Name: Pay Any Price
ISBN: 9780544341418

James Risen

The author reveals what he sees as the hidden costs of the War on Terror—from squandered and stolen dollars, to outrageous abuses of power, to wars on normalcy, decency and truth. By the author of State of War. 75,000 first printing.

Greed, Power, and Endless War

Pay Any Price

Bryan Alexander

Pay Any Price is one the most cynical and darkly funny titles for a recent book. It sounds like a patriotic assertion ("I'll pay any price to defend my people!"), but actually refers to the American public's apparently willingness to pay for... huge amounts of corruption, graft, outright theft, and surveillance in the name of the war on terror. If not willingness, then mere acquiescence, which works out as well in the end.

This James Risen book is a collection of articles, really, accounts of several crimes or scams surrounding America's post-9-11 global war. Stories describe $20 billion in cash which went missing in Iraq, a shady transportation service, a mysterious contractor, a seeming IT wizard whose well-capitalized products never actually worked, a building shared by two cross-border towns cleaved by new security arrangements, a fumbling if not criminally dangerous private contractor, and a torturer wracked by guilt. These are snapshots of a historical moment, small or at most medium-impact tales of what we just lived through and still endure.

A key argument of Pay Any Price is that the federal government, business, and parts of civil society combine to enable these crimes. Risen identifies some "new oligarchs" (54ff), entrepreneurs who made fortunes by exploiting war's chaos and a government's well-funded credulity. He offers new background on the NSA's mass surveillance of Americans, which was impractical before September 11th (230ff). He argues for the complicity of the American Psychological Association in torture (193ff). Many of the bad actors spent time in the financial sector, intriguingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your perspective).

Heroic figures brighten up this sad account, or sometimes. Risen takes care to develop stories of whistleblowers stymied or blocked, or who simply died before success could happen. He celebrates those who actually got the word out about malfeasance. 

One of those figures is himself, although Risen barely toots his horn at all. His account of being harassed by two presidents occupies only the four-page Afterword. 

One unheroic person in Pay Any Price is president Obama. Risen portrays the Bush(2) administration as the fountainhead of war on terror mistakes and crimes, but he also denounces the current president for largely continuing or expanding the bad policies of the Bush(2) administration.
As president, Barack Obama quickly abandoned many of his 2008 campaign positions on national secuity and worked assiduously to burnish his reputation as a warrior president... He continues most of the national security policies of George W. Bush, and even intensified the use of some of the most controversial... (225)

Obama performed a neat political trick: he took the national security state that had grown to such enormous size under Bush and made it his own. In the process, Obama normalized the post-9/11 measures that Bush had implemented on a haphazard, emergency basis. Obama's great achievement -- or great sin -- was to make the national security state permanent. (xiii)
In the years since [2008] the government's surveillance capabilities have expanded radically, as the NSA documents leaked by Snowden reveal. In fact, the ability of both government and business to track the daily activities of Americans, in something close to real time, has been developed, refinsed, and expanded over the past few years, with little public debate. A decade of technological change and the rise of social media have shredded the traditional concept of privacy in America. One NSA contrctor observed that Americans are now living in a "post-privacy age". (262)
[A] draconian crackdown on leaks by the Obama administration has made it far more difficult for the public to find out how electronic surveillance and domestic spying have grown. (263-4)
This stuff is now bipartisan, in short.

Risen lays all of this out with very clear prose. Each chapter neatly unspools a narrative thread. It's a cliche to say this, but the book reads like parts of a thriller. Very accessible.

That prose does not admit much emotion, being fairly clipped. This shouldn't dissuade the reader from feeling pity and horror. The story of a torturer so wracked by guilt that he wins full disability from the Veterans Administration (for having been a torturer!) is one such sad account. The failure of Diane Roarke to inform the public - heck, to tell most of the government - about domestic spying, and the way the state retaliated on her retirement, is heartbreaking and perhaps chastening.

Recommended. We need more Risen.

Pay Any Price Greed, Power, and Endless War

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