Black Ops

Seymour Hersh's latest reveals the existence of a black operation put into high gear after 9/11 that was stupidly pushed into Iraq due to frustration and impatience at the Pentagon.

First, let me say that I am not all that surprised that such a program existed nor that it was given greater ability to operate independently after 9/11. As Hersh points out, these clandestine operations had been used during the cold war and I certainly assumed that dealing with the assymetrical threat of terrorism would probably require at least some element of high risk spook style activity. It would be naive to think it wouldn't. In the hands of these unbelievable incompetents in the Bush administration it naturally turned into a complete disasater.

Moral questions aside (and there are many), as the article details, the problem is that if you use these techniques in anything but the most secret and rarest of ways and it comes into the hands of regular people instead of highly trained specialists using real intelligence, then it is not only ineffective in obtaining useful information, it is dramatically counterproductive in terms of compromising long term policy goals.

The CIA sources, perhaps covering their asses, tell Hersh that even they backed off of this stuff when it came to using it against regular people in Iraq. Some in the Pentagon apparently maintain that they had been getting good intelligence on the insurgency using these harsh measures until the "hillbillys" got involved and took pictures, which I find hard to believe. If anything the insurgency got stronger over the period they were sweeping innocent people off the streets and then torturing them in prisons so it doesn't track that they were really getting anywhere. In fact, it looks as if it may have contributed to the US military's problems. If they mean that they managed to get Saddam, I hardly think that was such a big coup. After all, he had terrorized the population for over 30 years so it's not unlikely that someone would have dropped a dime on him eventually.

The fact is that these torture techniques in anybody's hands are a terrible way to get information. People will say anything under torture. I suspect that the "historical information" that General Ripper is so proud of obtaining in Gitmo is probably bullshit. Certainly, after being down there for more than 2 years those prisoners don't know shit today. Believing their own hype about Gitmo, these people inexorably came to believe that if they just inflicted a little more pain and humiliation in Iraq they'd get the answers they wanted. Meanwhile, bin Laden is still at large and Iraq has blown up into a nightmare.

So, it is a case of macho overstepping and making things worse than they already were, much as the march to Iraq itself was a case of macho overstepping and making things worse rather than better. Evidently, the events of 9/11 released some testosterone rush in the pinched, unfulfilled systems of the ivory tower neocons and they lost the ability to reason and plan.

Hersh's article pretty much confirms that the person who gave the orders to take off the gloves in Abu Ghraib is Don Rumsfeld gofer, Steven Cambone, the man most uniquely unqualified to hold his office since well...President Bush. Of course, Cambone being the ultimate micromanager's clerk means that Rummy himself was well aware of everything that went on and approved it.

It's becoming more and more obvious that the White House was intimately involved in these issues, regardless of their plausible deniability. As I point out in my post below, one of the main reasons they wanted to create the "unlawful combatant" designation was to allow unfettered interrogations. The White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, led that argument. The Newsweek article shows that Cheney and Rumsfeld were deeply involved in the Padilla and Hamdi cases and argued forcefully that they (and any other American they deemed a threat) should be considered unlawful combatants, without the protections of even the constitution, much less the Geneva Conventions. They believe in harsh measures without regard to human rights. They have both shown a remarkable propensity to overlook the long term strategic damage of any given decision in favor of some short term emotional satisfaction or political gain.

They knew.