spurster
09-27-2004, 09:47 PM
www.nytimes.com/2004/09/2...8kaku.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/books/28kaku.html)
Controversial Reports Become Accepted Wisdom
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
CHAIN OF COMMAND
The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
By Seymour M. Hersh
394 pages. HarperCollins. $25.95.
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Seymour M. Hersh, the veteran investigative reporter who 35 years ago broke the My Lai massacre story, has written more than two dozen articles for The New Yorker on intelligence failures, national security policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Mr. Hersh's revelations this spring about Abu Ghraib and a corrosive internal report prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba were picked up by other publications around the world and helped lead to Pentagon investigations and Congressional hearings on abuse at the prison. And much of his post-9/11 reporting - which frequently provoked controversy and criticism when it first appeared - has since come to be accepted as conventional wisdom: that intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (used by the Bush administration to sell Congress and the American public on the war) was selective, sensationalized or just plain wrong; that a group of conservative, utopian civilians dominated thinking about Iraq at the Pentagon; that the C.I.A. was a deeply troubled agency with a director, George J. Tenet, who would not last in the job; and that the Bush administration's war and postwar planning for Afghanistan and Iraq was seriously flawed.
With his New Yorker pieces, Mr. Hersh was often far out in front of the pack, walking point. His new book, "Chain of Command" (which draws heavily on those articles), does not always make clear just how far ahead Mr. Hersh often was. Material from his original pieces has been shuffled about: the Abu Ghraib section (including new reporting, which charges that senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration had been warned repeatedly by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused) has been moved to the front of the book. It is followed by chapters on intelligence breakdowns, missteps in Afghanistan and Iraq, and problems in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Israel and Turkey. These countries present challenges, Mr. Hersh argues, "that the Bush Administration, driven by its obsession with Iraq, has been unwilling to address."
No doubt this narrative reorganization was done by the book's editors to billboard the new Abu Ghraib reporting, but the decision to reject a more chronological approach (or simply to run the original articles, with dates, in the order in which they first appeared) soft-pedals Mr. Hersh's prescience while playing down the ways in which the Abu Ghraib scandal was a symptom and byproduct of other misjudgments during the war against Iraq.
This, however, is a quibble. Whether consumed in this volume or in the pages of The New Yorker, Mr. Hersh's work is necessary reading for anyone remotely interested in what went wrong and continues to go wrong in Iraq, and how the Bush administration came to take America to war there in the first place. Some readers may question Mr. Hersh's heavy reliance on unidentified sources (described by their jobs or expertise but often not by name), but as David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, notes in the book's introduction, "the problem is that in the areas in which Hersh reports, especially intelligence, it is usually impossible to get officials to provide revelatory, even classified, information and at the same time announce themselves to the world."
As the book's vociferous epilogue makes clear, Mr. Hersh does not write in the decorous tradition often associated with The New Yorker but in a much feistier vein. And some of his subjects may take issue with the conclusions he draws from his reporting, as many in the current Bush administration already have. He asserts at one point, for instance, that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism."
The outrage that stokes Mr. Hersh's writing, however, seems less like ideological or partisan outrage than an old-fashioned muckraker's outrage, fueled by the disparity he sees between the reality described by senior-level officials and spinmeisters, and the reality on the ground as observed by soldiers, lower-level bureaucrats, operational experts and by the reporter himself.
In these pages Mr. Hersh points up the chasm between the administration's idealistic talk about a new regime in Iraq leading to a blossoming of democracy in the Middle East and the current reality of a growing insurgency, coupled with a mounting death toll among both American G.I.'s and Iraqi civilians. He also juxtaposes the Bush administration's fear-inducing pronouncements about a "mushroom cloud," emanating from Saddam Hussein's hidden arsenals in the walk-up to the war, with the postwar consensus that Iraq did not have significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
One theme that Mr. Hersh returns to time and again has to do with the ways that certain idées fixes shaped the thinking of high-level members of the administration, often inuring them, he suggests, to advice from the uniformed military and the intelligence agencies and often inclining them to seek evidence to confirm their beliefs. It is a view ratified or echoed, at least in part, by such recent books as "Imperial Hubris" by the C.I.A. officer Anonymous and "A Pretext for War" by the veteran intelligence writer James Bamford.
In a chapter that draws heavily on his provocative October 2003 New Yorker article "The Stovepipe," Mr. Hersh argues that the Office of Special Plans (a small group of policy advisers and analysts based in the Pentagon and working closely with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz) "was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true - that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons."
Exhorted to find information on Iraq's hostile intentions and links to terrorists that might have been overlooked by the C.I.A., Mr. Hersh writes, the Office of Special Plans turned to Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, which was in close touch with Iraqi defectors. Much of the information supplied by those defectors now appears to have been wrong, exaggerated or fabricated.
In effect, Mr. Hersh suggests, the filtering process that had existed for decades to prevent policy makers from getting bad information had been dismantled: "Throughout 2002 reports were flowing from the Pentagon directly to the vice president's office and then on to the president with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found."
Mr. Hersh also contends that wishful thinking, denial and strongly held preconceptions about the configuration of the American military played a fateful role in planning the Iraq war. He writes that in the fall of 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld "decided that he would no longer be guided by the Pentagon's most sophisticated war-planning document, the T.P.F.D.L. - time-phased forces deployment list," adding that Mr. Rumsfeld rejected the package as "too big," in the words of one lower-level Pentagon planner. Mr. Rumsfeld's "faith in precision bombing and his insistence on streamlined military operations," Mr. Hersh writes, "has had profound consequences for the ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas."
Many of the arguments in this book about the administration's use of intelligence, the shortcomings of its war and postwar planning and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal will be familiar by now to the reader. They are matters that have been addressed at length by print and television journalists and by a growing number of book writers. But in many cases it was Mr. Hersh, writing in The New Yorker, who got those stories or connected the dots in them first.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Controversial Reports Become Accepted Wisdom
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
CHAIN OF COMMAND
The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
By Seymour M. Hersh
394 pages. HarperCollins. $25.95.
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Seymour M. Hersh, the veteran investigative reporter who 35 years ago broke the My Lai massacre story, has written more than two dozen articles for The New Yorker on intelligence failures, national security policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Mr. Hersh's revelations this spring about Abu Ghraib and a corrosive internal report prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba were picked up by other publications around the world and helped lead to Pentagon investigations and Congressional hearings on abuse at the prison. And much of his post-9/11 reporting - which frequently provoked controversy and criticism when it first appeared - has since come to be accepted as conventional wisdom: that intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (used by the Bush administration to sell Congress and the American public on the war) was selective, sensationalized or just plain wrong; that a group of conservative, utopian civilians dominated thinking about Iraq at the Pentagon; that the C.I.A. was a deeply troubled agency with a director, George J. Tenet, who would not last in the job; and that the Bush administration's war and postwar planning for Afghanistan and Iraq was seriously flawed.
With his New Yorker pieces, Mr. Hersh was often far out in front of the pack, walking point. His new book, "Chain of Command" (which draws heavily on those articles), does not always make clear just how far ahead Mr. Hersh often was. Material from his original pieces has been shuffled about: the Abu Ghraib section (including new reporting, which charges that senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration had been warned repeatedly by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused) has been moved to the front of the book. It is followed by chapters on intelligence breakdowns, missteps in Afghanistan and Iraq, and problems in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Israel and Turkey. These countries present challenges, Mr. Hersh argues, "that the Bush Administration, driven by its obsession with Iraq, has been unwilling to address."
No doubt this narrative reorganization was done by the book's editors to billboard the new Abu Ghraib reporting, but the decision to reject a more chronological approach (or simply to run the original articles, with dates, in the order in which they first appeared) soft-pedals Mr. Hersh's prescience while playing down the ways in which the Abu Ghraib scandal was a symptom and byproduct of other misjudgments during the war against Iraq.
This, however, is a quibble. Whether consumed in this volume or in the pages of The New Yorker, Mr. Hersh's work is necessary reading for anyone remotely interested in what went wrong and continues to go wrong in Iraq, and how the Bush administration came to take America to war there in the first place. Some readers may question Mr. Hersh's heavy reliance on unidentified sources (described by their jobs or expertise but often not by name), but as David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, notes in the book's introduction, "the problem is that in the areas in which Hersh reports, especially intelligence, it is usually impossible to get officials to provide revelatory, even classified, information and at the same time announce themselves to the world."
As the book's vociferous epilogue makes clear, Mr. Hersh does not write in the decorous tradition often associated with The New Yorker but in a much feistier vein. And some of his subjects may take issue with the conclusions he draws from his reporting, as many in the current Bush administration already have. He asserts at one point, for instance, that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism."
The outrage that stokes Mr. Hersh's writing, however, seems less like ideological or partisan outrage than an old-fashioned muckraker's outrage, fueled by the disparity he sees between the reality described by senior-level officials and spinmeisters, and the reality on the ground as observed by soldiers, lower-level bureaucrats, operational experts and by the reporter himself.
In these pages Mr. Hersh points up the chasm between the administration's idealistic talk about a new regime in Iraq leading to a blossoming of democracy in the Middle East and the current reality of a growing insurgency, coupled with a mounting death toll among both American G.I.'s and Iraqi civilians. He also juxtaposes the Bush administration's fear-inducing pronouncements about a "mushroom cloud," emanating from Saddam Hussein's hidden arsenals in the walk-up to the war, with the postwar consensus that Iraq did not have significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
One theme that Mr. Hersh returns to time and again has to do with the ways that certain idées fixes shaped the thinking of high-level members of the administration, often inuring them, he suggests, to advice from the uniformed military and the intelligence agencies and often inclining them to seek evidence to confirm their beliefs. It is a view ratified or echoed, at least in part, by such recent books as "Imperial Hubris" by the C.I.A. officer Anonymous and "A Pretext for War" by the veteran intelligence writer James Bamford.
In a chapter that draws heavily on his provocative October 2003 New Yorker article "The Stovepipe," Mr. Hersh argues that the Office of Special Plans (a small group of policy advisers and analysts based in the Pentagon and working closely with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz) "was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true - that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons."
Exhorted to find information on Iraq's hostile intentions and links to terrorists that might have been overlooked by the C.I.A., Mr. Hersh writes, the Office of Special Plans turned to Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, which was in close touch with Iraqi defectors. Much of the information supplied by those defectors now appears to have been wrong, exaggerated or fabricated.
In effect, Mr. Hersh suggests, the filtering process that had existed for decades to prevent policy makers from getting bad information had been dismantled: "Throughout 2002 reports were flowing from the Pentagon directly to the vice president's office and then on to the president with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found."
Mr. Hersh also contends that wishful thinking, denial and strongly held preconceptions about the configuration of the American military played a fateful role in planning the Iraq war. He writes that in the fall of 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld "decided that he would no longer be guided by the Pentagon's most sophisticated war-planning document, the T.P.F.D.L. - time-phased forces deployment list," adding that Mr. Rumsfeld rejected the package as "too big," in the words of one lower-level Pentagon planner. Mr. Rumsfeld's "faith in precision bombing and his insistence on streamlined military operations," Mr. Hersh writes, "has had profound consequences for the ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas."
Many of the arguments in this book about the administration's use of intelligence, the shortcomings of its war and postwar planning and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal will be familiar by now to the reader. They are matters that have been addressed at length by print and television journalists and by a growing number of book writers. But in many cases it was Mr. Hersh, writing in The New Yorker, who got those stories or connected the dots in them first.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company