God bless Seymour Hersh. His latest New Yorker piece, just posted, is here. Looks like Stephen Cambone is, indeed, at the very center of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Hersh describes a logic behind the appearance of a torture policy in the Iraq gulag very similar to the one I sketched out, speculatively, last week: what brings it all together is the intersection of that logic (growing insurgency, vulnerability of forces to attack, inadequacy of human intelligence resources) with the opportunity presented by the black world of Special Access Programs, quick-reaction intelligence operations that are essentially placed outside the law and outside the normal chain of command. An opportunity as much about the bureaucracy as it is about the war in Iraq or the war on terror, according to Hersh:

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A. ...

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld's disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.'s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. ... Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. ...

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further: ... they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

"They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq," the former intelligence official told me. "No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I'm going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff. But we've got more targets"—prisoners in Iraqi jails—"than people who can handle them."

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the SAP's rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP's auspices

As one of the article's intelligence sources says, "We've never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War." Another precedent-shattering triumph for BushCo. Everything has indeed changed since 9/11.

There's much, much more—including the fact that those "civilian contractors" can be expected, in many instances, to be not civilians at all but government personnel in the black program. With every line he prints, Hersh gives the Terra Administration less and less ground to stand on. May the whole immoral, unAmerican edifice come crashing down.

posted by michael  4:18:19 PM  
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Better a torturer than a rat? In a comment on the previous post, Ben Brackley alerts us to another story from Kate Zernicke (writing with Adam Liptak and Michael Moss) about the Abu Ghraib MP defendants, which we'll no doubt be enjoying in tomorrow's print edition ("Accused G.I.'s Try to Shift Blame in Prison Abuse"). Zernicke et al. seem, as Ben says, "determined to avoid the main story, which is not the guilt or innocence of these particular soldiers, but rather the shared culpability of MI, the command structure and the cultural enviornment created at the prison by the disdain for international legal conventions in the Administration's conduct of the 'war on terror.'" Detemined is right—they're going to some lengths to change the topic.

The story begins oddly, with what might seem a throwaway human-interest detail:

Six of the defendants in the Abu Ghraib abuse case once bunked together in a tent in Baghdad. But as the most important military prosecutions since Vietnam unfold this week, each soldier is struggling to explain away seemingly irrefutable evidence captured in frame after frame of disturbing images, and they are pointing fingers at one another, minimizing their roles and blaming the government. ...

The defendants' challenge is to convince military courts that the pictures of abusive treatment of Iraqi detainees, which have generated a storm of criticism, do not begin to tell the whole story. Each has a personal version of events but one theme unites them: they contend they were following orders.

The point, apparently, is that in trying to save their hides the defendants are lapsing from proper soldierly solidarity, and that this compromises anything they may have to say about command structure. [A propos of which: still no mention of the MSNBC-published photograph showing military intelligence personnel surrounding a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.] The presumption seems to be that there's something illegitimate and dishonorable about these court-martialed soldiers defending themselves: they're not being tried as a group, of course, and the article acknowledges that "the cases against the soldiers ... are quite different," but what we're supposed to take away from that is that the process is causing the defendants to "turn on one another." Towards the end of the longish piece, the lead's tent conceit reappears, this time in the key of smarm:

Two weeks ago, Specialist Sivits abruptly left the tent in Baghdad he had shared with five other defendants, scrawling a farewell note that said he was moving "to benefit everyone." But he was moving mainly for his own benefit, going from bunkmate to witness against his compatriots in exchange for leniency, according to lawyers in the case. It is unclear how many of the defendants are still sharing the tent.

Wipe away a tear as you contemplate that emptied tent, bereft of its former band of brothers. What a sad symbol of broken faith! Liptak/Moss/Zernicke are a bit too decorous to say it outright, of course, but it seems they believe Spc. Sivits is a rat, and a selfish one to boot: though I wonder if they've quite thought through their little exercise in pious disdain. Where exactly is the dishonor in cooperating with a prosecution that aims to take down a ring of torturers? You might want to recalibrate your moral scale, there, Kate.

While we're on the topic, though, let me address a problem in my own writing. It's a naive error to attribute simple, coherent intentions to a complex collaborative product like a newspaper. I made that mistake yesterday when I identified the (very real) shortcomings in Kate Zernicke's article on the Sivits statements with a "line" being promulgated by the Times, and suggested that it indicated a "desire" on the part of the paper to hustle the abuse story off the front page. [Today's A1, which leads like all the major papers with the announcement that Centcom has now barred most coercive interrogations, adds a Douglas Jehl piece that tries to advance the story by focusing on the Camp Cropper detention center, a focus of ICRC reporting in the middle of last year. I don't give the piece especially high marks—Jehl's never demonstrated any particular ability to synthesize reporting, as he's asked to do here, and his leading idea that Camp Cropper "served as an incubator" for the abuses that would follow at Abu Ghraib isn't borne out anywhere in what follows. But it's an honest attempt and puts the lie to my overstatement yesterday.] Various people with various agendas push at each other on a daily basis to produce A1, and for an outsider it's almost impossible to discern which of those agendas is being expressed, and how, at any given moment. And it's much more to the point, anyway, to think about the politics that A1 itself creates, rather than the politics that creates it. My basic point, about the "undertow" of Establishment liberalism and the way it coverage on A1 is biased in that direction, remains valid—I was kind of hasty though in the way I expressed it.

posted by michael  2:29:52 PM  
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