"Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,"
Seymour Hersh's alternative history of Bush's war
The crack investigative reporter tells Salon about a disastrous battle the U.S. brass hushed up, the frightening True Believers in the White House, and how Iran, not Israel, may have manipulated us into war.


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By Mary Jacoby




Sept. 18, 2004

Arguably his most important scoop came last spring, when the legendary investigative reporter received the now infamous photos of prisoner abuse by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq, as well as the explosive report on the abuse by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. The story Hersh published in the New Yorker, followed by a report by CBS's "60 Minutes," created an international scandal for the Bush administration and led to congressional hearings.

In March 2002, Hersh writes, a military action against al-Qaida, known as Operation Anaconda, was botched in Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan. Billed at the time as a success story by the Pentagon, it was in fact a debacle, plagued by squabbling between the services, bad military planning and avoidable deaths of American soldiers, as well as the escape of key al-Qaida leaders, likely including Osama bin Laden.


Hersh's story is well known. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which American soldiers killed more than 500 civilians.

...What? Tell me why I feel it's important that Cheney called up?


What does it reveal?


It's more complicated than you think. For one thing, it reveals that they're all as one. The notion that they're going to fire [Donald] Rumsfeld, as people actually entertained, is comical. After 9/11 he gets in this swaggering mode and says we're going to smoke those terrorists out of their snake holes. And then it's clear there's prisoner abuse and torture going on. But does Cheney call up and say, "Oh, my God! What's going on over there, Don? What kind of craziness are you doing to those prisoners? This is devastating to our campaign. What's going on?" I don't hear that. What I hear is, "Let's all pull together and get past it." Very interesting.

...Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn't it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn't believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that's moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.


They thought it would happen quickly?


Very quickly. I don't have any empirical basis for it, but if I had to bet, the plan was to go right into Syria. That's why the fourth division was hanging for so long in the desert out there right on the border with Syria. In the early days of the war, before this government figured out how much trouble they were in -- which took them a long time -- they would drive practice runs, somebody told me. Again, I'm just saying what was told to me; this is not something I reported, but I was told pretty reliably, they were doing practice runs that amounted to the distance from the border to Damascus. It's my belief always -- again this is not empirical, it's sort of my heuristic view -- that the real reason [Paul] Wolfowitz and others were mad at [Gen. Eric] Shinseki when he testified before the war about [the need for] 200 or 300 troops -- it wasn't about the numbers -- was, "Didn't he get it? What had he been listening to in the tank? Didn't we explain to him in the tank what we told the chiefs? This is the way it's going to be. Didn't he understand what it's all about?" He didn't get it. He hadn't understood what they meant. This was all going to fall down. It was all going to be peaches and cream. And Shinseki just didn't get it! It wasn't about the numbers. He wasn't a member of the clan. He didn't join the utopia crowd.



...I think these guys in their naiveté and single-mindedness have been so completely manipulated by -- not the Israelis -- but the Iranians. The Iranians always wanted us in. I think there's a lot of evidence that Iran had much to do with [Ahmed] Chalabi's disinformation [about nonexistent Iraqi WMD]. I think there were people in the CIA who suspected this all along, but of course they couldn't get their view in. I think the Senate Intelligence Committee's report's a joke, the idea this CIA was misleading the president. They get some analysts in and say, "Were you pressured?" And they all say, "No, excuse me?" Is that how you do an investigation? The truth of the matter is, there was tremendous pressure put on the analysts [to produce reports that bolstered the case for war]. It's not as if anybody issued a diktat. But everybody understood what to do.


…We know that Chalabi had Iranian agents on his payroll.


Yeah, but, well, he admits to that. He had a villa in Tehran. But basically I think Iran was very interested in getting us involved. We get knocked down a peg; they become the big boys on the block.


...Was Chalabi the conduit?


I think Chalabi thought he could handle the Iranians. They were helping him all along with disinformation and documents he could give to the White House. Don't forget, once the neocons decided to go to Iraq in the face of all evidence, they were like a super-reverse suction machine, and anything in the world that furthered the argument that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was hot. I call it stove-piping, because it's a technical work of art. But it was much more than that. It was anything -- vavoom! -- into the president's [office]. It was so amateurish, it was comical. How hard was it to get some crapola into the White House about WMD without the CIA looking at it?


Do you have any idea of the origin of the forged Niger documents that Bush cited in his January 2003 State of the Union address as proof that Iraq was seeking uranium to make nuclear weapons?


I don't really know. I know that they think it was an inside job. And my idea is that there were people in the government who knew that you could give these guys [the neoconservatives] anything, and within three days, if it said the right thing, there would be a principals meeting [of the senior foreign policy officials] at the White House on it. And one idea would be to get them in a position where they really walked on their dongs, in a way. Give them some bad stuff. They'd have a big meeting about it and [the neocons] would finally be exposed as ludicrous. Nobody anticipated that [the forged documents] would end up in the State of the Union address. I mean, it's beyond belief. I don't believe in these conspiracy theories, about [Michael] Ledeen [a neocon operative] and these things. He's too smart for that. Because it was designed to be caught.

Do you think the responsibility for Abu Ghraib goes directly up to Rumsfeld?

I think they [Rumsfeld and senior administration officials] had a chance in the fall of 2002 to set the limits, and they chose not to...