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

[struggle4progress]

BOOK REVIEW
Looking closely at this tangle
By Tim Rutten, Times Staff Writer

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

... Risen provides valuable and troubling detail on both those situations, particularly with regard to the treatment of intelligence and diplomatic professionals whose analysis contradicted what the White House wanted to hear. For example, the CIA's post-invasion station chief in Baghdad was dismissed when he insisted on telling the truth about how the overthrow of Hussein had plunged the country into chaos and had turned it, in fact, into a center for an Al Qaeda-backed insurgency with regional and global implications.

Similarly, a State Department official who attempted to sound the alarm about American tolerance for post-Taliban Afghanistan's degeneration into a narco-state was ignored and punished. Today, Afghanistan is the world's leading producer of heroin, and proceeds from drug trafficking account for an estimated 52% of the country's gross domestic product.

Risen has other urgent and disturbing things to say about the almost willfully botched hunt for Osama bin Laden as well as the administration's and CIA's extraordinary diffidence toward Saudi Arabia, despite evidence that sympathy and financial support for the jihadi insurgents runs through the uppermost levels of the Wahhabi kingdom. As Risen points out, that diffidence has led the United States to rely totally on the Saudis for its information on what's going on inside that strategically vital country. In other words, we don't have any spies there.

Equally disconcerting, a mistake by a CIA communications officer working out of the agency's headquarters in 2004 handed the Tehran government the identities of every American agent inside Iran. A few years earlier, another incompetent operation by the agency actually put in the mullahs' hands the plans for a Russian-designed nuclear trigger ...

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/reviews/cl-et-book20jan20,0,3918318.htmlstory?coll=cl-home-more-channels

[stray cat]

1. Have your read it - and if so what do you think?

[struggle4progress]

2. Haven't read it yet. Plan to.