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4.09 AVERAGE
4.09 AVERAGE
Powerful narratives, although a bit repetitive in places due to what feels like articles spliced together to make up the whole. In any case, endless unadulterated corruption and criminal activity from the very highest levels, well documented and utterly depressing . Privacy has been utterly decimated despite specific laws to protect the public and our responsible elected officials have simply been O.K. with this. Lunacy, all of it. Where does it go from here? Solid 4 star book.!
James Risen has an ax to grind with the Bush and Obama administrations due to their lengthy legal battles relating to an earlier book written by Risen. Unfortunately Risen is unable to set aside his personal animosities in this polemic against the U.S. national security apparatus.
Pay Any Price is bloated with loaded adjectives aimed at Risen’s bad guys to the point of annoying distraction. He treats the reader with no respect by using an overbearing style that shamelessly overwhelms the tone of the book. The unfortunate thing is that there are some interesting ideas and ugly truths that are worth knowing about. His section on the inability of torture to elicit valuable intelligence made me want to know more about the subject. From somebody else.
Pay Any Price is bloated with loaded adjectives aimed at Risen’s bad guys to the point of annoying distraction. He treats the reader with no respect by using an overbearing style that shamelessly overwhelms the tone of the book. The unfortunate thing is that there are some interesting ideas and ugly truths that are worth knowing about. His section on the inability of torture to elicit valuable intelligence made me want to know more about the subject. From somebody else.
Half way in and pretty much only focused on post 9/11 war on terror topics, expected a broader range and more general through line on incentives vs a collection of loosely connected stories
Risen is a controversial figure, so reading a whole book of his requires a little Suspension of Credulity. :-) But if even a fraction of what he reports is true, it's enough to make us question whether we really want to live in a "state of war" against all terrorists everywhere for the rest of our lives. Our children's lives. Our grandchildren's lives. He details corruption, questionable figures with outsize influence on policy, the damage done to people fighting the "war", and what it's causing us to become--the liberties we have let slip away with hardly a whimper. I figure he must be doing something right since the government is clearly trying to shut him up at any price. :-) Definitely worthwhile reading--are we really willing to pay ANY price? Hope this helps spur some discussion about what we really are after here.
From http://weeksnotice.blogspot.com/2014/12/james-risen-pay-any-price.html
Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen's Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (2014) is an angry book, and you'll get annoyed--you'd better get annoyed--reading it. The book's core message can be summed up as follows:
"A decade of fear-mongering has brought power and wealth to those who have been the most skillful at hyping the terrorist threat" (p. 203).
The post-9/11 period, and especially the Iraq War, has destroyed many thousands of lives, greatly damaged the civil liberties of average Americans, all the while making many criminals, snake oil salesmen and shysters rich. It's this last point that Risen probes in particular, using investigative journalism to show how the U.S. government showered billions of dollars with almost no oversight to anyone who could lend support to the Global War on Terror.
He shows how we get "unsmiling men with shaved heads" and a testosterone-pumped sense of self-righteousness who are empowered to push people around in the name of national security. Abroad these same kinds of men torture and kill. Resistance will bring you threats and/or imprisonment. Meanwhile, the government has stripped away rights and spies on everyone without restriction.
He write about how the American Psychological Association abets torture to maintain government contracts; architects focus on security for the same reason; people work for shady private contractors because they're showered in cash from the US government; self-proclaimed terrorist experts go on TV spouting on about threats and thereby get contracting gigs; and we all dutifully do absurd things like meekly take off our shoes in order to get on airplanes. Talk back and you'll get arrested. Spread the truth and you will find, as Risen has, that the government will come after you.
Profiteering is nothing new, but the Bush Administration took it to entirely new criminal heights. Unfortunately, since then it doesn't matter who controls the White House or Congress--it goes on unchecked. And that's the really depressing conclusion of the book.
Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen's Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (2014) is an angry book, and you'll get annoyed--you'd better get annoyed--reading it. The book's core message can be summed up as follows:
"A decade of fear-mongering has brought power and wealth to those who have been the most skillful at hyping the terrorist threat" (p. 203).
The post-9/11 period, and especially the Iraq War, has destroyed many thousands of lives, greatly damaged the civil liberties of average Americans, all the while making many criminals, snake oil salesmen and shysters rich. It's this last point that Risen probes in particular, using investigative journalism to show how the U.S. government showered billions of dollars with almost no oversight to anyone who could lend support to the Global War on Terror.
He shows how we get "unsmiling men with shaved heads" and a testosterone-pumped sense of self-righteousness who are empowered to push people around in the name of national security. Abroad these same kinds of men torture and kill. Resistance will bring you threats and/or imprisonment. Meanwhile, the government has stripped away rights and spies on everyone without restriction.
He write about how the American Psychological Association abets torture to maintain government contracts; architects focus on security for the same reason; people work for shady private contractors because they're showered in cash from the US government; self-proclaimed terrorist experts go on TV spouting on about threats and thereby get contracting gigs; and we all dutifully do absurd things like meekly take off our shoes in order to get on airplanes. Talk back and you'll get arrested. Spread the truth and you will find, as Risen has, that the government will come after you.
Profiteering is nothing new, but the Bush Administration took it to entirely new criminal heights. Unfortunately, since then it doesn't matter who controls the White House or Congress--it goes on unchecked. And that's the really depressing conclusion of the book.
Risen is a controversial figure, so reading a whole book of his requires a little Suspension of Credulity. :-) But if even a fraction of what he reports is true, it's enough to make us question whether we really want to live in a "state of war" against all terrorists everywhere for the rest of our lives. Our children's lives. Our grandchildren's lives. He details corruption, questionable figures with outsize influence on policy, the damage done to people fighting the "war", and what it's causing us to become--the liberties we have let slip away with hardly a whimper. I figure he must be doing something right since the government is clearly trying to shut him up at any price. :-) Definitely worthwhile reading--are we really willing to pay ANY price? Hope this helps spur some discussion about what we really are after here.