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Hersh calls administration straussians

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War and Intelligence
Issue of 2003-05-12
Posted 2003-05-07

This week in the magazine and here online (see Fact), Seymour M. Hersh looks at a small circle of analysts and advisers at the Pentagon who came to rival the C.I.A. as the President's primary source of intelligence about Iraq; Hersh reports that questions have been raised about the integrity of the intelligence the group relied on. Here he talks to Amy Tübke-Davidson about his story, and about covering the war.

AMY TÜBKE-DAVIDSON: This week in the magazine, you look at how the case for going to war with Iraq was made. What did you find out?

SEYMOUR M. HERSH: Well, the biggest thing I found out is that what we think of as the intelligence community may not be a community at all. For example, I was just listening to Secretary of State Colin Powell describe how he had briefings from the intelligence community on weapons of mass destruction. It turns out that the intelligence community is really very much dominated by a small group of people in the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, has more or less muscled his way into day-to-day intelligence operations. I wrote about an ad-hoc analytical group that began working in the Pentagon in the aftermath of September 11th, and which became formally known as the Office of Special Plans last August. The office is the responsibility of William Luti, the Under-Secretary of Defense, and its director is Abram Shulsky. They argued that the C.I.A. and other agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department, weren't able to understand the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the extent to which Iraq was involved in the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. They felt that these agencies didn't get it right because they didn't have the right point of view. The Pentagon group's idea was, essentially: Let's just assume that there is a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and let's assume that they have made weapons of mass destruction, and that they're still actively pursuing nuclear weapons and have generated thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons and not destroyed them. Having made that leap of faith, let's then look at the intelligence the C.I.A. has assembled with fresh eyes and see what we can see. As one person I spoke to told me, they wanted to believe it was there and, by God, they found it.

What's wrong with challenging the C.I.A.? What's wrong with looking for a new perspective or wondering if the C.I.A. has its own institutional biases?

Absolutely nothing, and, of course, one of the complaints that's always been made about the C.I.A. is that it's too set in its ways. You can also argue that the C.I.A. had the Cold War wrong. For example, there were estimates on how much the Soviet Union was producing in terms of military output, and on how much of a commitment it had to military goods, and these estimates turned out to be way overblown. There's nothing perfect about the C.I.A. But these guys in the Pentagon took it a step farther. Their complaint was that the C.I.A. and its analysts were too concerned about analyzing actual facts. What they wanted to do was take it to the next level: let's not just analyze what we actually know; let's make assumptions about what we think, and factor those assumptions in. It really is a very provocative way of thinking. They simply looked at what they wanted; when they saw things that supported the thesis they believed, they accepted them as factual.

The real problem, though, is that when you examine the factual basis for some of the Pentagon's intelligence reviews closely it's not very good. One of their big sources was defector reports, many of which they got through the Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), Ahmad Chalabi's coalition of Iraqi dissidents. But these accounts were not always what they seemed. In fact, in my article I quote a former Bush Administration intelligence official who described a case in which a classified report on what a defector had said—about training in biological and chemical weapons with members of Al Qaeda—was distributed with the support of the Pentagon. It was also leaked to newspapers. Later, the C.I.A. found the defector and interviewed him separately, and he told them, "No, that's not what I said." No Al Qaeda, no chemical or biological weapons. Chalabi's group offered them little more than intelligence to please—for example, September 11th took place, and almost immediately defectors appeared who could give a dramatic account of how Iraq was the site of training by Al Qaeda and other terrorists in the high art of hijacking aircraft. Within a month or two of September 11th, the New York Times and the PBS series "Frontline" had defectors giving chapter and verse on how strongly Saddam Hussein was connected not only to Al Qaeda and terrorism training in general but to the World Trade Center attacks. And the people in the Pentagon were susceptible to their own biases. Whatever intelligence they found that supported their preëxisting theories was the intelligence they believed. And all of this has an effect; my article cites a recent poll that showed that seventy-two per cent of the American public believed it was likely that Saddam had something to do with September 11th.

The war is winding down, and Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. Why does it still matter how it started and what arguments were made beforehand?

It matters because the threat from Iraq was the whole basis of selling the war to the American people. There's a striking observation in my article from Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska, who wants to see a secular, democratic Iraq and was a strong supporter of the war. Kerrey said that it's very possible that they thought if they made a public argument on the basis of Saddam Hussein's being a bad guy the public really wouldn't care enough to endorse a war. But what they could do to mobilize public opinion was suggest that Saddam was involved in generating weapons of mass destruction, whose mere existence could potentially be a threat to us, and allow people to believe that he was involved in 9/11. If it is true that this Administration deliberately, from the very beginning, understood that the best way to mobilize the American people was to present Saddam as a direct national-security threat to us, without having the evidence beforehand that he was, that's, well, frankly, lying. That's the worst kind of deceit a President can practice. We don't elect our President to not tell us the real situation of the world, particularly when he sends kids to kill and be killed.

How much honesty can we usually expect from the government? You covered the Nixon White House; isn't whatever's going on here child's play compared with that?

My view as a journalist is simple: you have to hold public officials to the highest possible standard. What's happened in America is very disturbing. All of us, as parents, don't want our children to lie to us, and, earlier, as children, don't want to be lied to by our parents. We all understand that integrity in a relationship is the core issue. The tragedy in America today is that we don't begin to impose on our national leaders the same standard which we hold so dear in our personal life. In other words, if we were to say, "Well, that's always happened," we'd almost be officially saying that there is a double standard—that what we can't tolerate in our personal life is O.K. in the most important officials we have, those officials with power not only over us but over our young men and women who go to fight, and over the people they kill. If we start saying that anything less than the highest standard is tolerable, we're really destroying democracy. Democracy exists on the basis of truth.

There have been suggestions from Rumsfeld and others that it's wrong, if not unpatriotic, for military people, who have often been sources for you, to go public with complaints, to talk to people like you, when there's a war on. Is that right?

I've been a reporter for forty years, and I can tell you right now that I never report anything that's operationally important. And no journalist I know would tell a secret that would compromise the lives of our troops or the ability of our country to defend itself, so let's get that out of the way. The fact that I can write critically about the war does not suggest that I am in any way less a hundred per cent red-blooded American than Donald Rumsfeld. And I think he'll acknowledge that, too. But we're a democracy and the free press has a role to play, and it so happens that the people who talk to me are often in very sensitive places in the government, and do so because they understand that function. It's not just a place to air grievances; it's a place to suggest—to get a different kind of thinking. And one of the things that's very troubling to me about this Administration, and one of the things that I was writing about in this article, is that this is a group of people who are very much committed to groupthink. They're committed to the notion that they know the truth and anybody who disagrees doesn't. I quote somebody as saying that they see themselves as being on the side of the angels and everybody else as fools. In covering Washington for forty years, I've never seen a group of people who have been so unwilling to hear the other side, who are so quick to see criticism not as loyal opposition but as betrayal.

At the same time, this is an Administration that is really fractured. There are deep fault lines between the State Department and the Pentagon, between the C.I.A. and the Pentagon, and the Pentagon has won most of the fights. They control intelligence. Rumsfeld also has his finger on the personnel changes in the military command; he wants his people everywhere. But there's a lot of differing opinions, a lot of dissension, and a lot of people who don't like what's going on.

But, in addition to winning the bureaucratic battles, they've also won the war, haven't they?

Well, they certainly won the battle for Baghdad. But I think anybody would agree that, having won the battle, we are now left with an amazing and difficult problem that the press is really just beginning to focus on, and that is the extent of despair throughout that country. This was a war won with amazing skill and speed, but all the exhaustive plans that were done for postwar running of the country seem to have disappeared. You could almost argue that the political future of this Administration might not be judged by the skill in the war but by the next year, as we try to repair the damage that has been done to daily life in Iraq.

About the quick victory, some of the generals and planners you quoted in an earlier article felt that we had gone in with too few soldiers. Are people you talk to in the government surprised at how the war has turned out?

Well, look, a lot of people in the military didn't believe that Saddam would melt away, and that just the small number of forces we had could sweep through the country, and Baghdad, so quickly. But the other point that all the planners made from the very beginning was that without adequate forces after victory you cannot prevent the inevitable reactions to a war, which includes looting and everything like that. Those consequences are all anticipated. Every planning document I've ever read on civil war or urban war warns about such things, and I know that there were months and months of meetings in the Joint Chiefs of Staff over how to handle the postwar days. And then there simply weren't enough forces to have them do much of anything other than protect themselves—in the case of Baghdad, the only building I know of that was earmarked for protection was the oil ministry. And so we may really have set ourselves up for a serious problem.

Let's talk about someone who played a big role in this week's story: Ahmad Chalabi. He's now trying to establish himself in a leadership role in Baghdad. You've interviewed him—what kind of figure is he? Do you think he could be the leader Iraq needs?

Oh, no. But I will say this: he's certainly got a presence. He's charming, he's quick, he's very bright, full of fun. He's got a Ph.D. in mathematics. He's been friends for a decade with many people in the Pentagon, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He's not afraid to be critical of people in the government. And there are many people in the government who don't like him. He's been in a war with the C.I.A. and the State Department, who frankly just don't find him to be an honorable person. They've heard the stories about his wrongdoing—he has been found guilty in absentia in Jordan of fraud, charges that he denies. The Pentagon—Wolfowitz and others there—sees him as the solution. But it seems unlikely that somebody like Chalabi is going to emerge as anything other than a figurehead for us.

Another very interesting figure in your article is the late political philosopher Leo Strauss. What does Strauss have to do with intelligence?

Normally, you would think not much, beyond the fact that a lot of people in this government are Straussians. They include Abram Shulsky and some of the men with whom he works, like Wolfowitz and Stephen Cambone, who is the Under-Secretary of Intelligence. But Shulsky actually co-wrote an article about Strauss and intelligence that did make the connection. Shulsky's article involves Strauss's theory of esoteric writing, in which he notes that great philosophers, hesitant to tell the whole story of what they believed, used concealed messages in their writing. Only the very wise could understand the real truth. This also brings in Plato's concept of the noble lie. This is, of course, a great simplification. But what's interesting in terms of Iraq is Strauss's complaint that, as Shulsky writes, nobody quite understood the extent of deception that exists in the world, or its role in politics. This includes deception by Saddam Hussein, who deceived us about what his real intentions and goals were. But you can also extrapolate from that. This idea may help to explain how the people in Special Plans rationalized whatever concerns they had about the quality of the day-to-day intelligence about Saddam and weapons of mass destruction.

What did you think of the Pentagon's embedding program? Were you tempted to sign up?

I'm too old. Embedding has some great advantages—it brought the war home—but it also provided the war as seen through a filter—you could almost say it's a little touch of the Stockholm syndrome. One thing that interests me which very few people seem to be talking about is the extent of "collateral damage," in terms of the number of dead. How many civilians were killed in this war? I don't know, but I've heard some very grisly anecdotal accounts from people who were embedded about how many noncombatants were killed by the units they were with, very little of which has gotten into the press. One has to wonder if there ever will be an accounting of the collateral damage that was done, in terms of civilian deaths and injuries. And there are no official estimates from the Administration.

Do you think that the presence of reporters in the field changes the war as well as the reporters? Does an army act differently when reporters are there?

Well, I think in the beginning, of course, the reporters would serve as an enormous restraint on any excesses by soldiers. But one of the horrible things about war is that a lot of people are going to get killed. Two or three days after the start of this war, if you remember, there was a story that people were approaching American troops waving white flags, and they would then attack the American troops. Word of these incidents was communicated immediately to the forces. You know, as wonderful as our troops are, there's nothing quite as dangerous as a nineteen-year-old boy with a weapon who's frightened. So I think that it became very hard for Iraqis to surrender. It's inevitable that there were more than a few incidents. We certainly saw enough stories about that at checkpoints in Baghdad.

And, you know, I'm a cynic about the efficacy of having reporters travelling with military units, in terms of getting the story of a war back to the American people. All sorts of obligations arise when you have a relationship like that with the military. Here's why I'm a cynic. I began to report on My Lai in 1969—and I wasn't in Vietnam at the time—and I initially wrote five stories about the mass murders that took place there. But something interesting happened after the third story, and after Walter Cronkite picked it up, and any reservations that the newspapers had about the truth of what I was reporting disappeared. The third Sunday after I started writing about My Lai, as a freelancer, dozens of newspapers suddenly had their Vietnam correspondents writing devastating stories about other atrocities they had witnessed.

Stories that they'd had in their files.

Yes, stories that they'd had. One of the stories that really grabbed me was about an incident that took place when U.S. troops first landed at Danang, in June or July of 1965. Marines landed there and within two days some of them deliberately shot a group of civilians in an air-raid shelter. And the correspondent with them watched the incident, worried about it, and then he wrote a very graphic account, but not until late 1969, four years later. So I think that eventually some of these embedded reporters will begin talking or writing a little bit about what they actually saw.

So you think that reporters are watching each other and trying to figure out what the parameters are.

I know people who were embedded who have presented somewhat different, or, at least, fuller, pictures of what went on in private conversations than they have in print or in their broadcasts. And, look, our military is great. I've been dealing professionally with military men and sources for forty years. I have many wonderful friends in the military. The military is a vibrant organization full of people with a lot of integrity. There's nothing as honorable as a good military guy. But it's in the nature of war that, at the combat level, all sorts of things can happen. So we'll see. Some of these stories may get written eventually, and that's the press's job.



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