Seymour Hersh’s piece in the new New Yorker, “The Gray Zone,” begins thus:
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
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. Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.” |
Hersh’s report, which seems too detailed and credible for the administration simply to dismiss (though no doubt they will try), suggests that the testimony Rumsfeld offered Congress last week was at best a patchwork of outrageous omissions and at worst a passel of outright lies.
It’s also clear that Hersh’s sources are intelligence officials who decided to step forward with this tale only after Rumsfeld’s testimony. (Otherwise, presumably this material would have appeared in one of the reporter’s previous dispatches.) According to Hersh, the “black budget” operations his piece describes were top secret, and Rumsfeld could not have talked about them in public hearings. But clearly, something about the definitive nature of the Defense Secretary’s insistence on the “handful of loose cannons” line enraged someone at the CIA who knew a different story — enraged him enough to spill the beans to Hersh, using words like “bullshit” to describe Rumsfeld’s testimony.
It’s no secret that the CIA and the Bush administration are fighting their own war with each other, one that dates back at least to the buildup to the Iraq war, when the intelligence service kept telling the Bush team that there was no evidence Saddam still possessed weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush team kept throwing away the CIA’s info and seizing anything that looked like an excuse to invade. In each of the two biggest screwups of Bush foreign policy — the failure to anticipate 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq — Bush’s people have pointed fingers at the CIA and declared the problem to be a “failure of intelligence.” (Given this interpretation of history, you’d think Bush would have given George Tenet the boot long ago. But Tenet is loyal, and that’s all that seems to matter in this administration.)
Now the CIA is firing back. And that’s perfectly understandable. But you get the depressing feeling that, as all this bureaucratic crossfire ricochets, the biggest casualty will be the “war on terror” itself. Which is why the mistreatment and torture of the people we were supposed to be liberating is not only a moral calamity but a strategic disaster.
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