JAMES RISEN: No.
AMY GOODMAN: These reports that were in The Washington Post on Friday, and Michael Hayden saying, former NSA head saying, that perhaps you shouldn't be prosecuted, do they encourage you?
JAMES RISEN: Yeah, well, I'm glad to hear that, but we'll see. I don't know what's going to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: In June, Attorney General Eric Holder met with a group of journalists to discuss press freedom issues and was asked about the Justice Department's subpoena of you, of James Risen, to testify in the trial of ex-CIA analyst Jeffrey Sterling. According to the Times, Holder said, quote, "As long as I'm attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail. As long as I'm attorney general, someone who is doing their job is not going to get prosecuted." James Risen?
JAMES RISEN: Well, we'll see. I'm not sure what that means, you know, and it's all still in the courts right now. So...
AMY GOODMAN: And Holder is resigning.
JAMES RISEN: Yeah, yeah. So, we'll see. It's very unclear what's going to happen next.
AMY GOODMAN: Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, you have a series of stunning revelations. Why don't you begin by laying them out?
JAMES RISEN: OK. Well, you know, I set out to -- to me, what the war on terror became, as I said earlier, this enormous search for power and status and cash. And I began to realize that what we had in the war on terror was we had deregulated national security. That's essentially what Dick Cheney meant when he said the gloves come off. That means deregulating the whole national security apparatus, taking all the limits off of what we can do in national security. At the same time, we poured hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars into brand-new counterterrorism programs. And the FBI, the CIA and the new Homeland Security department, all the -- and the Pentagon, they all had more money than they knew what to do with. And so, they began -- to me, it's kind of like the banking crisis. You had enormous money going into a deregulated industry, meaning the counterterrorism industry, and you had lots of unintended and bizarre consequences. And so, that's what I've found, is the crazy programs that developed; the bizarre nature of the whole war on terror, if you pull up the hood and look inside of it, is just stunning.
And I open the book with this, to me, kind of a metaphor for everything that we have, what's going on now, is, in 2009, there was a small ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 60, which is where the dead of the Iraq War lay buried. And it was a small group of pro-war people who were celebrating the sixth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, and which they -- what they call Iraq Liberation Day. It's the day that the statue of Saddam was pulled down in Firdos Square. And I saw Paul Wolfowitz there. And the woman who ran that -- who was sponsoring that day's ceremony was Viola Drath, who was an aging Georgetown socialite. And she was very pro-Iraq War. And then, two years later, she was found murdered in her apartment -- in her house in Georgetown. And her husband, who had been going around Washington dressed as a general in the Iraqi army, was arrested for her murder. He had claimed that he had been named a general in the Iraqi army by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. And after he was arrested, the police found a receipt from a printing place in Washington where he had counterfeited the letter and the certificate of being a general in the Iraqi army. And he was a total fraud. He's now been convicted of her murder. And I thought that was a metaphor for the fact that this war on terror is -- a lot of it is just a fabrication, that we are now trying to unravel and deal with.
And so, I began to look and to see all of the various things that have happened in this war. One of the first things I came across was how the United States had airlifted billions of dollars to Iraq for use by the Iraqi -- the new Iraqi government, and billions had been stolen and moved to Lebanon by Iraqi leaders. Then I began to look at the case of Dennis Montgomery, who was a --
AMY GOODMAN: But before you go to Dennis Montgomery --
JAMES RISEN: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: -- the billions of dollars from the U.S. went from Iraq to Lebanon.
JAMES RISEN: Right. It was stolen --
AMY GOODMAN: Where?
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