Secrets and lies.

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration By James Risen Free Press. 240 Pages. $26.

I'm grateful to James Risen. He's one of the two New York Times .reporters who broke the scandal about Bush's warrantless domestic wiretapping. And the impending publication of this book earlier in the year may have finally persuaded the Times editors to print the urgent and vital story about the National Security Agency (NSA) spying. The details are all here, but they amount to only one chapter of this fascinating, damning book that serves as an indictment of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and Condoleezza Rice. It belongs on the shelf with the volumes of evidence produced by Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Seymour Hersh, and other chroniclers of the Bush age.

Risen tells some amazing stories. So let's get to the juicy parts first.

In the lead-up to the war, Risen reports that the CIA's assistant director for the collection of intelligence wanted to gather information about Iraqi scientists who had at one time worked on weapons of mass destruction. So he sent thirty relatives living abroad to Iraq to talk with them. "They all reported back to the CIA that the scientists had said that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned." (The italics are Risen's.) But so eager were the higher-ups at the CIA to go along with Bush's war plans that "CIA officials ignored the evidence and refused to even disseminate the reports from the family members to senior policymakers in the Bush Administration," Risen says.

While the manhunt was on for Saddam Hussein, the United States captured his secretary (in puerile Bush parlance, "The Ace of Diamonds"), who told his interrogators that "Saddam fled Baghdad by driving through a U.S. military checkpoint without being recognized."

In his chapter about Iran, Risen reveals two disastrous CIA blunders. The first happened in 2004, when an officer at Langley mistakenly e-mailed a document with data on the entire U.S. spy network in that country to an Iranian on the CIA payroll, who happened to be a double agent. "Several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fate of some of the others is still unknown," he writes.

Even more shocking, the CIA back in 2000 actually delivered nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. The cockamamie idea, code-named "Operation Merlin," was to have a former Soviet nuclear scientist deliver the blueprints, which intentionally had a defect in them, so as to send the Iranians down the wrong trail and to let U.S. officials see how far along they were. The Russian, with some difficulty, made the delivery, but he kindly alerted the Iranians that there was a defect in there somewhere, which he had readily discovered himself. Iranian scientists conceivably would have been able to figure that out, too, and now they had the specs on a nuclear warhead.

The CIA is not the only Keystone Cop that comes in for criticism. As Seymour Hersh has reported, Donald Rumsfeld created his own covert action paramilitary squads that were off the books--and unaccountable. Risen takes it from there. "The new cowboys at the Pentagon were dearly asking for trouble," he writes. "In early 2005, trouble came: Members of an operational support element team working in Latin America killed a man outside a bar. The American personnel then failed to report the incident to the U.S. embassy for several days."

In his chapter on Afghanistan, which he calls a "narco-state," Risen shows how Rumsfeld disdained the task of nation-building there, and how he tolerated the astronomical rise of opium production after the fall of the Taliban. Opium production went up seventeen-fold in the first year, then doubled the next, and nearly doubled again in 2004, Risen writes. By then, "Afghanistan was producing 87 percent of the world's opium supply." Rumsfeld refused to do anything about it, even when "drug trafficking was taking place virtually right in front of the American military," he says. The ultimate irony: Some of the profits from the opium trade were going to terrorist groups, including the Taliban and perhaps even Al Qaeda.

Final tidbit: At one point, the Saudis asked Jordanian intelligence to review their counterterrorism efforts, and so the Jordanians toured Saudi military and security facilities, Risen writes. "The Jordanians saw something that helped explain why the Saudis had not done a better job in counterterrorism: a number of Saudi officials had Osama bin Laden screen savers on their office computers."

Cheney and especially Rumsfeld are the devils of this book. Risen portrays them as consummate bureaucratic infighters, who make Machiavelli look like a piker. Working in league, they circumvented the customary decision-making process to promote the Iraq War, outplayed the CIA, dominated Rice (who "will go down as probably the worst National Security Adviser in history," one official tells Risen), neutralized Colin Powell, and even countermanded Bush.

"The President of the United States did not always have the last word in the Bush Administration," Risen writes. "Donald Rumsfeld and his lieutenants treated the President's statements as nothing more than the start of negotiations. Time and time again ... Rumsfeld simply ignored decisions made by the President in front of his war cabinet." (One example Risen provides is when Bush stressed at a meeting in late 2004 that the Pentagon should destroy Afghanistan's poppy crop. But Rumsfeld did not want to do that, so he got U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to go to Bush later and ask for flexibility on this, which meant doing very little, Risen says.)

Tenet plays the fool in this book. He comes off as an obsequious CIA chief who was in way over his head. "As one former CIA officer noted, Tenet was a great cheerleader, not a great leader," Risen writes. Tenet was more interested in pleasing his boss than in giving him the truth straight up. And when Tenet understood that Bush wanted war, the CIA chief dutifully used the agency to further those wishes, even though many within the intelligence community understood that the evidence was not there and that the consequences could be disastrous.

"A lot of people went to George to tell him that Iraq would hurt the war on terrorism, but I never heard him express an opinion about war in Iraq," a former Tenet aide tells Risen. "He would just come back from the White House and say they are going to do it."

Eleven months before Bush launched the Iraq War and six months before he began the charade of going to the United Nations, the leaders of the CIA's Iraq Operations Group spoke to European case officers at a meeting in Rome, Risen reports. Their point was unmistakable: Bush wants war with Iraq. "They said this was on Bush's agenda when he got elected, and that 9/11 only delayed it," according to one CIA officer Risen quotes who was at the Rome meeting. Everyone was to get on board.

Given Bush's obsession with Iraq, Risen oddly lets Bush off the hook. "It does not appear that the President's Daily Brief ever reflected the level of skepticism about the quality of the intelligence that was widespread within the CIA," he writes. "Of course, it is hard to say how Bush might have reacted if he had received a PDB that raised doubts about the existence of Iraq's weapons programs. He too might have ignored the warnings or even dismissed the articles. But it's also possible that he would have asked a few follow-up questions, which might then have forced the CIA to provide better supporting evidence. ... If someone had spoken up clearly and forcefully, the entire house of cards might have collapsed."

I strongly doubt it. The entire thrust of Risen's book (and other accounts) is that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were dead set on going to war with Iraq for their own reasons. The alleged weapons of mass destruction were just a pretext. It's only in this context that Tenet's infamous "slam dunk" remark makes sense to me. Bush was no impartial seeker of the truth; rm willing to bet any amount of money he demanded that Tenet find some intelligence to hang the war on. And that's when Tenet, always willing to serve, essentially saluted the boss and told him it was a "slam dunk."

To suggest that Bush, had he known about the faulty intelligence, would have avoided war with Iraq is to bow to the White House propaganda machine.

Risen does paint Bush in a harsh light when it comes to the torture scandal. He tells the story of Bush's particular interest in the case of Abu Zubaydah, one of bin Laden's lieutenants. The United States captured Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002, and Bush asked Tenet what Zubaydah was saying. "Tenet responded that they weren't getting anything yet, because Abu Zubaydah had been so badly wounded that he was heavily medicated," Risen writes, relying on an unnamed source. "He was too groggy from painkillers to talk coherently. Bush turned to Tenet and asked: 'Wha authorized putting him on pain medication?'" (Risen's italics.)

Here, too, Risen gives Bush some wiggle room, but not as much. "It is possible that this was just one more piece of jocular banter between two plain-speaking men," he writes. "But it is also possible that the comment meant something more. Was the President of the United States implicitly encouraging the director of Central Intelligence to order the harsh treatment of a prisoner? If so, this episode offers the most direct link yet between Bush and the harsh treatment of prisoners by both the CIA and the U.S. military."

Risen affords Bush some distance by claiming that Cheney and other senior Administration officials decided to "insulate Bush and to give him deniability" on torture. And while that might be true, Bush's fingerprints are still all over the torture policy. As Richard Clarke noted in Against All Enemies, on the evening of September 11, Bush told his counter-terrorism staff that "any barriers in your way, they are gone." Shortly thereafter, Bush also authorized the CIA to send detainees to third countries notorious for torture. And he himself issued a memo saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not a lot of insulation.

Risen's chapter on the NSA, entitled "The Program," is sensational. He begins with a profile of Michael Hayden, who was head of the NSA from early 1999 until he became John Negroponte's deputy intelligence czar in 2005. Risen seems to like Hayden, and says the "balding, soft-spoken" man took unprecedented steps to make the agency less secretive and insisted that it would guard against any abuses of civil liberties. Risen notes that Hayden even went on CNN to say, "We are very, very careful.... We don't get close to the Fourth Amendment."

Then came 9/11. Now, "the NSA is spying on Americans again, on a large scale," Risen writes. How large is that scale? "Over time, the NSA has certainly eavesdropped on millions of telephone calls and e-mail messages on American soil," he writes. And it has the capacity to spy on all of us.

"With its direct access to the U.S. telecommunications system, there seems to be no physical or logistical obstacle to prevent the NSA from eavesdropping on anyone in the United States that it chooses," Risen notes. He adds that it can grab the "email of virtually any American."

Bypassing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, "the NSA determines, on its own, which telephone numbers and e-mail addresses to monitor," Risen explains. "The NSA doesn't have to get approval from the White House, the Justice Department, or anyone else in the Bush Administration. before it begins eavesdropping on a specific phone line in the United States."

Risen persuasively shows that Bush's approval of the NSA warrant-less spying "made a mockery of the public debate over the Patriot Act," which gave no new powers to the NSA. "The White House went through the motions of the public debate over the Patriot Act, all the while knowing that the intelligence community was secretly conducting a far more aggressive domestic surveillance campaign."

Exposing "the Program," as Administration officials called it, must not have been easy for Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who worked on the story with him. Not many people in the Administration were clued in. As one official told Risen, "This is the biggest secret I know about."

For all its feats of investigative reporting, I've got a few problems with Risens book. As I mentioned, he underplays Bush's role in the torture scandal and gives him an escape route on weapons of mass destruction that the President does not deserve. Risen also places so much blame on "Rumsfeld's power grab" that he occasionally obscures Cheney's nefarious role.

In his prologue, Risen makes the unfortunate statement that "sometimes it seems as if the Bush Administration is fighting the birthrate of the entire Arab world." That's a terribly sweeping and offensive comment, when what he really means to say, and does say two paragraphs later, is that "Islamic extremism," which Bush's Iraq invasion has stoked, is a growing threat. Surely, Risen must recognize the distinction between "Islamic extremism" and everyone born Arab.

On top of that, there is a fundamental flaw in Risen's book. To highlight how awful Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld are, Risen upholds a false past, where the CIA worked professionally and the foreign policy bureaucracy functioned rationally to advance America's interests.

"Since World War II, foreign policy and national security have been areas in which American Presidents of both parties have tended toward cautious pragmatism," Risen writes. "On issues of war and peace, both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans have in the past recognized that the stakes were too high to risk sudden and impetuous actions based on politics or ideology."

Oh, really?

What, then, would he call the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954, or JFK'S Bay of Pigs fiasco, or Johnson's 1965 escalation of the Vietnam War, or Reagan's conquering of Grenada, or George H. W. Bush (almost sainted in this book) and his invasion of Panama, just to name a few?

The idea that everything was hunky-dory before Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld came along cannot be sustained by the facts.

Similarly, Risen exonerates two institutions with a lot of blood on their hands: the CIA and the Army. "Once the CIA, which had no history of running prisons or handling large numbers of prisoners, was given the green light to use harsh methods," writes Risen, "the United States military, which had a proud tradition of adhering to the Geneva Conventions, began to get signals from the Bush Administration that the rules had changed."

Well, the CIA certainly handled a lot of Viet Cong prisoners during the Phoenix Program--and liquidated 20,000 of them. And the proud tradition of the U.S. military did not fare so well at My Lai or at No Gun Ri.

Yes, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld are extraordinarily reckless and immoral. But Risen does not need to cast a glow over past Administrations to prove that point.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive.