Evidence of a White House 'cult'
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20050227wof1.htm
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
By Seymour M. Hersh
HarperCollins, 416 pp, 25.95 dollars
Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command is a stunning expose of the mismanagement,
mendacity and misconduct behind the actions of the U.S. government and
military in relation to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The book is a reworking and updating of Hersh's shocking series of
investigative reports, originally published in The New Yorker, on various
disturbing aspects of the foreign policy of the administration of U.S.
President George W. Bush.
Despite administration claims to the contrary--Richard Perle, one of the
architects of the Iraq war, called the author "the closest thing American
journalism has to a terrorist"--Hersh is hardly a wild-eyed radical. He
earned his journalistic spurs and a Pulitzer Prize breaking the story of
the
My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and recently won his fifth George
Polk Award for his work breaking the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story.
In a recent interview, Hersh asserted that the United States has "been
taken
over by a cult"--the neoconservative cabal of ideologues the White House
has
put in control of U.S. foreign policy, military and intelligence
apparatuses. Chain of Command paints a chilling portrait of an
administration so convinced of its righteousness that it refuses to see any
facts that do not fit its preconceptions. Goals set by the president, vice
president and defense secretary were to be achieved by any means
necessary--and woe to those who let moral or practical objections get in
the
way.
Hersh gets his information firsthand from a wide range of insiders and from
official documents ranging from congressional reports to U.S. Army
investigations.
And damning information it is.
In discussing the systematic abuse at Abu Ghraib, Hersh draws heavily on an
internal report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, providing a long list of
"sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the prison after the
president and his national security team turned to Maj. Gen. Geoffrey
Miller
to help improve interrogation results in Iraq. As head of the controversial
internment and interrogation center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Miller had
been
criticized heavily by the International Committee of the Red Cross for the
treatment of prisoners there.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, accepted Miller's
recommendation that "Army prisons be geared, first and foremost, to
interrogations," and that military intelligence, not military police,
should
be in charge of the prison system.
The result was that MPs were routinely directed to "set the conditions" for
interrogations by military intelligence officers, Central Intelligence
Agency operatives and private contractors by breaking the prisoners' will
through coercive treatment that included beatings, sleep deprivation and
sexual humiliation.
In autumn 2003, Sanchez authorized military interrogators to use dogs at
their own discretion, without his prior approval. Hersh points out that the
order requires dogs "to be muzzled and in control of a handler when in
interrogation rooms but put no restrictions on the use of dogs in other
settings."
In one of many examples of the inappropriate use of military dogs in Iraq,
Hersh writes: "One military intelligence witness, Spc. John Howard Ketzer,
told Army investigators that he watched a dog team corner two male
prisoners
against a wall at Abu Ghraib, with one hiding behind the other and
screaming. No interrogation was going on. 'When I asked what was going on
in
the cell, the handler stated that...he and another of the handlers was
having a contest to see how many detainees they could get to urinate on
themselves.'"
Hersh claims what happened at Abu Ghraib stems from the reliance of the
president and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and
special forces units in the war on terror. The switch to such tactics was
Rumsfeld's pet project--even before 9/11 he was moving to change the U.S.
military into a smaller, faster, smarter, more high-tech fighting force
that
would rely chiefly on precision air strikes and commando raids.
Such tactics require precise intelligence, and plenty of it. When such
intelligence was not forthcoming, Rumsfeld ordered drastic measures,
including the formation of a special, highly secretive intelligence unit in
the Pentagon with blanket approval to kill or capture high-value targets.
This blanket approval seems to have had a trickle-down effect.
A senior intelligence official is quoted as saying: "So now we get our
'High
Value' target lists and the Special Forces are given authority to kill on
sight. The guys begin to think, '*****, if I can shoot him (a high-value
target) on the street, why can't I do what I want when he's under my
control
in prison.' Rank-and-file soldiers--not Special Forces--are authorized to
get tough. The seam between the special high-value targets and the general
prison population begins to come apart."
The chapter detailing Rumsfeld's battles with senior military commanders
over the war in Iraq is revealing. His ideas on modernizing and
streamlining
the U.S. military were not popular with the generals. It was Rumsfeld's
insistence on a smaller footprint on the ground that led to the deployment
only 150,000 U.S. troops in the invasion of Iraq, instead of the 450,000
Pentagon planners recommended. Hersh quotes a variety of senior army
officers as saying that the war was micromanaged by Rumsfeld and his
civilian advisers, who regularly overruled the Joint Staff.
"'He thought he knew better,' one senior planner said. 'He was the decision
maker at every turn.'"
Again and again, Hersh quotes intelligence and military officers as saying
senior administration officials politicized intelligence and heard only
what
they wanted to hear. Intelligence agents who could not confirm the
existence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were ignored, and generals who
warned
the invaders might not be greeted with flowers were sidelined.
"They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with--to the
point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God,"
one intelligence officer is quoted as saying.
Chain of Command is a difficult book to read in several respects. The
stomach-turning descriptions of torture practiced on innocents at Abu
Ghraib
will horrify anyone with an ounce of humanity. The lengthy list of examples
of hubris, wishful thinking, arrogance and blatant stupidity by Rumsfeld,
Perle and others in overruling Pentagon planners and intelligence
professionals will appall most readers and enrage many.
In the book's epilogue, Hersch poses a series of questions raised by his
catalog of the Bush administration's sins, omissions and errors: "How did
eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that a war in Iraq was the
answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the
government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies
with
so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press,
mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that
fragile?"
Given the litany of errors, abuses and arrogance contained in Chain of
Command, the future does not look bright.
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
Scientology crooks: http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
Scientology murder: http://PerkinsTragedy.org
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