitedStates actually gave nuclear-bomb designs to Iran.
• The CIA had overwhelming evidence that Iraq had no nuclear weapons programs during the run-up to the Iraq war. They kept that information to themselves and didn't tell the president.
• While the United States has refused to lift a finger, Afghanistan has become a narco-state, supplying 87 percent of the heroin sold on the global market.

These are just a few of the stories told in State of War. Beyond these shocking specifics, Risen describes troubling patterns: Truth-seekers within the CIA were fired or ignored. Long-standing rules were trampled. Assassination squads were trained; war crimes were proposed. Yet for all the aggressiveness of America's spies, a blind eye was turned toward crucial links between al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia, among other sensitive topics.

Not since the revelations of CIA and FBI abuses in the 1970s have so many scandals in the intelligence community come to light. More broadly, Risen's secret history shows how power really works in George W. Bush's presidency.

The New York Times - James Bamford

While Mr. Risen's revelations about the N.S.A. take up only a chapter in State of War, they are the dramatic high point in an illuminating and disturbing book focusing on the Bush administration's use - and perhaps misuse - of power over the past four years. It is a record, Mr. Risen says, that has even caused protests by Mr. Bush's father, former President George H. W. Bush. Mr. Risen writes of a conversation between the two in 2003 in which the current president "angrily hung up the telephone." … obtaining details on an eavesdropping program as secret as the one discussed in State of War is a monumental job of reporting - especially when it is later confirmed by the president himself.

The New York Times Book Review - Walter Isaacson

This explosive little book opens with a scene that is at once amazing and yet not surprising: President Bush angrily hanging up the phone on his father, who "was disturbed that his son was allowing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a cadre of neoconservative ideologues to exert broad influence over foreign policy." The colorful anecdote is symptomatic of State of War. It is riveting, anonymously sourced and feels slightly overdramatized, but it has the odious smell of truth.

The New Yorker

Last month, the author, a Times reporter, broke, with his colleague Eric Lichtblau, the story of President Bush’s authorization of warrantless domestic wiretapping by the N.S.A., in apparent defiance of Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This account doesn’t go much beyond what has been in the Times—indeed, follow-ups have overtaken it—but Risen offers a useful perspective on what the C.I.A. has been doing since September 11th, and some devastating summary judgments. In the Bush years, Risen writes, “no other institution failed in its mission as completely.” George Tenet, the director, pandered to Bush and to Donald Rumsfeld; the agency passed on weapons intelligence that many knew was bad; the abuse of prisoners became accepted. But the main leadership failure Risen sees is that of the President, who, he writes, got from the C.I.A. no more than what he asked for.

Foreign Affairs

Risen has written a short and at times disjointed book packed with startling stories, a number of which appear to be true. It reflects the view that the intelligence community's mission was undermined by Bill Clinton's indifference, a readiness to sacrifice deep research to superficial reportage, a failure to acquire reliable agents in key countries, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet's desire to stay too close to the Bush administration, and, finally, the collapse of standards and safeguards in the readiness to facilitate torture and domestic spying. Risen provides new examples of the shoddiness of the analytic work on Iraq and its interaction with the administration's erroneous rationale and botched occupation. There is also some intriguing material on Iran and Saudi Arabia, the veracity of which is hard to determine. This is the sort of book that focuses on the "secret history" without bothering to explain the known history that would provide context, and Risen is so enamored with anonymous sources from the intelligence community that he does not acknowledge those who have already written well on these topics or consider how their evidence fits with his.

Table of Contents:

1	"Who authorized putting him on pain medication?"	11
2	The program	39
3	Casus belli	61
4	The hunt for WMD	85
5	Skeptics and zealots	109
6	Spinning war and peace	125
7	Losing Afghanistan	149
8	In denial : oil, terrorism, and Saudi Arabia	173
9	A rogue operation	193

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Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis

Author: Kenneth N Waltz

What are the causes of war? To answer this question, Professor Waltz examines the ideas of major thinkers throughout the history of Western civilization. He explores works both by classic political philosophers, such as St. Augustine, Hobbes, Kant, and Rousseau, and by modern psychologists and anthropologists to discover ideas intended to explain war among states and related prescriptions for peace.

Foreign

[A] thoughtful inquiry into the views of classical political theory on the nature and causes of war.

Foreign Affairs

In this thoughtful inquiry into the views of classical political theory on the nature and causes of war, Professor Waltz follows three principal themes or images: war as a consequence of the nature and behavior of man, as an outcome of their internal organization of states, and as a product of international anarchy.

American Political Science Review

It is fortunate that Waltz is not merely a qualified political theorist but also an able student of international politics.

American Political Science Review

It is fortunate that Waltz is not merely a qualified political theorist but also an able student of international politics with a command of the contemporary literature and of the raw data on the subject. He is thus able intellectually to analyze the contributions of the political philosophers and to assess their relevance and adequacy for understanding the real world of international politics.

Booknews

<:st>Reprint of the 1959 original, cited in , with a new four page preface. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)