The Empire 486

Russ Baker: Multiply Your Force!

Wednesday 18 November 2009

by: Leslie Thatcher, t r u t h o u t | Interview

Investigative journalist Russ Baker spent over five years researching his explosive "Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America." (Photograph: John Labbé)

On Monday November 9, 2009, I interviewed journalist Russ Baker, author of "Family of Secrets," reviewed in Truthout on November 11, 2009, over the phone:

Please contextualize how "Family of Secrets" fits in with the rest of your work.

Since the outset of my career, I have always sought more profound answers to the question of what it is that ails us. My nature is to question everything, including the conventional wisdom because that can be a dangerous thing. I have always sought platforms from which to do this kind of work. Years ago, I thought about starting an investigative-reporting, nonprofit web site. And I interrupted that project in 2004 to try to come to grips with how it was possible that someone such as George W. Bush - who was already controversial and was careening to a second term although the evidence was already accumulating that the Iraq war had been sold to us on false pretenses - could ever have been elected president in the first place.

I always approach my work from a position of not knowing what the answers are - or even if there will be answers. I think this approach is necessary for serious investigative reporting. A problem with some journalists described as progressive or progressive-minded is that all their stories go the same way. I never know which way my stories are going to go or sometimes even whether inquiry will lead to a story.

I spent five years on "Family of Secrets" and, as I was gathering material, for the longest time there just wasn't anything new until - as I began to notice discrepancies - certain aspects of the story that didn't check out led me to drop down into a rabbit hole of a whole different level of American history I didn't know anything about. Some of these things have been reported on partially in other books, but also I discovered completely new stuff as well as facts that, when put together with other information from elsewhere, paint a wholly different picture of what actually happened.

So, "Family of Secrets" is definitely part of a larger mission to convince the American public, journalists and potential funders that we need to get the larger picture here; we need journalism that takes into account those actual events that are shaping our destiny, but that we don't know anything about. If we don't confront institutional roadblocks we can't get anywhere. Many people are doing positive things, meaningful work, but we need to get someone to unclog the central drainpipe of American life. The act of addressing these roadblocks is the first step in the road to fixing things.

While you convincingly delineate a nexus of intelligence, finance, military-industrial and foreign interests that have exercised a largely subterranean, malign and disproportionate influence on American history - and continue to be active - they are clearly not monolithic, as, for example, the CIA complaint when Valerie Plame's identity was revealed would suggest. Have you found evidence of push-back within the same secret power structures you describe?