State of War

Written by James Risen

Narrated by Boyd Gaines

James Risen has broken story after story on the abuses of power of the Bush administration.

From warrantless wiretapping to secret financial data mining to the CIA's rogue operations, he has shown again and again that the executive branch has dangerously overreached, repudiated checks and balances on its power, and maintained secrecy even with its allies in Congress. In no small part thanks to Risen and State of War, the "secret history" of the Bush years has now come partially into view.

In a new epilogue for the paperback edition, Risen describes the two-front war that President Bush is now fighting: at home against Congress and the Supreme Court, as his administration is increasingly reined in from its abuses; and in the Middle East, where George W. Bush's great gamble to bring a democratic revolution is failing radically. We must learn the lessons of Risen's history now, before it is too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Jan 5, 2006
• ISBN: 9780743555869

James Risen

James Risen covers national security for The New York Times. He was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2002 for coverage of September 11 and terrorism, and he is the coauthor of Wrath of Angels and The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB. He lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife and three sons.

Reviews for State of War

[marklacy-355086 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Disturbing. Only further reinforced my feelings about the Bush administration. No adequate conclusion or summary to the book, which would have been nice.

[midlevelbureaucrat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Written by the NY Times journalist who broke the the Bush administration's illegal domestic surveillance program, this book documents the transformation of the CIA from the independent and usually reliable foreign intelligence masters, into the political puppets of its neo-conservative foreign policy masters. Enabled by Clinton holdover George Tenet, who was more interested in providing his superiors with the intelligence they wanted than the intelligence they needed to further his own career, the CIA has become essentially a bureaucratic sidebar to Rumsfeld's Defense department, used when they give up the information the Defense Department wants, and sidelined when they offer up anything that challenges the conservative's agenda. James Risen outlines the hows and whys of the domestic spying scandal, the deliberate ignoring of intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq, the administration's blind eye in foreseeing the violent aftermath of the Iraq invasion, and a continuing string of failures that may ultimately take us into Iran. The book ends with a stunning account of the CIA handing over the technology for nuclear weapon triggers to the Iranians! Curiously absent from any significant discussion in this book, is W himself. It appears that he is either genuinely out of the loop and letting Rumsfeld and Cheney run the show, or these guys have done a masterful job of providing this president plausible deniability of any of the major decisions and actions of his administration. It will be fascinating, and undoubtedly sad and disturbing, to read the histories to be written about the Bush administration 20 years from now.Read this book! It reads, logically, more as a piece of investigative journalism than as history. The sourcing is obscure, but it probably has to be considering the sensitive and classified nature of the CIA and the intelligence community. But, there's no doubting that Risen's account rings true to everything we've hear, read and see from the cabal of criminals running this administration.