Stephen Cambone, smoking gun. The most significant article in the Times today is buried on A11; in it, Eric Schmitt notices that Friday's Senate testimony contains the answer to the question I asked last week, namely, who was responsible for sending Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the Gitmo commandant, to Iraq last summer to make a report on prison interrogation practices? Schmitt also has a good idea why this is important, even if his paper doesn't.

The Pentagon's top intelligence official urged last summer that an Army general be sent to Iraq to review how American military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

But the official, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, said he had never advocated a policy of having military guards at the prison soften up prisoners for the interrogators. ...

In impromptu testimony before the Senate committee on Friday, Mr. Cambone explained why General Miller had been sent to Iraq.

"We had then in Iraq a large body of people who had been captured on the battlefield that we had to gain intelligence from for force-protection purposes," said Mr. Cambone, who had been summoned from a group of aides sitting behind Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to respond to a senator's question. "He was asked to go over, at my encouragement, to take a look at the situation as it existed there."

In an unfolding scandal in which most of the focus has been on soldiers or military commanders, the role of Mr. Cambone, as well as of other senior Pentagon officials, in pushing for improved intelligence in Iraq directly links the Defense Department to policies that may have influenced how prison guards and military interrogators carried out their jobs.

"Pentagon Official Says Asking Army to Help Iraq Interrogators Did Not Lead to Prison Abuse"

Cambone is one of the minders that the Defense Department insisted, at the last minute, on having accompany Gen. Antonio Taguba to the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings today. Cambone's post, "under secretary of defense for intelligence," is a post created just a year ago, and bureaucratically is somewhat analogous to Doug Feith's infamous Office of Special Plans that cooked the books on prewar WMD intelligence to suit Donald Rumsfeld's liking. As Schmitt notes at the end of his article:

Since he took on the post as the Pentagon's top intelligence official, Mr. Cambone has been flexing his bureaucratic muscles in what has long been a struggle over intelligence resources between the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, according to current and former intelligence officials.

As a bureaucratic rival to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, Mr. Cambone's has placed priority on obtaining intelligence for military commanders. That mission is not always shared by the C.I.A., whose priorities tend to be broader and more strategic.

Here's some background Schmitt doesn't provide in his article. Cambone is a hard-core neocon, with a Ph.D. in political science from Claremont University (the neocon finishing school), a PNACer, a Rumsfeld protege during the Clinton interregnum (identified as staff director of the PNAC's so-called Rumsfeld Commission on ballistic missile defense) and since then has pretty much been sitting on the Rumster's right hand at DoD. Here's an excerpt from his profile on the extremely valuable Right Web, which fleshes out the institutional politics of Cambone's current position:

Before taking over as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence in early 2003, Stephen Cambone, considered one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s key aides, served on a number of influential government and nongovernmental defense review studies. He served on both the National Institute for Public Policy’s Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control study team as well as the Project for the New American Century’s 2001 “Rebuilding America’s Defense” report team. Both studies seem to have served as blueprints for the defense policies initiated by the administration of George W. Bush. Cambone also served on two Rumsfeld-chaired studies commissioned by Congress dealing with space weapons and the missile threat to the United States.

When Cambone was tapped to be the first ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence, some observers saw it as a Rumsfeld power grab. According to veteran defense analyst John Prados (Tompaine.com, April 14, 2003), Rumsfeld’s appointment of Cambone "will allow the Defense Department to consolidate its intelligence programs in a way that could undermine CIA head George Tenet’s role."

And Disinfopedia quotes a 2002 article from the Weekly Standard (from back when Rummy was still a defense transformation visionary) on Cambone's prior DoD job, as Director of the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation (a sort of internal DoD think-tank), and on his relationship to Rumsfeld:

Rumsfeld has made Dr. Steven Cambone the head of analysis and evaluation, bringing him directly into the budgeting and programming process. Fairly or not, Cambone has long been viewed as Rumsfeld's henchman, almost universally loathed—but more important, feared—by the services. The message is that, this time, Rumsfeld will get what he wants.

Cambone's even got his fingerprints on one of the more notorious WMD lies, Judith Miller's erstwhile "mobile bioweapons trailers" scoop, as An Economist Against Empire reported last year.

Bottom line here: Cambone is a key player in Rumsfeld's shadow Defense Department. If Cambone is responsible for sending Gitmo Miller to Iraq, then given their relationship you can damn well bet that Donald Rumsfeld is standing directly behind that decision. Miller was obviously a known quantity, and it was a foregone conclusion how he'd recommend handling Iraqi interrogations, which means that Rumsfeld knew exactly what he was buying when he dispatched Miller to be a prison consultant. Cambone's presence in this makes it a dead-on certainty that the abuse policy in Iraq emanates with full knowledge and direction from Donald Rumsfeld himself.

posted by michael  4:26:36 PM  
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Rummy's mojo. I kinda ran out of steam on Saturday, after what I intended to be the first of several posts: apparently there is such a thing as outrage overload. But there was a thought left hanging, and I want to try completing it ...

In the artificial division of labor between straight reporting and analysis, reporting leaves thought to the analysis side, while analysis leaves off the work of developing facts. Is it any wonder that reporting in such a regime becomes thoughtless, while analysis verges perilously on fantasy?

The news/analysis twin-pack is a double gesture toward the Record that the Paper of Record claims responsibility (however reluctantly) for maintaining. The Times' straight-reporting style implies that the Record is complex, unwieldy, not really suited to the understanding of mere readers. And when analysis appears in the news pages alongside straight reporting, it serves a largely ornamental function: it celebrates the occasion being Recorded by way of embellishing it with commentary. Formally divorced from reporting, that is from grounding in the work of fact, analysis in the Times becomes weightless and irresponsible. The analysis pieces that accompany straight news provide a point of view on major events, but the only source of viewpoint is the writer's attitude, and the only thing available to validate that attitude, usually, is the writer's ability to flaunt access, or project cleverness.

Given the degeneration of analysis into an ornamental exercise, it makes sense that the writers who most frequently show up to do analysis on Major Public Occasions are members of the Times' courtier class: writers like Todd Purdum or Jodi Wilgoren, like Kit Seelye and Liz Bumiller (who were assigned the analysis duties on Saturday, or Rummy Day), whose training seems mostly to be in knowing where power lies and how best to suck up to it. Consider Seelye's review of Friday's Rum performance on Capitol Hill ("For Six Hours Onstage, the Rumsfeld Survival Rules Displayed, by the Man Himself"), which is especially instructive even if it wasn't the officially designated A1 analysis piece. (If you're wondering why the Times doesn't just find a trained reviewer to do this sort of job, a drama or TV critic, instead of a political reporter: they actually tried it when Condi Rice testified before the 9/11 commission. The deeply addled weirdness that came from Alessandra Stanley's word processor is probably why they won't run that experiment again soon.)

Seelye's article is a courtier's performance par excellence: it does double duty, delivering an artful compliment while displaying the writer's ingenuity and serviceable eagerness to please. (It also offers, unintentionally, another example of a bizarre and nameless paraphilia possibly unique to Kit Seelye, which involves the public giving of blowjobs to elderly GOP officials.) With a vengeance, Seelye gives us the narrative coherence entirely lacking in A1's straight reporting on Rumsfeld's testimony: only problem being, the narrative has no independent support outside Kit's own brain. In Seelye's telling, Rummy's big day of testimony becomes a challenge to his aging manliness. Will he be able to negotiate it?

His more than six hours in the hot seat, first in the Senate then the House, showed him to be a man conflicted, pressed into a role as an apologist while suppressing his inner peacock. He left the door open on whether he would resign, saying he was wrestling with whether his effectiveness had been diminished. ...

His larger mission was to contain the growing fury on Capitol Hill over the Bush administration's handling of the war and over the nation's plummeting standing in the world. He called the prisoner-abuse scandal a catastrophe but said there was no reason for the United States to rethink its policy in Iraq, asserting, "I am convinced that we are doing exactly what ought to be done."

This was the self-assured executive on display, the one who instinctively glanced at his watch as he faced tough questioning in his final minutes before the Senate.

But sometimes, the confident executive pleaded ignorance. ... In the House, he repeatedly referred to his poor hearing. "Maybe my ears have gone bad," he said, adding, "I'm having a dickens of a time hearing folks." At one point, he seemed to miss a question entirely. "I'm sorry, did you just ask me a question? I couldn't hear a thing."

Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who is 87 but had no diminution of his sense of outrage, told Mr. Rumsfeld, "I see misplaced bravado, and an unwillingness to admit mistakes."

Has the much older Robert Byrd stolen Rummy's mojo? But the very next sentence starts Rumsfeld on the road back to his best and boldest self.

Mostly, Mr. Rumsfeld adhered to his famously pragmatic "Rumsfeld Rules," the list of survival tips that he has been keeping for the decades he has served in the capital, as a congressman and savvy bureaucrat.

Seelye's conceit, developed in the last phase of her narrative, is that it's Rummy's ability to call upon his own theoretical prescience that saves him: Rummy's Rules to the rescue! So Kit lets us watch as Rumsfeld recovers his balance and his skills, shaming Sen. Bayh and later, and even more forcefully, Rep. Meek when they suggest that he resign: his two-word reply to Bayh is spoken, according to Seelye, "with breathtaking simplicity, stunning the packed hearing room into utter silence" in apparent tribute to the Rumsfeldian presence. Indeed, by the last sentence of the article Rummy's, er, potency is fully restored:

Mr. Rumsfeld did not close the door on resigning. He was following another Rumsfeld Rule, which goes like this: "Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the president and do wonders for your performance."

Rummy's Rules: like Viagra for Congressional witnesses!

Is there any sense in which Kit Seelye has journalistic warrant for telling this story about the restorative effect of the codified Strangefeldian wisdom? Of course not—not unless Seelye has learned to read Rumsfeld's mind. But Seelye's job here isn't reporting, as such, or even reportorial analysis: journalistic only in appearance, this is really a form of secular mythography. Seelye's task is to hymn the Deputy Leader's bravery and insight, to make her audience sympathize with his ordeal and triumph, which she does with what I can only describe as Stalinist verve. See? It's not for nothing that those of us on the left keep calling the Times the New Pravda.

posted by michael  1:25:24 PM  
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