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.
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.
1.
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.
2.
RISEN: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
3.
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?
4.
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.
5.
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?
6.
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.
7.
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?
8.
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.
9.
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?
10.
RISEN: Right.
11.
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?
12.
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.
13.
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?
14.
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.
15.
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?
16.
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.
17.
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.
18.
RISEN: (Laughs) My son took that picture.
19.
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?
20.
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.
21.
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?
22.
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.
23.
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?
24.
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.
25.
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.
26.
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.
27.
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?
28.
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.
29.
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?
30.
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.
31.
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.
32.
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.
33.
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?
34.
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.
35.
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?
36.
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.
37.
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.
38.
RISEN: Well thank you.
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