Posted on 05/19/2004 8:24:58 PM PDT by Jean S
How can you tell that the national security experts who are the unnamed sources for journalist Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker exposé of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal are tough-minded, no-nonsense insiders?
They say “shit” a lot.
“This shit has been brewing for months,” a Pentagon consultant tells Hersh, creating a particularly unpalatable image of the growing prison abuse investigation.
“He goes into it not knowing shit,” says a former intelligence official, referring to Gen. Antonio Taguba’s state of mind as he began an investigation of the abuse.
“When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9-11, how do you push the pedal?” the defense consultant asks, suggesting that it is exceedingly difficult to find the appropriate levels of force and intimidation in terrorist interrogations.
And, finally, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone,” says a senior CIA official of the congressional testimony of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone.
Clearly, if Hersh’s reporting is correct, the Bush administration is in deep shit.
Of course, there are serious doubts about the accuracy of some of Hersh’s information.
And what has not been discussed much lately is the fact that many people will read Hersh’s descriptions of the actions taken by Rumsfeld and his deputies and say, “Yes!!!”
As Hersh tells the story, the secretary of defense was “apoplectic” after U.S. forces blew a chance to kill Afghanistan’s Mullah Omar because a military lawyer wouldn’t approve the strike.
“Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness,” Hersh writes.
To which many people might say: It’s about time. That’s precisely the reaction a secretary of defense should have.
And Rumsfeld didn’t just rant. According to Hersh, he created a new, top-secret program to get around legal roadblocks in high-importance terrorism cases.
The program gave elite U.S. forces great freedom in nabbing terrorists. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want,’” one former intelligence official told Hersh.
To which many people might say: Good.
And the plan worked. “In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror,” Hersh writes.
“It’s been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat,” the former intelligence official told Hersh. “If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States — and do so without visibility.”
Although Hersh writes that some of the program’s methods were “troubling,” still many people might say of the program: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
All that applied to the war against al Qaeda.
Hersh reports that later, in Iraq, Rumsfeld became increasingly alarmed at the growing level of violence from the post-Saddam insurgency.
After the August bombings of the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, and then the United Nations headquarters, top Pentagon officials began to rethink their approach to the insurgents.
To which many people might say: Good idea.
The problem, Hersh writes, was a shortage of usable intelligence.
“Human intelligence is poor or lacking ... due to the dearth of competence and expertise,” says a classified military report quoted by Hersh. “The intelligence effort is not coordinated since either too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner.”
So the Pentagon decided, in Hersh’s words, “to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents.”
And guess what: It worked.
“We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told Hersh, “and the intelligence is flowing. ... We’re getting good stuff.”
Informed of that, readers who have been discouraged by the administration’s unsteady — some would say disastrous — handling of the insurgency in Fallujah most likely began to feel some renewed confidence in the Iraqi effort.
Hersh writes that the administration then took the program too far, which led to the Abu Ghraib abuses.
But it’s not at all clear from his report that the prison abuses actually stemmed from the secret program.
And one of the article’s sources “made it clear” to Hersh “that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or [Joint Chiefs chairman] General Myers knew that atrocities were committed.”
So in light of some of the hyperventilation that has surrounded the release of Hersh’s article, it might be good to remember this: The abuses, whatever their origin, were discovered and investigated and are now being prosecuted.
The president himself apologized for them.
And the secret interrogation program, whether or not it had any connection to Abu Ghraib, nevertheless produced real results and probably saved American and Iraq lives.
It was a good idea.
No shit.
| Byron York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: byork@thehill.com |
My mother always said that cuss words are the mark of a poor education.
Your mother wasn't wrong....
I confess that I haven't looked at more than a few of these pictures. But the more I think it over, the more I think they have been mislabeled. They are NOT atrocities. They are demeaning and they are PORNOGRAPHIC.
Pornography, if I may say so, is not in Rumsfeld's line. It's more of a liberal disease than a conservative disease.
And it seems to have arisen because of a lack of discipline in the MP brigade that was chiefly responsible. That woman general should have been disciplined much earlier for letting her troops sleep with each other, get pregnant, and generally screw around with no supervision.
Sy Hersh is a leech!
Everything you've said is true.
The central question is why she wasn't. My feeling is that things got out of control because we're trying to do too much with too little - and that's because of budget constraints.
No. I've reconsidered. They're pornography AND atrocities.
Actually, I would say that the female general was not disciplined much earlier had to do with political correctness, and not much else.
Qwinn
LOL Ya know you are starting to grow on me but that is a very liberal attitude. Just throw money at the problem and it will go away. Why does it take money to make 6 adults exhibit a sense of right and wrong not to mention self-restraint and respect? Why does it take money to make a Brigadier General stop running her command like a bad imitation of M*A*S*H with no military discipline including a uniform optional policy and no saluting. Having said that you are show a lot of class on FR.
Quite possibly. I hope it turns out that you're correct. It'll be much better for the country.
It's true that money is not the solution to every problem...but it's also true that money is the solution to some problems. I can understand why Americans might want to inflict pain and humiliation upon Arabs...but that these people did it for amusement fills me with revulsion.
Me too. The first court martial today set the tone. The guy that pleaded guilty got the max even after he cut a deal to testify against the others. These perverts are in for some serious time at Leavenworth along with a full Colonel and very likely the Brigadier General.
"I hope it turns out that you're correct. It'll be much better for the country."
Only if political correctness is recognized for the mental disease that it is. If the same pattern continues, where a significant percentage of our population continues to get a free pass to commit crimes without repercussions, why would it be any better than the alternative?
Qwinn
That's the idea.
Expose the consequences of a free pass, and of mistaken ideas of equality, and - hopefully - our society will correct its errors and not make the same mistakes.
We'll make different mistakes, of course, but that's much, much better.
If political correctness is seen as the cause of Abu Ghraib there's a good chance we will take steps to abandon it.
It protecting tax breaks for the wealthy is seen as the cause it can only further polarize the country and hobble our efforts to effectively deal with our foreign enemies.
Atrocities??? Only if you mean how bad the photography actually was...bad lighting, lack of composition, barely able to see peoples faces, subject matter uninteresting....
I, too, thought it was laugh-out-loud funny that Sy Hersh and the heavy breathing media thought these secret projects at DOD were bad things. Yesterday on Scarborough, Bo Dietl hit it out of the park when he went off on the Republicans and the president for apologizing for the pattycakes tactics at Abu Ghraib. He and York are the only two commentators who haven't disappointed me about the non-torture of these killers.
Most forms of non-consensual sex are atrocities.
And then there was the deliberate infliction of pain - physical and psychological.
But if you want to make excuses....
You lack a sense of humor as well as a sense of proportion...No doubt you want all troops removed because we shouldn't be there in the first place. The people in this particular area of the prison are not good guys. They are the worst of our enemies and whatever information they had should be extracted. The only concern I have is pragmatic...will it work? Will the info be accurate? If the answer is yes to both then have at it. I do not care that the so called "rights" of people out of uniform who could be summarily executed for being spies are being "violated". War is hell.
I guess the only thing you had against Saddam Hussein was that he wasn't on our side. Pathetic...
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