Steps and missteps that stumble toward truth

Like any investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh seeks out secrets to uncover and publish. Being a good investigator, he has a deft hand in presenting them: “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....” That is how Hersh first became famous in 1969, by uncovering not the My Lai massacre -- U.S. Army investigators did that -- but the existence of the investigation, a distinction that was soon blurred in the minds of his admirers.

Exactly the same thing has happened over the Abu Ghraib prison affair: Members of the U.S. Army’s 372nd Military Police Company mingled sex abuse with the wholesale abuse of Iraqi prisoners; then U.S. Army investigators went into action and uncovered the facts, which U.S. Army Major Gen. Antonio M. Taguba analyzed and reported to his superiors in disturbing detail. Once again, people are no doubt already forgetting that Hersh revealed not the abuses themselves but their discovery by other members of the U.S. Army.

Still, we must have Hersh’s kind of reporting to protect us from the institutional temptation of minimizing the gravity of exceptionally shameful acts. It is inevitable that the relentless evocation of My Lai or Abu Ghraib obscures other realities, including the habitual killing of civilians by the other side in Vietnam or everyday conditions in the prisons of every Arab country. Too bad: My Lais or Abu Ghraibs cannot be tolerated, not because of the subsequent bad publicity but because the deeds themselves negate our highest values.

In Hersh’s “Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” many large and small acts of malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance are revealed. The United States is in the dock, of course, but not alone. Those champions of humanistic posturing, the Swedes, are condemned for handing over radical Islamists to the tender care of Egyptian interrogators without benefit of extradition proceedings. The new term for sending suspected Muslim extremists to Arab countries where they are routinely tortured -- as even petty thieves are, after all -- is “rendition,” a word all the more sinister for its religious undertones. (It is just one of the many things that happens when hysteria becomes policy, from useless color-coded alarums to the recent diversion of a United Airlines aircraft to Bangor, Maine, because Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, was aboard.) With rendition, what is lost is not only another slice of the legal safeguards that protect us all, but potentially useful information. Torturers are lousy interrogators -- they are usually sadists who are after their jollies, not information.

One reason for rendition is that today’s degenerated CIA has so few people who know foreign languages -- not just difficult languages such as Korean, but easy ones such as modern standard Arabic, in which fluency requires only a short period of moderate effort. Yet more serious is the CIA’s lack of professionalism in basic intelligence-gathering by human espionage, concealed by the solid products of satellites and electronic intelligence so long as the Cold War lasted, but essential now for going after terrorists. Competent case officers with languages are very few; undercover operatives are absent. We have been engaged with Iraq since 1990, but the CIA did not have one agent in its government when war started anew in 2003. Now ordinary Army and Marine officers in intel slots are doing a better job than the CIA of recruiting Iraqi informants.

Hersh has a harsh chapter on the intelligence failure, but because he mostly uses much-quoted sources, he is not harsh enough. (There is hope, however, for the first time in years: Former Rep. Porter Goss, the new CIA director, actually knows the business and recognizes that he must rebuild espionage expertise from almost zero.) In addition to institutions, Hersh goes after individuals such as Richard Perle, for example, criticized not only for neocon ideas but also for the plain con -- his mingling of unofficial diplomacy with money-seeking from the Saudis.

Then Hersh falls into a trap -- along with many others -- in writing about Ahmad Chalabi, the exile founder of the Iraqi National Congress, because he depicts him as the puppeteer of the Iraq war when he was only the puppet. I like Chalabi because of his exuberant bon vivant style, physical courage and brilliant intellect (underscored by his University of Chicago doctorate in mathematics). But Chalabi did not persuade Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the rest to invade Iraq. Instead, when they had decided to invade Iraq they paraded him around in Washington as their exemplary Iraqi, eminently ready for democracy if only Saddam Hussein would go. It remained for our troops to discover that 95% of Iraqis are entrapped by tribalism, fanatical religion and the gross ignorance of the clerics they blindly follow.

Hersh is obviously good with American sources and institutions, but he regularly slips badly when dealing with foreign matters. In this book, he gets wrong the story of the Hussein regime’s purported interest in buying uranium from Niger. He starts very well by carefully explaining how the tale of Iraqi yellowcake uranium imports from Niger -- derived from a crude forgery already exposed as such by layers of analysts -- ended up in the speeches of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Hersh also correctly notes that the forgery was peddled to Italy’s Panorama magazine, whose star reporter Elisabetta Burba uncovered the deception and told the U.S. Embassy at the behest of editor Carlo Rossella. But then Hersh slips by blaming Italy’s foreign intelligence service for having passed the forgery to the CIA station in Rome -- which they did, but only as a highly suspect paper. In fact, as Hersh seems to know, the CIA in Rome was entirely undeceived.

When policymakers want bad intelligence to suit their policies, they get it. If Hersh could read the Italian press, he would have known where it all started -- with French intelligence, out to trip up the Americans and their allies. Instead Hersh canvasses other possibilities, quoting, for example, the estimable director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, who said that “it could be someone who intercepted faxes in Israel.” Hersh quotes that gratuitous jab, even though he must know that it is just the Arab coming out in ElBaradei, because Hersh always brings the Israelis into his stories -- if he can cast them in a sinister light. In 1991, Hersh published a book about Israel’s nuclear arsenal whose melodramatic speculations began with the title, “The Samson Option.” In “Chain of Command,” though, Hersh correctly records that it was the mujahedin opposition that revealed the centrifuge and heavy water complexes of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, but then goes on to suggest that it was the Israelis who uncovered the secrets, which in their murky fashion they preferred to reveal by way of the mujahedin. He fails to explain why any sane person would pass excellent information quickly validated by satellite photography to a fanatical sect of no credibility. There is more of the same on Kurdistan -- when it comes to Israel, Hersh will relay any fantastic tale of evil meddling, including wild Turkish nationalist accusations that Israelis are buying up property in Kurdistan.

More commonly, in his endeavor to find dirty secrets under the carpet of government, Hersh fails to see what is happening on top. He rightly criticizes Rumsfeld, Cheney and their underlings for having persuaded the president to invade Iraq in pursuit of impossible aims, ignoring professional advice at every turn. But he fails to report that they no longer have a say on important Iraqi matters, all now decided by the State Department and by deputy national security advisor Robert Blackwill in the White House. In the end, however, I vote for Hersh’s “Chain of Command,” obsessions and all. We need to know what we least like to see in print. *