James Risen has won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting twice. The first win was as part of a New York Times reporting team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for coverage of the September 11th attacks and terrorism. The second win came with his bestselling book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (2006). Another highly commended book he’s published is Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (2014), detailing the “homeland security industrial complex”, or the rise of the super-intrusive surveillance we all cope with today.
State of War included an article on the NSA’s Stellar Wind program that Risen had written as a Times reporter, with Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” which was quashed by editors and only published14 months later (December 2005) when Risen informed the Times that he’d be including it in his forthcoming book. The story’s suppression of the Stellar Wind story partially inspired Ed Snowden to blow the whistle 8 years later on the government’s global surveillance abuses. Risen later wrote about the Times decision, after he moved to The Intercept, and described it as being based not on national security issues so much as it was a favor to NSA head Michael Hayden by Times Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman.
Risen himself was inspired by the doings and findings of the Church Committee hearings of 1975, which brought to light and confronted for the first time the often illegal excesses of the tax-payer funded Intelligence Community (IC). This inspiration was the source of his latest book, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the
— source counterpunch.org | John Kendall Hawkins | Jul 21, 2023