Pay Any Price Quotes

“A 2011 study by the Pentagon found that during the ten years after 9/11, the Defense Department had given more than $400 billion to contractors who had previously been sanctioned in cases involving $1 million or more in fraud.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“During the darkest years of the Iraq war, between 2004 and 2008, there were at least thirty-five convictions in the United States and more than $17 million in fines, forfeitures, and restitution payments made in fraud cases in connection with the American reconstruction of Iraq. But the midlevel officers, enlisted personnel, contractors, and others who have been caught account for only a tiny slice of the billions that have gone missing in Iraq. The biggest thieves have been far more elusive.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“The object of terrorism is to use violence or the threat of violence to create fear and alarm,” says Jenkins. “And so terrorism has worked. Certainly, we have been the major contributors to that. We have scared the hell out of ourselves.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“The drone is the ultimate imperial weapon, allowing a superpower almost unlimited reach while keeping its own soldiers far from battle.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Money from taxpayers in Wichita and Denver and Phoenix gets routed through the Pentagon and CIA and then ends up here, or in Baghdad or Dubai, or Doha or Kabul or Beirut, in the hands of contractors, subcontractors, their local business partners, local sheikhs, local Mukhabarat officers, local oil smugglers, local drug dealers—money that funds construction and real estate speculation in a few choice luxury districts, buildings that go up thanks to the sweat of imported Filipino and Bangladeshi workers”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“KBR went on to become far and away the largest single Pentagon contractor of the entire war, receiving a combined total of $39.5 billion in contracts, according to calculations by the Financial Times in 2013.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“KBR won its coveted role in Iraq while it was a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company Vice President Dick Cheney ran before the 2000 presidential campaign. KBR was later spun off from Halliburton, but by then, it was well entrenched with a virtual monopoly over basic services for American troops in Iraq. At the height of the war, KBR had more than fifty thousand personnel and subcontractors working for it in Iraq, making the company’s presence in Iraq larger than that of the British Army.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Today, at least $11.7 billion of the approximately $20 billion the CPA ordered sent to Iraq from New York is either unaccounted for or has simply disappeared.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Overall, the United States spent $63 billion of its own money on Iraq’s reconstruction throughout the war.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“He shook his head no and said, “It is now among us.” Roark also pressed him on the limits of the program, and Hayden suggested that the only real limit had been imposed by Rep. Nancy Pelosi in exchange for going along with the program and maintaining her silence about it. Hayden told Roark that “Pelosi had repeatedly warned him not to go beyond the CT [counterterrorism] target, and for now they were adhering to that.” In other words, the Bush administration and NSA eventually wanted to use the domestic spying program for purposes that had nothing to do with the global war on terror.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“President Obama’s decision to launch airstrikes against ISIS in the summer of 2014 raised the potential for a completely new war on terror, without ever having declared an end to the previous one. It also signified a questionable “whack-a-mole” strategy, in which the U.S. targets Islamic militant insurgencies before they ever attack the United States, just in case they might do so in the future. That strategy would almost guarantee that those groups will eventually turn against us, and that the endless war on terror would remain endless.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“One of the most baleful consequences of the toxic combination of fear and money in the post-9/11 era has been the constriction of the physical landscape of the United States. Freedom of movement—one of the greatest attributes of life in the expanse of the United States—has been curtailed. Money has flowed from Washington and corporate America to finance security guards, security gates, metal detectors, and Jersey barriers; bit by bit, the United States has become a nation whose watchwords are now “authorized access only.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Mitchell and Jessen’s great achievement was to bend the accepted narrative of how SERE affects the mind and body. They made two important and related claims—that SERE could force prisoners to tell the truth, and that SERE did not constitute torture. The CIA, based in part on the notion that SERE was safe, told the Justice Department that the enhanced interrogation techniques were safe. Based on those assurances, in turn, the Justice Department provided the intelligence community with secret legal opinions stating that the techniques did not constitute torture and were legal.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Barack Obama has had a love affair with drones. By 2012, the CIA had conducted six times more drone strikes in Pakistan during the three years of the Obama administration than the agency had conducted under the entire eight years of George W. Bush,”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Between May 2003 and June 2004, while the CPA was in operation, Basel was in charge of all the cash flights and said he never lost a single dollar. All of the cash that arrived at the Baghdad airport got to its destination downtown, he insisted. “Absolutely, all the money I guarded got to where it was supposed to go,” Basel said, emphatically.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Many of the NSA’s ISTJs were eclectic geeks just this side of Rain Man. One was known to park his car in exactly the same spot in the agency parking lot every day—no matter whether the lot was empty—and then walk precisely the same steps from that parking spot to his office. Another would buy secondhand pants, wear them every day to work for two weeks, and then throw them out and buy another pair, so that he never had to do laundry. In addition to this disarming weirdness, there was a dark side to the predominance of this singular personality type within the agency. The introverts at the NSA never questioned authority. They kept to themselves and remained silent about the agency’s secrets, for good or ill. Many NSA employees were married to other NSA employees, and often their children came to work there as well, reinforcing the agency’s insular nature, enhanced by its geographic isolation at Fort Meade in suburban Maryland, far from the rest of official Washington.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Jacobson had been told to remove the Fourth Amendment protections from an experimental surveillance system, one of the most powerful spying programs the NSA had ever developed. The advanced system was still just a pilot project, but top NSA officials wanted to make it operational immediately—and use it to collect data on Americans. They had ordered Jacobson to strip away the carefully calibrated restrictions built into the system, which were designed to prevent it from illegally collecting information on U.S. citizens.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Morgan’s studies show that the use of the SERE simulated torture techniques impairs memory and prompts inaccurate answers from those subjected to the tactics. Mitchell and Jessen’s methods, Morgan said, create a mental state that makes it difficult to remember information accurately—making the credibility of all statements suspect.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Once the NSA embraced the Internet and a drift-net style of data collection, the agency was transformed. The bulk collection of phone and e-mail metadata, both inside the United States and around the world, has now become one of the NSA’s core missions. The agency’s analysts have discovered that they can learn far more about people by tracking their daily digital footprints through their metadata than they could ever learn from actually eavesdropping on their conversations. What’s more, phone and e-mail logging data comes with few legal protections, making it easy for the NSA to access.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Why is torture the worst interrogation method? Produces unreliable information Negative world opinion Subject to war crimes trials Used as a tool for compliance”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Mitchell and Jessen were advocating torture tactics that had been originally designed to break men and force them to spout lies and propaganda, but they claimed that these techniques were not torture, and that they would elicit the truth, not lies and propaganda. In the upside-down world of the global war on terror, their explanations were widely accepted.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Before the war on terror, the U.S. military had a well-earned reputation for the humane treatment of prisoners of war.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Pentagon auditors told Smith that as of the end of 2003, about $1 billion in KBR’s supposed costs in Iraq were not credible and should be thrown out.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Coughlin came to believe that the Department of Veterans Affairs had an inherent conflict of interest that hobbled its ability to conduct honest research. The VA was charged not only with conducting research on medical conditions afflicting veterans but also with paying the benefits to veterans who suffered from those conditions. Whenever VA researchers discovered a new health problem, the VA had to pay out more money. The VA thus had an incentive not to discover new illnesses among veterans.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“The cash arrived without warning. None of the officials at the bank branch in Erbil knew the money was coming, and they had no idea at first what to do with it. The Americans unloaded it into piles, after which it was stored in the bank building until bank officials could figure out what to do next. Later, after senior American officials realized that the cash had been left with bank officials who were entirely unprepared to receive it, they called back to the bank branch in Erbil to check on it. The American officials were told that the cash had been taken care of and that everything was fine, according to staffers with Bowen’s IG office. The CPA never saw the money again, never knew where it went or how it was spent.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Bremer issued orders that effectively purged the Iraqi government of Baath Party members and then disbanded the Iraqi Army, virtually guaranteeing an anti-American insurgency.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“Today, the CIA relies so heavily on outside contractors that many case officers have learned that the way to get ahead is to quit—and then come back the following week to the same job as a contractor making twice as much money.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

“This book will save lives. As I read Bottle of Lies, I was so stunned by the revelations that I tried to think of works of comparable significance, and the first one that came to mind was Silent Spring. What Rachel Carson did for our understanding of the perils facing the environment Katherine Eban has now done for our understanding of the threats to our health from the drugs we take every day. Bottle of Lies is Katherine Eban’s masterwork of global investigative reporting.”
― James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War