CHAIN OF COMMAND

When (thanks to the efforts of Seymour Hersh and CBS News' 60 Minutes) the truth about U.S. treatment of detainees at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad broke into public view in April 2004, it provoked shame here at home as well as outrage around the world — and not only in Arab countries.

In responding to the scandal, President Bush laid it to the aberrant conduct of a small number of soldiers at the prison. He assured the nation they would be disciplined for their derogation of American values. And so they have been. The truth, however, was more sinister. There was in fact a high-level decision that preventing another terrorist attack on America's home soil outweighed all other considerations. Field commanders in charge of prisoner interrogation rightly understood this as allowing them to be as ruthless as needed to make their prisoners talk. From Chain of Command (page 46):

As Hersh reports, there were those within the military who objected to the prisoner abuse that resulted. But, until the graphic images hit the Internet, they were treated as whistleblowers typically are: they were ignored. Even General Anthony Taguba, who wrote the report Hersh mentions above, is regarded with disfavor in certain Pentagon circles. And though his report is widely available on the Web (selected links are below), officially it is still classified. There were calls for an independent commission like the one that investigated the failures of intelligence that led to 9/11. Such a commission has not been formed.

As I write this, on the day before Veterans' Day 2005, there is renewed furor over the "Special Operations" that have been and are being conducted to obtain intelligence from prisoners held at "Gitmo" (the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay) in the so-called War on Terror. The Supreme Court has agreed to rule on the question of whether indefinite detainment of prisoners without trial violates the Constitution. The Washington Post recently disclosed that the U.S. operates a number of secret prisons at undisclosed locations in 8 democratic countries.1 There, presumably, "high-value" terrorists are interrogated away from inconvenient scrutiny by the International Red Cross. My reaction to this news was not surprise, but rather puzzlement: Apparently, the much-discussed but officially unacknowledged practice of "extraordinary rendition" is not yielding enough actionable intelligence. Could it be that other countries are not cooperating in this, or have stopped cooperating, fearing terrorist reprisals? Well they might: the cost of making common cause with the U.S. against Al Qaeda can be heavy, as Jordan has just learned.

There is one thing to be said in favor of harsh interrogation methods: They do get prisoners to talk. The question is, how useful is what the prisoners say? First of all, that depends on what they really know. Many prisoners at Gitmo were swept up in groups, and a large percentage of them apparently know nothing about Al Qaeda. Even those that do are mostly low-rankers. It is well known that Al Qaeda, like any halfway competent underground group, is organized in cells precisely to cut its losses due to prisoner interrogation. Second, making a prisoner talk does not guarantee he tells the truth. Indeed, he has every incentive to say whatever his captors want to hear, and a few "trial balloons" will usually suffice to point him in the right direction. It's a safe assumption that the higher his rank in Al Qaeda, the better he will be at providing effective disinformation. Third, while it may take longer, treating prisoners well and convincing them that the U.S. is not the Great Satan, as they've been led to believe, is a better path to reliable intelligence. Fourth, unless they are "disappeared", most prisoners will one day be repatriated. When they are, they will want revenge for harsh treatment. They may even be able to exact some. Even if not, their tales will inflame our enemies and lower our esteem among our allies.

Symbolism, as in the toppling of statues of Saddam Hussein, is an important part of the picture. In discussing Abu Ghraib, President Bush suggested that it might be razed to the ground as partial recompense for the abuses Americans perpetrated there. Hindsight is always keen, of course; but had I been in charge of the CPA I would have suggested razing that symbol of Saddam Hussein's butchery as soon as Baghdad was occupied. I certainly would not have continued its use as a prison by American forces — just as I would never have set up headquarters in Saddam's palaces. There must have been other facilities that would have served; if not we could have rehabilitated them, or constructed new ones. Who knows how much bitterness might have been avoided by these actions?

Civilian casualties are another part of the picture. Of course there will be some civilian casualties in any large-scale military action. The trick is to keep them to an absolute minimum, so as not to embitter the populace you are trying to help. This is where Rumsfeld's policy of going light on ground troops and heavy on air power went wrong. It worked well enough in the conquest phase of the Iraq war (though the JCS would have done many things differently, given the chance.) But where it really fell short was the occupation. If the objective was to capture and punish Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party henchmen, while maintaining stability in the country, the way to do it was with plenty of well-equipped ground troops. Instead, for over a year, the standard way of handling any military objective was to blast it to smithereens — either from the air or with heavy artillery. An example is the battle that ensued in July 2003 when Uday and Qusay, Hussein's sons, were located in a hideout in Mosul. They were trapped in a house, and (naturally) resisted arrest; the thing to do would have been to throw a solid cordon around the area and starve them out. Instead, for a week, whenever those within resisted, the house was repeatedly attacked with missiles and other heavy weapons. In the end, no one inside survived. Sure, Uday and Qusay were despicable thugs; they deserved death. But would it not have been better to take them alive and exhibit their thuggishness in a trial? (This would also have avoided the charges that the U.S. had really gotten someone else and was calling them Uday and Qusay for a cheap propaganda victory.)

Even worse were the cases where bad intelligence, or simple mistakes, resulted in bombs or shells falling on innocent parties. Just as in Afghanistan, some informants gamed the U.S. into helping them settle old grudges. The extent to which this happened may never be known. Then there were outright mistakes, like the helicopter attack on the wedding party in Al Qaim. Such mistakes win us no friends, and give Al Qaeda propaganda weapons to use against our interests. Relying more on ground troops would not eliminate such mistakes, but would certainly reduce them and limit the damage when they do occur.

There were other bad outcomes flowing from the war plan pushed through by Rumsfeld and his DOD Office of Special Plans, or by Paul Bremer's CPA: The disbanding of the Iraq army, leaving hundreds of thousands of troops unemployed and desperate for money; the lack of attention to physical security by the overstretched occupation forces, which allowed widespread looting and sabotage of infrastructure; and more.

Specific failures and abuses documented by Hersh include:

• Two Egyptian men abducted from Sweden on 18 December 2001, flown to Cairo where they were tortured. Their connections to Al Qaeda were tenuous at best. In addition to violating the legal procedures of Sweden, where the men had sought asylum, such "rendition" is prohibited by international law. (pages 53-55)
• The Counter-Terrorism Center, established in 1986 after a wave of bombings and airplane hijackings, was meant to collect and coordinate information on terrorists worldwide. But it had no authority overseas, and asking intelligence agencies who did (notably the CIA Directorate of Operations, or D.O.) brought only indifference. Six months later, writes one of its top men, only two Arabic speakers had been recruited — and he was one of them. (Page 78) Also, the CTC staff dissipated their energies on turf battles and other internal disputes. (Page 79)
• When the Cold War ended, nearly the entire human intelligence network in Europe and the Middle East was dismantled. (Page 79)
• Infighting and bureaucratic indifference led many top men to leave the intelligence service in the years before 9/11. Case officers were in such short supply that some were induced to come out of retirement and work part-time. (page 83)
• The FBI computer system had been in disarray for ten years. Immediately after 9/11, the FBI could not electronically send images to its field offices; it had to burn them to a CD-ROM and mail that. Thus it was 5 or 6 years behind the average Web surfer. Part of the problem was that upgrade funds kept getting diverted to other areas. (Page 89)
• Needing prompt access to threat information, the FAA sought to put security liaison officers in the FBI, CIA, and State Department. CIA and State were cooperative, but the FBI refused. Even after 9/11, the FBI sought to get rid of the FAA liaison man at HQ because "he was seen as too pushy about trying to get information." (page 93)
• When Zaccarias Moussaouri was apprehended and admitted to being a member of Al Qaeda, many intelligence officials wanted to offer a plea bargain, convinced that he would talk with the right inducement. But John Ashcroft was adamant in seeking the death penalty, removing any chance of an incentive. (Page 104) When Moussaouri's odd behavior in a Minnesota flight school2 was reported to the FBI and they arrested him in August 2001, the field agents wanted to get a warrant to seize his computer. HQ turned them down — until after 9/11.
• In the assault on Mullah Omar's complex, the first ground action of the war in Afghanistan, the Army's Delta Force wanted to send in a four-man special ops team and attack with no warning. Instead, the operation began with strafing by an AC-130 gunship. Then, a hundred Delta Force troops went in. They found no Mullah and no documents of importance. But when they came out, the Taliban found them, firing small arms and a host of RPGs from dug-in positions. Twelve were wounded, three seriously. They managed to retreat as Army helicopter gunships provided covering fire against the Taliban. In post-mortem analysis, the operation was judged too slow and too noisy — but not by CENTCOM, which decided it showed that Afghanistan was no place for Special Operations. (Pages 124-6)
• In November 2001, the Northern Alliance trapped thousands of Taliban and Al Qaeda, along with some Pakistani soldiers, in the town of Kunduz. Despite Rumsfeld's assurances, the Pakistanis were evacuated in a nighttime airlift, with U.S. approval. Unfortunately, an unknown number of Taliban and Al Qaeda also managed to escape to Pakistan on those aircraft.
• By March 2002, the remaining Taliban forces were entrenched in the Shah-i-Kot mountains bordering eastern Afghanistan. CENTCOM was set to go in and get them. But when additional cave complexes apparently occupied by Al Qaeda were spotted, the Air Force was denied permission to bomb them. The stated reason was to retain the element of surprise. Fortunately, wiser heads prevails and the bombing was done. Even so, when the first wave of troops (Afghan) headed up the mountain road in trucks, they were blasted by mortars pre-targeted on that stretch of road. Thus did Operation Anaconda begin. And then things got worse. (Pages 135-145)
• Lack of planning RE: Iraq evinced itself in early summer 2001. A career official undertook a routine evaluation of the scenario the Bush administration was working on. Basically, he looked at things that might go wrong: such as, what if Chalabi turns out not to be popular in Iraq? Pentagon leadership rejected this, wanting instead to focus on what would go right. Similarly, Pentagon leadership disdained the more cautious planning done at the State Department, and accused Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage of losing their nerve.3 (Page 169)

A dearth of ground truth

One striking fact, evidenced in many separate facets of the Iraqi situation, was the discrepancy between what experienced analysts or the troops in the trenches knew, and what the Pentagon believed. For example, Rumsfeld knew little about the extent of the insurgency, and minimized it as the residual action of "a few dead-enders". Others knew it was a well-organized and well-financed effort by Sunni Baathists. These would pay desperate men such as those from the disbanded Iraqi army to attack U.S. troops, and would learn from the response. (pages 58-59) This fits right in with Pentagon insistence, before the war started, that post-occupation problems would be negligible. (For very good coverage of planning for the post-war phase, and how it failed to get heard at the Pentagon, see James Fallows's article "Blind into Baghdad" in the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic.)

The evidence that satisfied

Hersh's account reveals that Rumsfeld and top Pentagon officials deliberately chose to believe the evidence that supported their assessment of Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat, and discounted contrary evidence. Page 218-219: "The former intelligence official went on, "One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn't like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. 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." He added, "If it doesn't fit their theory, they don't want to accept it."

Among the "evidence" on which the Pentagon depended was

• The notorious fake documents recording Iraq's purchase of 500 tons of yellowcake from Niger. One letter, dated 10/10/2000, bore the signature of Allele Habibou, Niger's minister of foreign affairs. The only problem was that he had left that office in 1989.4
• A sensational memoir by Dr. Khidir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994. It claimed that Iraq had in 1991 been far closer to the bomb than believed. Alas, Hamza's earlier memoir, written with former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright, described how Iraq had failed in its A-bomb quest. This first book never found a publisher.
• The documents brought out of Iraq by Hussein Kamel, Saddam's brother in law, detailed immense quantities of chemical weapons. His full report, however, tells that all were destroyed before the U.N. inspections began.
• Reports by other defectors, telling of mobile bioweapon factories and a secret lab under a hospital in Baghdad. The mobile labs weren't, and no probing, even ground-penetrating radar, found anything under the hospital.
• Sabah Khodada, Iraqi army captain, claimed that at Salman Pak south of Baghdad a Boeing 707 was used to train hijackers. In fact, it was for counterterrorism, requested when pro-Iranian extremists hijacked an Iraq airliner in 1986, and had been supplied by Britain's MI6.

Many of these defectors came through Ahmed Chalabi's outfit. The point is that the Pentagon regarded the CIA as untrustworthy, accusing it both of not reasoning beyond the hard facts it uncovered and of missing obvious interpretations carried in documents it possessed. The Pentagon's practice was to leak classified reports such as the yellowcake fake, and when CIA rebuttals, also classified, reached it, to simply sit on them. Thus, the public only heard their side. The core of the distortion was the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, staffed by true believers intent on bypassing the normal checks and balances of the evidence review process. They were aided by John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Hersh reports (p.222) that Bolton became disturbed because his intelligence liaison wasn't telling him what he wanted to hear. The liaison, Greg Thielmann, was soon shut out of Bolton's meetings despite the fact that he had been posted by Colin Powell.

Even the DIA, which was under his direct control, was suspect to Rumsfeld's eyes. As for the CIA, with Tenet in a shaky position, and the analysts pounded day after day to produce the "right" evidence, some caved.

The evidence that should have raised red flags

There is an Iraqi named Jafar Dhia Jafar, a british-trained physicist who was in charge of Iraq's nuclear bomb program in the 1980s. He fled the country before Baghdad fell in 2003, settling in United Arab Emirates. Agreeing to be debriefed by CIA and British intelligence there, he said that there were no nukes, no poisons, no WMD at all. Asked how he could be sure, he said he knew all the scientists, and they had talked about it. The WMD were destroyed, he said, on orders from the Top Man (Saddam) before UN inspections began in 1991, for the very sound reason that Saddam knew they would be worse than useless against the USA. This clearly veers too far in the other direction: the UNSCOM teams uncovered and destroyed quantities of chemical weapons in the mid-1990s. As a physicist, Jafar would have been most "in tune" with Iraq's nuclear programs. Nevertheless, this should have raised concerns.

Fiddling with the "Tip-Fiddle"

In planning for the war in late 2002, Rumsfeld discarded the JCS' carefully prepared TPFDL ("tip-fiddle") setting forth the types of forces to be mobilized and their sequence of deployment. It called for pre-shipping heavy equipment for 3 or 4 divisions, and would ultimately employ 4 or more Army divisions plus other specialized units. Rumsfeld wanted a much smaller deployment, plus overwhelming air power. More, he insisted on controlling the sequence of deployment himself. And in Afghanistan, he used special forces teams and UAVs for manhunts, much like the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. At least one mistake was made. In February 2002, a Predator spotted a very tall man assumed to be bin Laden. It fired a missile which killed the man and two others; they turned out to be locals collecting scrap metal. And on Sunday, 11/3/2002, a Hellfire missile killed Qaed Salim Sinam al-Harethi, an Al Qaeda leader, and 5 other men in Yemen, leaading Al Qaeda to retaliate against Yemen. Yemeni officials advised that there had almost been two prior mistakes.

The above incidents, presented in somewhat haphazard order, are the basis of my "Abu grief". I feel there's a very small chance that our excursion into Iraq will turn out well, at least not without more years of troop presence and billions of dollars expended. If not for the Pentagon's intransigence and the CPA's incompetence, we might at this moment be preparing to depart from an Iraq with its infrastructure repaired, its army and police forces functional, and its politics stable and reasonably democratic. Instead, we face an Iraq with a major fraction of its population discontented with our presence, a minor portion actively insurgent, outside agitators operating quite freely, and a small but real possibility that the country might fragment itself in factional disputes. All this can be laid to a small group of leaders who decided they had to abandon American values in order to successfully conduct a war to save American values. When will they ever learn?

Some references for "Extraordinary rendition"

• Outsourcing Torture (The New Yorker)
• Extraordinary Rendition (Wikipedia)
• Rendition Realities (Washington Post)

A link to the Taguba Report (Many more can be found by Googling.)

• The "Taguba Report" On Treatment Of Abu Ghraib Prisoners In Iraq (FindLaw)

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