NYT Book Review | Sy Hersh's CHAIN OF COMMAND

[nostamj]

'Chain of Command': What Geneva Conventions?
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

"CHAIN OF COMMAND'' is the best book we are likely to have, this close to events, about why the United States went from leading an international coalition, united in horror at the attacks of 9/11, to fighting alone in Iraq and, in Abu Ghraib, to violating the very human rights it said it had come to restore.
According to Seymour M. Hersh, whose revelations this spring about the Abu Ghraib scandal have matched in impact his breaking of the My Lai story in 1969, this fatal declension was a direct consequence of presidential decisions taken long before combat in Iraq. The war on terror began as a defense of international law, giving America allies and friends. It soon became a war in defiance of law. In a secret order dated Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared, as Hersh puts it, that ''when it came to Al Qaeda the Geneva Conventions were applicable only at his discretion.'' Based on memorandums from the Defense and Justice Departments and the White House legal office that, in Anthony Lewis's apt words, ''read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to . . . stay out of prison,'' Bush unilaterally withdrew the war on terror from the international legal regime that sets the standards for treatment and interrogation of prisoners. Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples, but the direct consequence, Hersh says, of ''the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion -- and eye-for-an-eye retribution -- in fighting terrorism.''

The resort to torture also flowed from the administration's fantasies of liberating Iraq and its failure to anticipate Iraqi resistance. Once this resistance began to claim American lives in the summer and autumn of 2003, the administration believed it had to let the dogs loose -- literally -- at the prison at Abu Ghraib. Torture and humiliation became the fallback response to the failure to plan for occupation. Bush may have neglected to anticipate Iraqi resistance, but Saddam Hussein did not. According to Ahmad Sadik, an Iraqi Air Force brigadier general in signals intelligence Hersh interviewed in Damascus in December 2003, Hussein had ''drawn up plans for a widespread insurgency in 2001, soon after George Bush's election brought into office many of the officials who had directed the 1991 gulf war,'' stockpiling small arms around the country. Insurgency divisions were set up under the command of Izzat al-Douri and Taha Yassin Ramadan, Hussein's lieutenants. If this is true, and if, as Sadik told Hersh, he was interviewed by American intelligence after the fall of Baghdad, it is genuinely astonishing that the administration did not see the insurgency coming.

We now have two major accounts of the road to war in Iraq, Hersh's ''Chain of Command'' and Bob Woodward's ''Plan of Attack.'' Hersh is the anti-Woodward. Woodward is official scribe to the inner sanctum, and his access -- to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell -- gives his account real authority, but at a price. In Woodward's world, everything is what the principals say it is. In Hersh's world, by contrast, nothing the policy elites say is true actually is. Sy Hersh would be persona non grata in that inner sanctum, because unlike Woodward, he is not inclined to take dictation from presidents. What Hersh lacks in privileged access, he makes up for in unparalleled sources throughout the Washington bureaucracy, among the secret army of spooks, bureaucrats and bag carriers in the F.B.I., State and Defense. ''Chain of Command'' is a whispering gallery peopled by phantoms: a ''former U.S. ambassador in the Middle East told me,'' ''one recently retired senior military officer . . . said at the time,'' ''a high-ranking intelligence official similarly noted.'' Hersh has sources not just in Washington, but also in Syria, Turkey, Pakistan and Israel. In his introduction, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, where Hersh has been writing steadily about national security and intelligence issues and Afghanistan and Iraq, assures readers that Hersh's tips are verified by the magazine's editors. The problem is not accuracy, I think, so much as whose agenda Hersh may be furthering without meaning to. Are C.I.A. operatives talking to him to cover the agency's lamentable failures? Are State Department people spinning him because State is so obviously out of the loop on key decisions?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/books/review/17IGNATIE.html

[joeybee12]

1. Love it--Yup, Woodward just takes dictation these days!

My, how the mighty have fallen.

The problem is, Woodward is not alone, there is this ingrained bias (I call it stupidity) to believe in what your leaders tell us. And we know how just how much our leaders lie, yet some people refuse to see the truth.

[nostamj]

2. kick for SY! n/t