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"State of War": Summary

Imagine you are a US Intelligence officer and it is September 1st, 2001. One day a call comes in from a from a friend in a local police department that a suspect was apprehended in a matter that has nothing to do with national security but in the process of investigating that crime, information was retrieved that may very well have something to do with National Security. The suspect has a laptop, an internet and email account, a cell phone, a bank account, credit card bills with plane tickets to various US locations over the past year as well as an answering machine that has been receiving calls since the suspects arrest from other parties who are asking for contact for an operation that is going to happen soon.

So what do you do? Well, you probably tell your friend that it sounds interesting, but legally, there’s nothing you can do but if the suspect starts to reveal any information about anything involving national security, that he should make note of it and give you a call.

Then 9/11 happens. So what do you do now? You call your friend at the local PD, and he tells you that one of the names left on the answering machine was one of the guys that hijacked one of the aircraft.

So do you follow the letter of the law, or do you do your duty?

Quite by accident of relationship you have been provided with information on the network that launched an attack that killed thousands of Americans. With phone records and their relationships to other individuals based on calling patterns, you can work with the NSA to track down locations, identities and relationships, the times and dates of contact for other people who were involved with this attack. With bank records, you are able to determine the source of funds, with each piece of information provided by your local PD friend, you have uncovered a vast trove of information about the terror organization that can be used to help take it apart. From the fingerprints on the doorknobs to each phone number that was dialed out of their house, you’ve stepped into the “source data” that can reveal all of the other parts of the terror organization. As each “node” in the network is uncovered and apprehended, the relational database of information on the terror network and each of its nodes will grow until the network itself is so compromised that it can no longer function.

Welcome to the first Database War. He who has the source data and the correct relationships between it – wins.

But Again I ask; Do you follow the law, or do you do your duty?

Because of the data you uncovered at the first node, you start rolling up more and more of the nodes. When you capture people, they are given to the CIA to be detained to help you in your task to find and reveal each of the nodes in the terror network. They are detained in hidden locations for two reasons. First, to not reveal to the terror organization that one of their nodes is missing and compromised which gives you time to either spoof the network or to continue retrieving information on the next node in the network. Second, so that they cant reveal to the organization what method was used to get them captured in the first place. Were they informed on? Who or what was their source? Did someone in the chain rat them out? Or is it something that they are doing that is getting them pinched.

Things are going along well until a colleague, an old timer who has been left out of the operation becomes aware of what’s been going on with your program. He cares not for the security of the nation, but for the size of the budget of his department and his career and since you and your team have been getting results, you are now also getting the budget, the attention and of course the recognition and promotions to go along with it.

After years of work, after all the "sucking up" to political appointees after every election, he’s about to be lapped by “the new kids” who are violating every rule you followed in the previous 10 years when you had the project. He decides he can’t compete with these rules and the culture that comes with it and the results that are expected, so he decides to even the game in the only way he can.

He decides to have lunch with a friend; a friend who just happens to work for the New York Times.

He relates a shocking tale of an intelligence organization spying domestically. He tells how the United States has access to all sorts of internet traffic and phone traffic and it also has the means to “snoop” on all of it, supposedly in the name of National Security.

In the war against al-Qaeda, the effect of this public release of information has the same effect as it would have been had a World War II OSS officer met with the Japanese before Midway to reveal that the United States had broken their Naval codes. Set aside the loss of manhours as people now have to undergo investigations by congress, you now have a bigger problem. After this is revealed to the public all of a sudden the network goes silent and you quickly find your leads have all dried up.

Within a year, the network has as many nodes up and running as it did in the days before 9.11, only because you haven’t penetrated it enough to determine the network or its nodes, you have no idea who, what or where anything is going on regarding terror in the United States.

All this happens because someone talked to the New York Times and revealed the methods of your team not as a way to help the country, but as a way to hold onto power within their organization.

This sort of thing happens every day in every company where people in their jobs feel threatened in their careers. However, when it happens in a National Security Organization, we all pay the price for these selfish acts not just the organizations the discontented employees worked for and wish to take revenge.

And this is where James Risens “State Of War” comes into play.

This is a book written on the backs of angry intelligence officers who have been passed over for promotion, lost prestige and who feel just a little bit guilty at once again failing to deliver results for their country. By their own inaction and incompetence caused the very war they now see happening all around them. It stinks of the flop sweat of the failed career and begs for revenge at the hands of public indignation for the actions taken by the President, which resulted in the loss of prestige for former “big time operators” in the Intelligence community.

But the book fails to deliver on that idea. In fact, the book makes a surprisingly clear case for the Bush Administration and why they have taken the steps they have in the War against Al-Qaeda. The PR on the book makes it out that this book into a testimonial against the Bush Administration, but the real villain in this book is former CIA director George Tenet, who is savaged in nearly every chapter of the book. President Bush’s greatest crime seems to be allowing Tenet to stay in his job.

Don’t get me wrong; the author is clearly on “the other side” of the President in this book. He refers to conservatives only as “ neo-conservatives” and blames Bush for as much as he can as often as he can but very often his arguments against the Bush administration fall far short of anything close a convincing argument. I often found myself reading the book wondering if the author was in fact a Bush supporter who had been forced by his editor to write an “anti-bush” book and in the end had the book edited to express that idea rather than his actual findings.

The most famous part of the book, the release of information about the NSA “wiretapping” seems contrived and added at the last minute. It simply doesn’t fit into the rest of the book in a seamless way. It's almost like an appendix to the basic theme of the book rather than the central case being made.

The NSA section of the book is also the most troubling and it gets to my biggest complaint about the book. Whomever it was from within the intelligence community who revealed the NSA program information to Mr. Risen should be put on trial for treason, along the lines of what was done to Christopher Boyce in the 1970’s. While I disagree with the idea of doing so, Mr. Risen is within his rights as a journalist to reveal it but for any serving or former intelligence officer to even breath any part of this program to a journalist is without conscience or consideration for the damage that will be done as a result of their self serving and utterly traitorous behavior. These people are not whistleblowers any more than the Walker Gang were advocates for peace with the Soviet Union. That being said, if Mr. Risen and his editors were to be more interested in the security of this nation than he was his career, he would have considered the damage the release of this information would do before he published it because the revelation of this program to the world will probably in all likelihood cost lives. Civilian lives. American lives. Innocent lives.

It seems that Mr. Risen and I live in two different ethical standards, one that puts the nations security first and one that puts career first. I sleep very well at night with my choice but I wonder how Mr. Risen does with his.

One thing Mr. Risen makes clear through the book is the incredible bureaucratic headwind that anyone has to walk into to accomplish anything in the intelligence business for the security of the country. In fact he says that very thing repeatedly throughout the book. At one point in the book, he points out that the National Security apparatus is ill suited to fight a war on terror, and gives the best evidence as the information found in the 9/11 report, which says much to that effect.

Yet over and over gain Mr. Risen excoriates President Bush for not taking the advice of the very organization he works so hard to discredit by publishing this book, that being the CIA. The CIA comes across as a disorganized, disheveled group not even capable of doing a job as even as competent as FEMA did in Hurricane Katrina. Yet, President Bush gets a finger wagging from Mr. Risen for not listening to these learned men whom even Mr. Risen clearly marks as having dropped the ball and left the nation lost and dithering during its dire time of need.

Throughout the reading of the book I kept asking myself what I would do if I were President and I was faced with a CIA that was contradictory in its intelligence findings, inconsistent in its delivery and sometimes working overtime against my administration by leaking to the press outside of any consideration for national security.

I wondered how we could be so lucky to have elected a man who had the patience to put up with that kind of crap and still manage to get the job done with such dignity and grace.

Posted @ January 08, 2006 08:52 PM | Current Affairs

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