Naturally, the details in Seymour Hersh's latest piece for The New Yorker that have caught people's attention are (1) the further details about the abuse and torture of prisoners, and (2) the shoddy treatment of Major General Antonio Taguba. However, we knew that there were more horror stories from Abu Ghraib to come, and other articles (including some by Hersh) have already described how badly Taguba's superiors treated him for doing his job professionally and honorably.
Therefore, the more newsworthy part of Hersh's article appears in the middle:
The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”
A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams “had full authority to whack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action,’ ” the phrase for political assassination. “It was surrealistic what these guys were doing,” the retired operative added. “They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the chief of station.”
J.S.O.C.’s special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the global war on terrorism. “You’re painting on a canvas so big that it’s hard to comprehend,” Armitage said.
Just for a moment, let's leave aside the constitutional, legal, and moral problems with this approach to counterterrorism. From a purely practical level, this means that the people responsible for theater-level strategy--the chief US diplomat in Iraq, the CinC of CENTCOM, and the senior US Army and Marine officers in Iraq--were not part of the decision to assassinate Iraqi targets. The "authority to whack" may have not helped the war effort in Iraq. To the extent that assassinations lead to retributions, and that the exact source of an assassination isn't always known, these operations might have deepened Iraq's political crisis.
Depending on the details that aren't provided in Hersh's article, the situation might be even worse--again, from a purely practical perspective. Many US officials have confused counterterrorism, primarily directed against Al Qaeda since 2001, with counterinsurgency in Iraq. If "direct action" operations, planned to defeat Al Qaeda, were being conducted against Iraqi insurgent groups,
the "authority to whack" was directed against entirely the wrong people.
Now, let's bring back the constitutional, legal, and moral problems, and you can see exactly how bad this program really is.
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