corrente

Hey, and Hersh finally writes a lead! Here it is:

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 élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

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.
(via The New Yorker)

Not that the CIA wouldn't have done all this themselves, of course. But, as any parent knows, "Everyone's doing it" is no excuse.

So, I guess I'll just start at the top of the story, and excerpt and comment as I go. Note that it looks like No More Mr. Nice Blog put a broad outline of the story together, from open sources, two weeks ago.

The origins of the program:

[A]lmost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. ... In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. ...

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or SAP—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. ...

The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said

Approval would not have been difficult to secure from Bush. Remember "they are no longer a problem for the United States," from Bush's first post-9/11 SOTU. I—and if I'm not alone in the blogosphere on this, I'd be very glad to hear this—saw this statement as the sign of an Operation Phoenix-style (or, if you prefer, an Israeli style) program of extra-judicial assassination of suspected AQ members. Looks like I was right, and the SAP is that program (see back here, 11/30/2003 ([1]. This SAP sounds like the program that enabled Bush to childishly cross out photographs (hmmm...) of "high value targets" that he keeps in his desk drawer as they were killed (see back here).

Here's the nature of the SAP and who knew about it:

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone...

Ah. Cambone. The Bad Cop the Pentagon wanted at Good Cop Taguba's side when testifying. Ah. Cambone. The guy in charge of the WMD search. The boss of that Jeebofascist nutter Boykin
Right.

So far so good! But enter the Iraqi insurgency:

In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. ...By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The SAP was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and—without success—for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving insurgency.

In fact, in mid-2003 the military (honest, at least to a degree, internally) knew that even if they had won the battle for Baghdad, they could be losing the war:

[One internal report prepared for the U.S. military] concluded, “Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council”—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—“as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.”

So, as the danger of losing the war becomes real, the SAP's mission is changed:

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures.

Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba.

Or, as we would say in Texan, "git tough." But Rummy and Cambone went beyond Miller's recommendation:

[T]hey 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.

[T]he former intelligence official told me: “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.”

Once again, Rummy's ideologically driven poor planning is (almost literally) the Achilles heel. Without enough manpower, Cambone brings people from the "white" world into the heart of darkness:

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would [Cambone] 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. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

Which explains something the poor old Times (for example) just can't understand: the chain of command is murky because that's the nature of a covert operation: another word for a murky chain of command is "plausible deniability" (meaning the kind of story the Times falls for).

Enter The Fog Machine (back):

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts."

Nacht und nebel....

The CIA was apparently smart enough to bail from the Abu Ghraib operation at this point, seeing Carbone's actions as a recipe for blowing the cover of the SAP in its original form:

“This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

I've been reading, lately, about the rise of Hitler, and it seems clear that in the United States—so far—our democratic traditions have been an order of magnitude stronger than those German liberals and democrats had to draw on during the demise of the Weimar Republic. The above is one example; there are more in this story.

And now, how the "bad apples" went bad:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.

The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

.
Making the question I keep asking—Who ran the system on which the photos were stored, who had privileges on that system, and what was the distribution list for the system?—still pertinent. Is there a reason to think it all stops with Cambone?

Finally, the clash between the military and the heart of darkness happens. A soldier with a some sense of respect for our democracy blows the whistle, and the Pentagon at once goes to work pushing the "Bad Apple" theory. It's a bad choice, except for all the others:

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.

Remember when "the adults were in charge"? To me, it looks like Joseph Darby is one of the few adults in this story. Certainly the "six morons who lost the war" aren't ...

The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. “You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the [SAP]? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away.”

Once again, the Bush administration reacts to unpleasant reality with denial.

The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”

Denial, and throwing the little guys to the wolves.

This official went on, “The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality. The SAP is still active, and the United States is picking up guys for interrogation.

That is, Abu Ghraib undermines the Operation Phoenix-, Israeli-style, targetted assassination program: the SAP that is the part of the "legitimate" war on terror.

"The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover? Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”

The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”

Depends on what you mean by maligant, I supppose.

So let's look at the bottom line so far. Bush, through his deputy, Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld, through his deputy, Carbone, have:

1. With the torture photos, managed to splash every wall in the Arab world with recruiting posters for AQ.

2. Managed to blow a (reportedly) successful and highly covert program against the AQ leadership. (We can talk about what "success" might mean in another post).

Makes the Plame affair look like a tiny slip, eh? Tell me again why the Republicans are supposed to be so good on national security?

Readers, now that you've come to the bottom of this long post, what's your take on the bottom line?

NOTE:

[1] After noticing that an Iraqi general had "fainted" in US custody, this on 11/30: "Torture, assassination, arbitrary detainment ... Hope none of the karma on this catches up with us!" Heh. THE LIBERALS WERE RIGHT AGAIN, YOU WINGERS, JUST LIKE WE WERE RIGHT ON THE WAR. The comments section is available for the requisite apologies to be entered.