The Reporter Resists His Government
In this covert action of the Clinton administration, according to Risen, the CIA recruited a Russian scientist to provide flawed nuclear weapons designs to Iran, in hopes of delaying the country’s progress toward constructing a bomb. Instead, the scientist pointed out the design flaws to the Iranians, which may have helped them.
.. In more than one instance, the Justice Department took positions that came close to criminalizing the act of professional reporting on classified subjects.
.. Risen presents a startling account of how a Texas lawyer and Republican loyalist named Stuart Bowen tried to find out what happened to the approximately $20 billion that the Bush administration sent into Iraq in the first year or so after the 2003 invasion. More than half of that sum was flown into Baghdad on cargo planes as bundles of hundred-dollar bills.
.. The Bush administration’s controls were so weak that even today, despite Bowen’s persistent efforts, Risen writes, “at least $11.7 billion of the approximately $20 billion…is either unaccounted for or has simply disappeared” (his italics).
.. “At the height of the war,” Risen reports, “KBR had more than fifty thousand personnel and subcontractors working for it in Iraq, making the company’s presence…larger than that of the British Army.”
.. Risen has added a fresh element, however, by concentrating on the position of the American Psychological Association in supporting the psychologists who took part in the CIA’s program of torture. “Despite the professional consensus among psychologists that torture was counterproductive,” Risen writes, the American Psychological Association nonetheless “worked assiduously to protect the psychologists who did get involved in the torture program.”
.. Holder said, “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail.” In late September, however, Holder announced his resignation, upon confirmation of a successor, so it was unclear how significant a promise this would prove to be.