Journalist James Risen Facing Jail For Telling The Truth

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James Risen, author of the new Pay Any Price, is facing jail time because of stories he broke about the NSA spying on Americans. He spoke on radio Thursday night of the corruption, excesses, and wasted billions in the war on terror. As the New York Times review of the book reported:

We see how, in the post-9/11 era, a panic-stricken Congress threw cash at the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., at a rate so fast they had trouble spending it. Of course there were many volunteers eager to help them. A Pentagon report found that in the decade after 9/11, the Defense Department gave more than $400 billion to contractors who had been sanctioned in actions involving $1 million or more in fraud. One of the most extraordinary stories is that of a failed gambler, Dennis Montgomery, who managed to fool the C.I.A. into believing that he had devised a means for decoding Qaeda messages. The C.I.A. proved itself more gullible than the executives of both Hollywood and Las Vegas, who declined to invest in his technology. The combination of the code of secrecy, turf warfare among bureaucrats and personal ambition ensured that Montgomery’s claims went untested and made their way up through the intelligence ranks to the Oval Office. Even after he was exposed, the C.I.A. pretended it had never been involved, the Pentagon kept working with him and the Justice Department tried to prevent any information about the scheme from becoming public.

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D.B. Hirsch

D.B. Hirsch is a political activist, news junkie, and retired ad copy writer and spin doctor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.