1.
Goodman:
Today we spend the hour with the journalist at the center of one of the most
significant press freedom cases in decades: veteran New York Times
investigative reporter James Risen. In 2006, Risen won a Pulitzer Prize for his
reporting about warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency. His
story would have come out right before the 2004 presidential election of
President Bush over John Kerry. It might have changed the outcome of that
election. But under government pressure, The New York Times refused to
publish the story for more than a year, until James Risen was publishing a book
that would have had the revelations in it. He’s since been pursued by both the
Bush and Obama administrations in a six-year leak investigation into that book,
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.
James Risen now faces years in prison if he refuses to testify at the trial of
a former CIA officer accused of giving him classified information. In June, the
Supreme Court turned down his appeal of a court ruling forcing him to testify
in the criminal trial of ex-CIA analyst Jeffrey Sterling, who prosecutors
believe gave him information on the agency’s role in disrupting Iran’s nuclear
program. In State of War, Risen showed that instead of hampering Iran’s
efforts, the CIA effectively gave Iran a blueprint for designing a bomb. James
Risen has vowed to go to jail rather than testify at Sterling’s trial, which is
set to begin in January. In a story broadcast Sunday, General Michael Hayden, who led the CIA until 2009 and, before
that, led the NSA, told Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes he does not think
Risen should be forced to divulge his source.
2.
Hayden:
I’m conflicted. I know the damage that is done. And I do. But I also know the
free press necessity in a free society. And it actually might be that I think,
no, he’s wrong, that was a mistake, that was a terrible thing to do, America
will suffer because of that story. But then I have to think about: So, how do I
redress that? And if the method of redressing that actually harms the broad
freedom of the press, that’s still wrong. The government needs to be strong
enough to keep me safe, but I don’t want it so strong that it threatens my
liberties.
3.
Goodman:
Well, the Obama administration must now decide if it will try to force James
Risen’s testimony and risk sending one of the nation’s most prominent national
security journalists to jail. President Obama has already developed a
reputation as the most aggressive in history when it comes to targeting
whistleblowers. His Justice Department has brought eight cases so far, more
than all previous administrations combined. On Friday, federal prosecutors
hinted they may decide not to press for Risen’s testimony, under new guidelines
issued earlier this year that make it harder to subpoena journalists for their
records. James Risen’s answer to this saga has been to write another book.
Released today, it’s titled Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. He
writes the book is his answer to how, quote, “to best challenge the government’s
draconian efforts to crack down on aggressive investigative reporting and
suppress the truth in the name of ceaseless war.”
4.
James Risen, welcome back to Democracy
Now!
5.
Risen:
Thanks for having me.
6.
Goodman:
It’s great to have you with us.
7.
Risen:
Thanks.
8.
Goodman:
So, your new book is Pay
Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. You’re quoting John
Kennedy here.
9.
Risen:
Yes, yes. And I think that’s what we have done since 9/11. We’ve paid an
enormous price in the name of what we—we started this war after 9/11, this
global war on terror, in order to seek justice or retribution or whatever
you—however you want to characterize the attitude of America right after 9/11.
But today it’s become essentially a search for cash, and there’s lots of people
involved in the war on terror today who are doing it because they’re ambitious,
because they want status or power or money. And I think of it kind of in the
historical sense. The historical context is kind of like in the Middle Ages
when you had the Thirty Years’ War or the Hundred Years’ War in Europe, where
you developed a whole new class of mercenary soldiers, who all they did their entire
careers is go from one country to another to fight wars for money.
10.
Goodman:
Well, as you expose a great deal in Pay Any Price, you yourself are
under, as I just documented, enormous pressure.
11.
Risen:
Right.
12.
Goodman:
How do you continue to write these front-page pieces for The New York Times,
write this book, Pay Any Price, as you face the possibility of years in
jail?
13.
Risen:
Well, it’s what I do. It’s my job. You know, it’s what keeps me sane, is to
keep going. If I just gave in to them, then I would be, you know, failing in
what I want to do. I want to keep finding out the truth. It’s the thing I’ve
tried to do my whole life, is be a reporter and be a writer. It’s the only
thing I know how to do.
14.
Goodman:
Well, in a moment, we’re going to talk extensively about these stunning
revelations in Pay Any Price, but if you could go back to what you
revealed, before Edward Snowden, and how it eventually came into The New
York Times, that won it and you a Pulitzer Prize?
15.
Risen:
Yeah, well, the—I guess you mean the original NSA stories. We, in 2004, Eric
Lichtblau and I, had a number of different sources who began to tell us early
on in 2004 that they were very—they knew something really big, they knew the
biggest secret in the government, but they couldn’t tell us, because they were
so nervous. They were very tortured by what they knew. And it took months of
kind of patience and talking and reporting for Eric and I to figure out exactly
what it was that they were talking about, and finally we were able to piece it
all together. And in the fall of 2004, we had the story ready to go. I had a
great confrontation over the telephone with Michael Hayden, who you just saw,
where I read him the—I got him on the phone kind of by bluffing the PR person
at the NSA and said, “I need to talk to him right now.” And I was shocked that
he got on the phone. And I read him the top of the draft of the story, and he
goes, “[gasps].” And that’s when I knew we had it. And so, we had the story
ready. But then, by, you know, then, Hayden and the government started to crack
down on The New York Times and pressured them to hold the story ‘til—even
though it was ready about two or three weeks before the election, in
mid-October 2004. And then, after the election—
16.
Goodman:
Well, wait.
17.
Risen:
Yeah.
18.
Goodman:
Can you just explain, what does it mean when the government pressures, you
know, the leading newspaper in the United States?
19.
Risen:
Well, they—
20.
Goodman:
What does that look like? Do they march through the offices of The New York
Times into Bill Keller the executive editor’s office?
21.
Risen:
No. Well, usually what they ask is for us to go to them. The first meeting was
between—I think it was probably early October, late September of 2004, between
me and the Washington bureau chief at the time, Phil Taubman, and John McLaughlin, who was then the
acting CIA director, and his chief of staff, John Moseman. And we met at the CIA director’s
downtown office at the old executive office building. And it was a very funny
meeting, because at that time they didn’t want to acknowledge that the story
was right. They didn’t want to officially acknowledge. And
so, they had all these hypothetical—we had this very weird hypothetical
conversation, where they kept saying, “Well, if you were to—if the government
was doing what you say they were doing, it would be very bad for you to reveal
that.” And then they—then, that was just the beginning of a whole series of
meetings with the editors and us, the reporters, in which they said that this
is the crown jewel of the U.S. counterterrorism operation, and that if you
reveal this, this will damage national security. And so, that was essentially
the argument that they used then and they used throughout the entire process.
22.
Goodman:
Well, it went higher than you and the Washington editor.
23.
Risen:
Yeah, it kept going higher and higher and higher.
24.
Goodman:
And the election is coming closer and closer and closer.
25.
Risen:
Yeah, yeah, and they met with Taubman and Keller. And then we had—you know, we
in the newspaper, the editors and reporters—met to discuss the story, and Bill
Keller decided to hold it. And then the election—you know, so he decided to not
run it before the election. And then, after the election—
26.
Goodman:
I mean—
27.
Risen:
Yeah.
28.
Goodman:
Do you think it could have changed the election? I mean, explain the nut—
29.
Risen:
Yeah.
30.
Goodman:
—of your revelation.
31.
Risen:
Basically, the story was that we found out that the U.S. was spying on
Americans—the NSA was spying on Americans electronically, listening to their
phone calls, international phone calls, back and forth with people overseas,
and gathering lots of—doing lots of data mining on their phone and email, and
also getting the content of their email, and doing that without court approval.
They were going around the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act court, which had been set up specifically for that purpose of providing
secret warrants for spying on—for eavesdropping on spies and terrorists or
suspected spies and terrorists. And the government had decided to go around the
law, go around the courts, and not tell anyone else that they were doing that,
except a couple hand-picked people in Congress, who were like the chairmen of
the intelligence committees. And they were keeping this secret from everyone so
they could do it on a vast scale. And we believed that what we were—the people
who talked to us about it believed that it was unconstitutional. And that’s why
we were pursuing it.
32.
Goodman:
I wanted to turn to Bill Binney for a minute, who we had on Democracy Now!
William Binney was
the National Security Agency whistleblower, spent nearly 40 years at the NSA,
but retired about a month after September 11, 2001, due to concerns over
unchecked domestic surveillance. Speaking on Democracy Now! in 2012, Binney
explained what happened.
33.
Binney:
After 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA, and they decided to—between the
White House and NSA and CIA, they decided to eliminate the protections on U.S.
citizens and collect on domestically. So they started collecting from a
commercial—the one commercial company that I know of that participated provided
over 300—probably, on the average, about 320 million records of communication
of a U.S. citizen to a U.S. citizen inside this country.
34.
Goodman:
What company?
35.
Binney:
AT&T. It was long-distance communications.
So they were providing billing data. At that point, I knew I could not stay,
because it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in
the country. Plus it violated the pen register law and Stored Communications
Act, the Electronic Privacy Act, the intelligence acts of 1947 and 1978. I
mean, it was just this whole series of—plus all the laws covering federal
communications governing telecoms. I mean, all those laws were being violated,
including the Constitution. And that was a decision made that wasn’t going to
be reversed, so I could not stay there. I had to leave.
36.
Goodman:
That was National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney. So he leaves, and he ultimately has a gun put to his head by
federal authorities in his shower—he’s a diabetic amputee—his kid and his wife
also being held at gunpoint.
37.
Risen:
Right, yes, unfortunately, and I have a chapter in my new book about the NSA
whistleblowers early on, including Bill and Diane Roark and Tom Drake and some
of the others. And it’s remarkable what happened to them at the NSA. What we
found out, years later—I did not know Bill, I didn’t know Diane or Tom. They
were never our sources. But what we found out was, the government thought that
they were our sources for our New York Times story, and they were
persecuted as a result, even though they had never come to the press. And I
detail in the new book, Diane Roark, in particular, suffered amazing
persecution. And she tried—even though she tried to go through the channel—
38.
Goodman:
Explain who she was—is.
39.
Risen:
Yeah, Diane Roark—along with Bill, Diane Roark was the House Intelligence
Committee staffer in charge of oversight of the NSA, and right at the time of
9/11. And Bill, right after he found out about this new program, went to her,
her house in suburban Washington, and told her what he had heard about. And Diane
was outraged and shocked, and she couldn’t believe that it was authorized. She
thought this must be some kind of rogue program that nobody really knew about.
And so, she went to the chairman of the—she went to her bosses, the staff
director of the House Intelligence Committee and the minority staff director,
to warn them that they’ve got to tell the chairman and the vice chairman of the
committee what’s going on. And then she gets this message back: “Don’t talk
about this anymore. Don’t investigate it. And keep your mouth shut.” And she
realizes that the chairman and the vice chairman already know about it and are
keeping it secret. And so, she then tries to—goes on this long odyssey within
the government of going to all these powerful people that she knows inside the
government to try to warn them about this illegal and unconstitutional program.
And every time she goes to someone that she respects and who is very powerful,
she realizes they already know, they’re in on the secret, and they’re keeping
their mouths shut. And finally, about a year later—a couple years later, after
our story comes out, the government thinks that she’s our source, and they raid
her house, and they raid Bill’s house and a few other people, like Tom Drake.
40.
Goodman:
So, the piece doesn’t get published before the election. You try again right
after the election.
41.
Risen:
Yeah, we convinced the editors, well, if you’re not going to run it now, let us
try again after the election. And so, after the election, they said OK. And so
Eric and I go start working on the story again. We get it re-edited by our
editor, Rebecca Corbett, and we have it all ready to go again. You know, we do
a lot more reporting. I remember we, Eric and I, knocked on doors, and we went
to this one guy who we knew, at his house late at night right before
Christmas—we knew he knew about this, and we knock on his door, and he just
starts yelling at us for bothering him. And he was clearly scared. He didn’t
want to talk. But we had the story ready to go by mid-
to late December of 2004, and then the editors killed it again for the same
reasons, that it’s national security. And so, by that time, the story
was dead. I knew it was—they were not going to run it at all. And so, I had a
previously scheduled book leave to work on my book, State of War, and so
I decided I’m going to put it in my book. And so I did. And then, when I came
back from book leave in the summer—spring or summer of 2005, you know, and I
finished the book throughout the summer, and I think by late summer, I told the
editors, “It’s going to be in my book, so you should think about running it.”
42.
Goodman:
Let me go to Bill
Keller in 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl, when she asked him, then the executive editor
of The New York Times, about a meeting he was summoned to at the White
House that made Keller decide not to run James Risen’s story.
43.
Keller:
The president said, you know, “If there’s another
attack like 9/11, you know, we’re going to be called up before Congress to
explain how we let that happen, and you should be sitting alongside us.” It
was, in effect, you know, “You could have blood on your hands.”
44.
Stahl:
He was saying, if anything goes wrong, we’re going to blame you.
45.
Keller:
Right.
46.
Goodman:
That was Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times. What was
your answer to him? I’m sure he said that to you.
47.
Risen:
Well, we had lots of talks over about 14 months. And actually, their talks—you
know, the talks we had, me and Eric had, with the editors were very
high-minded. It was an interesting debate. And we debated kind of this issue of
national security versus civil liberties in a lot of ways. I always thought
afterwards, you know, you could have put those debates we had inside the paper
on television. They were pretty interesting. But ultimately, what really, I
think, convinced Bill was, in the fall of 2005, when they were—after I told
them it was going to be in my book, and they decided to re-engage on the story—
48.
Goodman:
Well, that’s putting it politely. It’s going to be very embarrassing—
49.
Risen:
Yeah, right.
50.
Goodman:
—as their top national security reporter reveals his revelations not in the
pages of the Times, but in your book.
51.
Risen:
Yeah, yeah. Well, what they said was, “We’ll think about putting”—after I told
them it was going to be in my book, in the late summer of 2005, what they said
was, “OK, we’ll think about putting it in the paper.” But they weren’t
committed to it. They wanted to negotiate again with the government. And so,
there were a whole series of new meetings with the government, and which was
very frustrating to me. What the government told them that fall was: “Risen and
Lichtblau have it wrong. We’re not listening to anybody’s phone calls. We’re
only getting the metadata, you know, the calling data.” And when the editors
came back and told us that, we told—Eric and I said, “They’re lying to you.”
And finally, after a while, Eric and I were able to convince them, you know,
that they were being lied to, and I think that had a major impact on their
final decision to run the story.
52.
Goodman:
And so, the story comes out, and you win a Pulitzer Prize for your book. But
there is something else that the Times decided not to publish—
53.
Risen:
Yeah.
54.
Goodman:
—that is what you are being prosecuted for now.
55.
Risen:
Right. There was another story, a CIA operation involving the Iran nuclear
weapons program, in which the CIA had used a Russian defector to give nuclear
blueprints to the Iranians. And the idea was that they were supposed to be
flawed blueprints that would then send the Iranians down the wrong track on
building a bomb. But the Russian told them immediately, “Oh, I can see the
flaws,” because he was a scientist, he was a nuclear scientist. He says, “I can
see the flaws. The Iranians are going to see the flaws.” And then he sent a
letter. When he gave the blueprints to the Iranians, he gave a letter to the
Iranians saying, “You’re going to see that there are problems in these
blueprints.” And so, it’s quite possible that the Iranians were able to—by
being tipped off, were able to find good information in them and ignore the bad
information. And that was in my book. I had written that for the paper
in—before, and the editors had decided not to run it because the White House
asked them not to on national security grounds. And after my book came out, the
government began leak investigations of both the NSA story and other things in
my book, including that story. I think they finally decided not to come after The
New York Times on the NSA story, because it would have meant a major
constitutional showdown. And I think they decided to find something else in my
book to come after me on, to isolate me from The New York Times. And
they picked the Merlin operation.
56.
Goodman:
And they want to know your source.
57.
Risen:
Yeah, they want to know who my sources are for that story.
58.
Goodman:
Did it surprise you that it went from the Bush administration to the Obama
administration?
59.
Risen:
Yes. I thought that once the Obama administration came into office, that the
whole thing would be dropped. And I was very surprised that the Obama
administration continued to pursue the case, when, in 2009, they issued a new
subpoena. And they’ve continued to pursue this ever since.
60.
Goodman:
You told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, President Obama is “the
greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation”?
61.
Risen:
Yeah, I think that his record speaks for itself. He’s gone after—he’s
prosecuted more whistleblowers and gone after more journalists than any
president in history. He’s done—I think that record is going to be a major part
of his legacy, of trying to erode press freedom in the United States.
62.
Goodman:
We’re talking to New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative
journalist James Risen. He has just published a new book—it’s out today—called Pay
Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. When we come back, we’ll talk
about what he calls “the homeland security-industrial complex.” Stay with us.
63.
[break]
64.
Goodman:
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman. We’re spending the hour with James Risen, investigative
journalist with The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
His new book, just out today, is Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless
War. You’re being pursued by the U.S. government. Will you reveal the
name of your source?
65.
Risen:
No.
66.
Goodman:
Because?
67.
Risen:
I just think that the—you know, you cannot have aggressive investigative
reporting in America without confidential sources. And without aggressive
investigative reporting, we can’t really have a democracy, because the only
real oversight for the government is an independent and aggressive press. And I
think that’s what the government really fears more than anything else, is an
aggressive investigative reporting in which we shine a light on what’s going on
inside the government. And we can’t do that without maintaining the
confidentiality of sources.
68.
Goodman:
Has President Obama, Eric Holder or anyone else in the administration signaled
to you that they may not demand that you testify and reveal your source?
69.
Risen:
No.
70.
Goodman:
These reports that were in The Washington Post on Friday, and Michael
Hayden saying, former NSA head saying, that perhaps you shouldn’t be
prosecuted, do they encourage you?
71.
Risen:
Yeah, well, I’m glad to hear that, but we’ll see. I don’t know what’s going to
happen.
72.
Goodman:
In June, Attorney General Eric Holder met with a group of journalists to
discuss press freedom issues and was asked about the Justice Department’s
subpoena of you, of James Risen, to testify in the trial of ex-CIA analyst
Jeffrey Sterling. According to the Times, Holder said, quote, “As long
as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to
jail. As long as I’m attorney general, someone who is doing their job is not
going to get prosecuted.” James Risen?
73.
Risen:
Well, we’ll see. I’m not sure what that means, you know, and it’s all still in
the courts right now. So...
74.
Goodman:
And Holder is resigning.
75.
Risen:
Yeah, yeah. So, we’ll see. It’s very unclear what’s going to happen next.
76.
Goodman:
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, you have a series of
stunning revelations. Why don’t you begin by laying them out?
77.
Risen:
OK. Well, you know, I set out to—to me, what the war on terror became, as I
said earlier, this enormous search for power and status and cash. And I began
to realize that what we had in the war on terror was we had deregulated
national security. That’s essentially what Dick Cheney meant when he said the
gloves come off. That means deregulating the whole national security apparatus,
taking all the limits off of what we can do in national security. At the same
time, we poured hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars into brand-new
counterterrorism programs. And the FBI, the CIA and the new Homeland Security
department, all the—and the Pentagon, they all had more money than they knew
what to do with. And so, they began—to me, it’s kind of like the banking
crisis. You had enormous money going into a deregulated industry, meaning the
counterterrorism industry, and you had lots of unintended and bizarre
consequences. And so, that’s what I’ve found, is the crazy programs that
developed; the bizarre nature of the whole war on terror, if you pull up the
hood and look inside of it, is just stunning. And I open the book with this, to
me, kind of a metaphor for everything that we have, what’s going on now, is, in
2009, there was a small ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 60,
which is where the dead of the Iraq War lay buried. And it was a small group of
pro-war people who were celebrating the sixth anniversary of the fall of
Baghdad, and which they—what they call Iraq Liberation Day. It’s the day that
the statue of Saddam was pulled down in Firdos Square. And I saw Paul Wolfowitz
there. And the woman who ran that—who was sponsoring that day’s ceremony was
Viola Drath, who was an aging Georgetown socialite. And she was very pro-Iraq
War. And then, two years later, she was found murdered in her apartment—in her
house in Georgetown. And her husband, who had been going around Washington
dressed as a general in the Iraqi army, was arrested for her murder. He had
claimed that he had been named a general in the Iraqi army by Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki. And after he was arrested, the police found a receipt from a
printing place in Washington where he had counterfeited the letter and the
certificate of being a general in the Iraqi army. And he was a total fraud. He’s
now been convicted of her murder. And I thought that was a metaphor for the
fact that this war on terror is—a lot of it is just a fabrication, that we are
now trying to unravel and deal with. And so, I began to look and to see all of
the various things that have happened in this war. One of the first things I
came across was how the United States had airlifted billions of dollars to Iraq
for use by the Iraqi—the new Iraqi government, and billions had been stolen and
moved to Lebanon by Iraqi leaders. Then I began to look at the case of Dennis
Montgomery, who was a—
78.
Goodman:
But before you go to Dennis Montgomery—
79.
Risen:
Yeah, yeah.
80.
Goodman:
—the billions of dollars from the U.S. went from Iraq to Lebanon.
81.
Risen:
Right. It was stolen—
82.
Goodman:
Where?
83.
Risen:
It was stolen from Baghdad and moved secretly to a bunker in Lebanon, where it
was being held by wealthy and powerful Iraqis, because they wanted to steal it
and use it for themselves, and also probably with some Lebanese money
launderers who were watching over it.
84.
Goodman:
So, this billion dollars of taxpayer, U.S. taxpayer, money is—
85.
Risen:
Well, it was actually Iraqi government money that had been held in the United
States, but the U.S. government was airlifting it by the U.S. Air Force. So, it
was just a—you know, no one was doing any oversight of any of these programs.
86.
Goodman:
Dennis Montgomery?
87.
Risen:
Dennis Montgomery is a fascinating character, who—he was a computer software
person, self-styled expert, who developed what he said was special technology
that would allow him to do things with computers that other people couldn’t do.
One of the things that he developed was this imaging technology that he said he
could find images on broadcast network news tapes from Al Jazeera. He said that
he could read special secret al-Qaeda codes in the banners on the broadcasts of
Al Jazeera. And the CIA believed this. And he was giving them information based
on watching hours and hours of Al Jazeera tapes, saying that “I know where the
next al-Qaeda attack is going to be based—is going to happen.” And the Bush
administration and the CIA fell for this.
88.
Goodman:
And it was in the news zipper at the bottom of the Al Jazeera broadcasts?
89.
Risen:
Well, he says it was in the banner. But anyway. And so, it was this great—if
you talk to him, he argues, well, they—that’s what they were looking for. You
know, they convinced him to look for this. You know, it depends on who you talk
to. But it was one of the great hoaxes of the war on terror, where they
actually grounded planes in Europe, the Bush administration, based on
information they were getting from Dennis Montgomery’s so-called decryption of
Al Jazeera broadcasts. And then there’s a whole number of other things, like
Alarbus, which was this covert program at the Pentagon where a Palestinian
involved in that was actually trying to use the bank account set up by the
secret program, Pentagon program, to launder hundreds of millions of dollars.
And the FBI investigated this, but then tried to keep the whole thing quiet.
90.
Goodman:
How much did the U.S. government give to Dennis Montgomery?
91.
Risen:
Millions of dollars. And then he used—he was a heavy gambler and eventually, I
think, had a lot of financial problems as a result of that. So, it’s a
strange—to me, the Dennis Montgomery story is one of the strangest, because
what it shows is, early on in the war on terror, as I said, the CIA and all
these other agencies had so much money to spend on counterterrorism that they
were willing to throw it at everything. They were so afraid of the next
terrorist attack that they were willing to believe anybody who came up with
some idea. And I called that chapter about Montgomery, you know, “The Emperor
of the War on Terror,” because nobody wanted to say that the emperor had no
clothes.
92.
Goodman:
I mean, it had very real effects, aside from spending all that money.
93.
Risen:
Yeah.
94.
Goodman:
For example, planes being sent back.
95.
Risen:
Yes, yes. There were planes grounded. International flights between the United
States and Europe and Mexico were grounded. There was talk at the White House
even of shooting down planes based on this information.
96.
Goodman:
Because they could be used, as with September 11th, as weapons?
97.
Risen:
Yeah, as missiles or whatever. And so, it was crazy. It was absolutely insane.
98.
Goodman:
And it was only the French government who then did a study?
99.
Risen:
Yes, yes. Yeah, the French government finally—you know, the U.S.—the CIA and
the Bush administration didn’t want to tell anybody what was really happening,
where they were getting this information. You know, “This supersecret
information about Al Jazeera, we can’t tell you.” And finally, the French
intelligence service and the French government said, “You know, you’re
grounding our planes. You’ve got to tell us where you’re getting this
information.” And they got—they finally shared the information with them, and
the French got a French tech firm to look at this, and they said, “This is
nuts. This is fabrication.” And after a while, the CIA was finally convinced
maybe the French were right, and they stopped talking about it. They didn’t do
anything else. They just like shut it down eventually, but never wanted to talk
about what had really happened.
100.
Goodman:
Then Dennis Montgomery, revealed as a con man—
101.
Risen:
Yeah, yeah.
102.
Goodman:
—in jail for that?
103.
Risen:
Well, no, he’s not in jail. But it was a—he actually got more contracts after
that, with the Pentagon and other agencies. And he continued to operate for a
long time. You know, he kind of went from one agency to the other.
104.
Goodman:
We’re talking to James Risen, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist
for The New York Times. His new book, just out today, Pay Any Price:
Greed, Power, and Endless War. When we come back, war corrupts, endless war
corrupts absolutely. Stay with us.
105.
[break]
106.
Goodman: We’re
spending the hour with James Risen, the investigative reporter for The New York
Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, State of War: The Secret
History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. It also won him, well,
becoming a target, not only of the Bush administration, but of the Obama
administration, for year after year, right through to today. He could face
years in jail for not revealing a source on one of the stories that he has
exposed around a program called Merlin and the U.S. giving flawed blueprints
for a nuclear trigger to Iran. This issue of facing years in jail, how are
you preparing for this?
107.
Risen:
Well, as you said, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. And it bothered me
a lot more at first. I was more nervous about it when it first started. But now
it’s just like kind of background noise in my life, and so I’m just kind of
used to it now, because I know exactly—I have no doubts about what I’m going to
do, and so that makes it pretty easy.
108.
Goodman:
So, you’re covering the very people who could put you in jail.
109.
Risen:
Yeah, sometimes, yes. As I said earlier, that’s the only way to deal with this,
is to keep going and to keep—the only thing that the government respects is
staying aggressive and continuing to investigate what the government is doing.
And that’s the only way that we in the journalism industry can kind of
force—you know, push the government back against the—to maintain press freedom
in the United States.
110.
Goodman:
So, you have covered whistleblowers for years. They’re your sources for years.
And now, in a sense, you have become one yourself for press freedom. And you
write about, in Pay Any Price, these remarkable people—
111.
Risen:
Yeah.
112.
Goodman:
—who face all odds, like Bill Binney and others.
113.
Risen:
Yeah. Well, I really respect them much more. They face much more than I ever
do. They’re much more courageous, I think, than we reporters are, you know,
especially me. I mean, Diane Roark, who I talked about a little bit before, is
really one of my heroes. She went—she did everything that you would expect
someone to do in the government. And to me, her case is a perfect example of
why Edward Snowden had to do what he did, that he could never have gone through
the system. People say, “Oh, why didn’t he go through the system?” She tried to
go through the system and was persecuted for it.
114.
Goodman:
What about Edward Snowden?
115.
Risen:
I think he’s a whistleblower, you know, and I think he’s in the same tradition
of whistleblowers.
116.
Goodman:
The New York Times recently said they would consider him, call him a
whistleblower. Can you talk about the process, the decision that the Times
made in using that terminology for him?
117.
Risen:
I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that that was an issue. That’s interesting. I
just think he is. I mean, I think it’s just a simple fact. He has revealed lots
of information that’s led to a national debate about the extent of electronic
surveillance in the United States, and has, you know, paid a heavy price for
it. He’s had to go into exile. And I think anyone who thinks he could have done
what he’s done and stayed in the United States is fooling themselves.
118.
Goodman:
Do you think he should be allowed back into the United States and not face
trial?
119.
Risen:
Yes, I do.
120.
Goodman:
What do you think he has contributed?
121.
Risen:
As I said, he has sparked a new national debate over the extent of
surveillance. What I think he contributed was—you know, in our stories and
other people’s stories early on about the NSA, we revealed the framework, the
framework for what the Bush administration had done, that they had turned the
NSA on the American people. What I think Snowden revealed, the basic thing that
I think he revealed, is that under Obama and in the years since we had first
written about it, the American people had become much more online, an online
citizenry. We were now completely digital, with Facebook and Twitter and all of
these things. And as a result, the NSA had grown dramatically in their ability
to watch the online presence of Americans, much more than they had just a few
years earlier in the Bush administration. And so, what I think he revealed was
the dramatic expansion, in just a few short years, of the NSA’s ability to
shadow the online presence of Americans. And that was a real contribution.
122.
Goodman:
You have a son who’s a reporter?
123.
Risen:
Yes, yeah, my oldest son, Tom, is a reporter at U.S. News & World Report, yeah.
124.
Goodman:
And so, what is the legacy you want to pass on to him?
125.
Risen:
Well, I want to have a free press. I want to have him—I want it to be where he
can still develop sources and do aggressive reporting in the same way I did
throughout my career. I don’t want young reporters to face a situation or a
climate where they’re much more constrained in what they can write about than I
had in my career.
126.
Goodman:
And you’re willing to go to jail for this?
127.
Risen:
Yes. I think that’s the one thing I can leave to my son.
128.
Goodman:
Well, I want to thank you for being with us. The Times might have just
come out with an editorial calling Edward Snowden a whistleblower.
129.
Risen:
Oh, OK, OK.
130.
Goodman:
But, James Risen is an investigative journalist with The New York Times,
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. His new book is out today; it’s called Pay
Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War.
