Situation unclear. Try again later. To Steven R. Weisman, writing an inner-page "Diplomatic Memo" today, just who's going to exercise authority in Iraq after the magic date of June 30 is a big big mystery ("Transfer Date Is Clear, but Not Much Else Is"). His article gives the impression of one manfully struggling through a sea of murk—but at least we can have faith that somewhere there's a "game plan":

American officials say all the uncertainties are a necessary byproduct of the plan to let Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy in Iraq, choose the new Iraqi leadership.

The American game plan is to let that "caretaker government," which is to stay in power until elections early next year, negotiate the definition of its own powers, in discussions with the United States and other members of the United Nations Security Council, with the active participation of Arab nations in the region. ...

The justification for letting the new government negotiate its own powers is that it would look bad to the world if the limits on Iraqi sovereignty seemed to be imposed from without.

"Any limitations on Iraqi authority are going to have to come from the Iraqis themselves," a top administration policy maker said. "I don't see how you could do it any other way."

I'm thinking Mr. Weisman could have unconfused himself to a degree if he'd had a look at this little article, which appeared last week on the front page of an obscure rag known as the Wall Street Journal: "Behind the Scenes, U.S. Tightens Grip On Iraq's Future: Hand-Picked Proxies, Advisers Will Be Given Key Roles In Interim Government," by Yochi J. Dreazen and Christopher Cooper.

As Washington prepares to hand over power, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and other officials are quietly building institutions that will give the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important decision the interim government will make.

In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover.

In many cases, these U.S. and Iraqi proxies will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens. The new Iraqi government will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials and others familiar with the plan.

[Thanks to Altercation for the link.]

How does Weisman manage an entire article about the Iraq sovereignty handover without reference to any of the allegations in the WSJ piece? Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps he's just more comfortable with fog, and official fictions, than with an unapproved storyline.

posted by michael  5:39:31 PM  
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Judith Miller Rules. I wasn't especially surprised that the Times failed to lead yesterday with an account of Sy Hersh's latest mortar blast in the New Yorker—though the piece that did get picked to lead, Kate Zernicke et al's taunting exercise about the Abu Ghraib MPs now under investigation, was a pretty sorry choice to take its place. I wasn't even that surprised that the paper's summary of Hersh's charges got buried back on A12: unfortunate, but par for the course. I'd have hoped, though, that the Times at least wouldn't actively assist the Administration in playing its non-denial denial games with Hersh—but you know what? ...

The lead focuses where it ought, on the special access program (SAP) that authorized detainee abuse and on its bureaucratic sponsors:

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of Al Qaeda, allowing these methods to be used against prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to an article in The New Yorker.

The article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reported that Mr. Rumsfeld and Stephen A. Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, approved the use of the tougher interrogation techniques in Iraq in 2003 to extract better information from Iraqi prisoners to counter the growing insurgency threat in the country.

David Johnston and Tim Golden, "Rumsfeld and Aide Backed Harsh Tactics, Article Says"

Actually, the second graf here already goes a bit astray: nowhere does Hersh suggest that Rumsfeld and Cambone actually "approved"—in the sense of having reviewed and authorized—"use of the tougher interrogation techniques." (It's a mistake that chimes with Lawrence Di Rita's artfully askew rejection, reported at the end of the article, of the notion that any "responsible official" in the DoD was "involved in sanctioning the physical coercion or sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners.") The abusive techniques were brought to Iraq by Geoffrey "Gitmo" Miller, and authorized in some as-yet opaque process through the coalition chain of command. Expanding the SAP, as Hersh notes, is a different thing, "a step further" from Miller's mission to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib—but also presumably a step taken safely behind the barrier of plausible deniability. (The rules for SAP operatives, in the words of one Hersh source, are "Grab whom you must. Do what you want." Rummy and Cambone knew exactly what they were buying when they sicked the SAP on Iraqi detainees—same as with dispatching Miller, really—and they got it without having to put their names on any directive that would have explicitly authorized torture.)

The really juicy red herring comes after the writers have finished summarizing Hersh.

On Saturday, officials in the Bush administration disputed several of the critical details of Mr. Hersh's article. They said that they were aware of no high-level decision to use highly coercive interrogation techniques on Iraqi prisoners.

A military official who worked in Iraq on detention issues said on Saturday that a covert task force of military and intelligence officers had operated in Iraq, but that it had appeared to limit its contact with the jailers at Abu Ghraib. The official said that the covert operators worked out of their own highly secret and well-guarded compound in Baghdad, where they held captives incommunicado and questioned them for relatively short periods of time before turning them over to the jailers at Abu Ghraib.

"They had their own mission," the official said. "They picked up their own people. They were operating under their own rules. So we had nothing to do with that. It would have been a huge security violation for anyone else to be in there."

The official said the group was no longer working in Iraq.

The official said the Baghdad compound where the team worked was so closely controlled that other military and intelligence personnel could not enter it without having clearance or the authorization of the commander of American forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez. ... The official said that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the commander of the military detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, visited the covert compound last September, during a trip to assess the problems with detention and interrogation efforts in Iraq. General Miller was accompanied by a detention expert, who made suggestions about the security of the compound.

Let's parse this. Somebody in the administration, charged with rebutting the Hersh article (Di Rita?), puts Johnston and Golden in touch with a "military official who worked in Iraq on detention issues," someone whose comments suggest he held a position at Abu Ghraib. He dutifully gives the word about a "covert task force" (now safely out of Iraq, if not out of business) that had minimal contact with the Abu Ghraib system. The obvious intent, as the highlighted passages indicate, is to suggest that the source is describing the SAP in Iraq, and that Hersh has gotten it wrong about the expansion of the SAP to Abu Ghraib.

And it won't fly. For starters, odds are the source isn't describing a SAP operation. Hersh reports that Geoffrey Miller wasn't "read in" to the SAP, which is extremely closely guarded, until "sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public"—presumably after the Taguba investigation began. So what was he doing touring a SAP compound in September—along with another "detention expert"? And how does this source know about the operation, unless he himself is in the SAP—and if that's the case, is it likely he'd be talking about it at all? To quote Hersh again, "The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. 'If you even give a hint that you're aware of a black program that you're not read into, you lose your clearances,' the former official said."

What's more, even if this is a SAP operation, what Johnston and Golden report is scarcely dispositive, as the lawyers say. The presence of the SAP at its own, secure Baghdad compound doesn't preclude the program having been expanded in the way Hersh describes. In fact, the two have nothing to do with each other: Hersh reports that Cambone decided to "bring the SAP's rules into the prisons" and to "bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP's auspices"—not to physically link any existing SAP operation to Abu Ghraib. Moreover, the decision to expand the SAP came after the initial decision to set up a black interrogation apparatus inside Iraq, as a consequence of the jails having been full of detainees that the black-ops guys couldn't get to. Hersh portrays that decision as an act of overreaching, and/or administrative desperation, that unraveled what was emerging as a successful, limited use of SAP on high-level detainees.

If I can see these problems with Johnston and Golden's anonymous source, it's a cinch that Johnston and Golden ought to have seen them. But they appear to be following Judith Miller Rules: in which it's a reporter's job merely to transcribe what officials say, without being so gauche as to subject it to analysis. Nice to see that the whole WMD debacle still hasn't taught them skepticism at the Times.

posted by michael  1:04:27 PM  
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