Chain of command: the road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

309 Pages·2004·1.45 MB·English

by  Seymour M. Hersh

CHAIN OF
COMMAND
THE ROAD FROM 9/11 TO ABU GHRAIB
SEYMOUR M. HERSH
To Matthew, Melissa, and Joshua
CONTENTS
Introduction by David Remnick
I. TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB
1. A Guantánamo Problem
2. Photographs from a Prison
3. Crossing the Line
4. The Gray Zone
II. INTELLIGENCE FAILURE
1. How America’s Spies Missed September 11th
2. Why the Government Didn’t Know What It Knew
3. The Twentieth Man
III. THE OTHER WAR
1. Afghanistan’s Secret Battles
2. The Getaway
3. A Power Base of Warlords
IV. THE IRAQ HAWKS
1. The Early Fight to Take On Saddam
2. Getting Closer
3. Richard Perle Goes to Lunch
V. WHO LIED TO WHOM?
1. March 2003: “These Documents … Are in Fact Not Authentic”
2. Into the Intelligence Stovepipe
3. Behind the “Mushroom Cloud”
VI. THE SECRETARY AND THE GENERALS
1. Driving to Baghdad
2. Manhunts
3. Targeting the Insurgency
VII. A MOST DANGEROUS FRIEND
1. Gambling on Musharraf
2. The Ultimate Black Market
3. Washington’s Deal
VIII. THE MIDDLE EAST AFTER 9/11
1. Saudi Arabia: Corruption and Compromise
2. Syria: A Lost Opportunity
3. Iran: The Next Nuclear Power?
4. Israel, Turkey, and the Kurds
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
On November 14, 1969, the readers of an assortment of American newspapers
encountered a story with such headlines as “Lieutenant Accused of Murdering
109 Civilians.” It ran courtesy of the Dispatch News Service, a year-old
marketing service for reporters working in Vietnam, and under the byline of a
former wire-service reporter named Seymour M. Hersh. The opening
paragraphs, written in a direct, laconic style, described how one morning the
previous year soldiers of the Army’s 11th Infantry Brigade went on a killing
rampage in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai:
Fort Benning, Ga., Nov. 13—Lt. William L. Calley Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-
looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname “Rusty.” The Army is completing an investigation
of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and-destroy
mission in March 1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as “Pinkville.”
Calley has formally been charged with six specifications of mass murder. Each specification cites a
number of dead, adding up to the 109 total, and charges that Calley did “with premeditation murder …
Oriental human beings, whose names and sex are unknown, by shooting them with a rifle.”
The Army calls it murder; Calley, his counsel and others associated with the incident describe it as a
case of carrying out orders.
“Pinkville” has become a widely known code word among the military in a case that many officers and
some Congressmen believe will become far more controversial than the recent murder charges against
eight Green Berets.
As it turned out, soldiers of the 11th Brigade had killed five hundred or more
civilians that morning—mainly women, children, and elderly men—in what had
started out as a search for Vietcong soldiers. They shot some from helicopters,
others from the ground and at point-blank range. There were rapes, torture,
babies and young children shot. After hours of killing, the soldiers set fire to the
hamlet and left behind a landscape of corpses.
Working on a tip from a lawyer and with a modest grant from the Fund for
Investigative Journalism, Hersh arrived at the Army’s base in Fort Benning and
went from building to building looking for Calley, who was awaiting court-
martial proceedings. Knocking on doors, and avoiding the pursuit of officers on
the base, Hersh finally encountered “Rusty”—a former railroad switchman—and
asked to talk to him. After they had talked for three or four hours, they went to a
local grocery store, bought steaks, bourbon, and wine, and ate and talked some
more at the apartment of Calley’s girlfriend. Calley told Hersh that he was only
following orders at My Lai, but he spoke freely about what had happened. A
total of thirty-six newspapers ran the story, eventually causing a sensation, and
sometimes disbelief, in the journalism world and beyond. When a Pentagon
reporter from the Washington Post was charged with following up the My Lai
stories, he called Hersh and said bitterly, “You son of a bitch, where do you get
off writing a lie like that?”
The jealousy and bewilderment among his competitors was, perhaps,
understandable. Hersh was thirty-two when he broke the story of My Lai and not
at all well-known. He had plenty of connections in newspapers, but he was
working freelance on My Lai. With the help of a friend, David Obst, he sent the
story via Telex, collect, to dozens of newspapers. Although soldiers in the unit
spoke to Hersh extensively and in the most horrifying terms, and Calley’s own
lawyer was willing to confirm the story, some of the big papers, including the
New York Times, did not run it. “But I kept on writing,” Hersh has said, “and by
the third story I found this amazing fellow, Paul Meadlo, from a small town in
Indiana, a farm kid, who had actually shot many of the Vietnamese kids—he’d
shot maybe a hundred people. He just kept on shooting and shooting, and then
the next day he had his leg blown off, and he told Calley, as they medevaced
him, ‘God has punished me and now he will punish you.’ ” After Hersh
published that interview, CBS put Meadlo on the evening news and the story
broke open. The next year, Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize, a rarity for a freelancer.
By the time Hersh was ready to write a book about the massacre, My Lai 4, he
had interviewed dozens of participants and officials and discovered myriad
macabre details, including how Colonel George S. Patton III—son of the Patton
—sent out a Christmas card reading “Peace on Earth” with photographs of
“dismembered Viet Cong soldiers stacked in a neat pile.” In 1972, he published a
long account of the government’s secret investigation and coverup of the My Lai
massacre in The New Yorker.
It is an open secret in journalistic circles that reporters, like detectives and
sprinters, lose their legs. Eventually, they go to grass, they retire, they get desk
jobs, they become columnists or, worse, editors. Sy Hersh is my colleague and
friend, but I also know that his general regard for editors can best be reflected in
what the late Shirley Povich, of the Washington Post, used to say of the breed:
“An editor is a mouse training to be a rat.” Hersh, who is in his mid-sixties, is a
reporter and he always will be. If anything, he has even more energy now than
he did in his thirties. And the results are plain: his work for The New Yorker
during the Administration of George W. Bush, which is reflected in this book,
represents an achievement, journalistic and even moral, as striking as his reports
on My Lai.
Hersh’s parents were immigrants from Lithuania and Poland who came to
Chicago and eventually opened a dry-cleaning store on the South Side. His
father, Isidore, died when Hersh and his twin brother were just seventeen. At the
University of Chicago, Hersh majored in history, but he also spent a lot of time
doing crossword puzzles, playing bridge, and hanging out. He spent less than a
year at the law school there before he was kicked out for poor grades. His first
job out of school was as a liquor-counter clerk at Walgreens at $1.50 an hour.
This was not a wholly satisfying line of work. He got a job at the City News
Bureau, where he began his distinguished career covering such stories as a fire in
a manhole. After a stint in the Army—he was a public information officer at Fort
Riley, Kansas—he worked for U.P.I., then for the A.P. as a Pentagon
correspondent. He quit the A.P. in 1967 after his editors diluted and cut a story
he had written investigating the government’s development of biological and
chemical weapons. After selling a version of the story to The New Republic, he
spent a few months working as press secretary and speechwriter for Eugene
McCarthy, and then he got serious again about his career as a reporter.
With his stories on My Lai, Hersh joined a tradition of muckrakers, including
Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Rachel Carson, and I. F. Stone.
Theodore Roosevelt had adapted the term from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress—
the man “who was offered a celestial crown for his muckrake, but who would
neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to
himself the filth of the floor”––in order to criticize “reckless journalists,” like
David Graham Phillips, who were attacking some of his allies in the Senate for
their fealty to corporate interests. After My Lai, Hersh applied his rake to a huge
variety of fields of public endeavor and malfeasance. In his career, as a
freelancer and as a staff writer for both the New York Times and, since 1998, The
New Yorker, Hersh has cracked so many stories of major importance that his only
conceivable rival is Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post.
During Watergate, when Woodward and Carl Bernstein were soundly beating
the competition week after week, the editors of the Times tried to catch up by the
only means possible—deploying Seymour Hersh. Although the Washington
Post, in both legend and reality, remained ahead on the story until Nixon’s
resignation, Hersh scored numerous beats and was a constant prod to Woodward
and Bernstein. The three reporters occasionally met for dinner during the most
intense months of the scandal, trading jibes and gossip but always carefully
avoiding giving away secrets and leads. In their book All the President’s Men,
Woodward and Bernstein write of Hersh showing up for those dinners in ancient
sneakers, a frayed shirt, and “rumpled bleached khakis. He was unlike any
reporter they had ever met. He did not hesitate to call Henry Kissinger a war
criminal in public and was openly attracted and repelled by the power of the New
York Times.”
At the Times, Hersh broke a series of stories about the C.I.A.’s illegal spying
on domestic “enemies,” Henry Kissinger’s surveillance of government
employees, the U.S.-backed coup in Chile in 1973, and the secret bombing of
Cambodia. Since the early 1990s, Hersh has been writing long investigative
pieces for The New Yorker, including a prescient article in 1993 describing how
Pakistan had built its nuclear program and one in 1999 on the decline of
intelligence analysis in the National Security Agency. He has written eight
books, including Chain of Command.
For many years, Hersh has worked in a spare office on Connecticut Avenue in
Washington, a room and a half stacked with countless books and yellow legal
pads with scrawled notes and telephone numbers. It is the office equivalent of a
freshman dorm room, minus the pizza boxes. On one wall there is a typed memo
from Lawrence Eagleburger and Robert McCloskey to Kissinger, their boss at
the State Department, that is dated September 24, 1974. It reads, “We believe
Seymour Hersh intends to publish further allegations on the CIA in Chile. He
will not put an end to this campaign. You are his ultimate target.” Later, Hersh
would write a book, The Price of Power, which remains the definitive
investigation of Kissinger’s activities during the Nixon era.
On the morning of September 11th, just a couple of hours after hijacked
airplanes had rammed into the World Trade towers, the Pentagon, and a field in
Pennsylvania, Hersh and I talked. We agreed that he would have to follow this
story no matter where it went and that he would likely have to publish more