I'M FINALLY READING THE ENTIRETY OF SY HERSH'S NEW YORKER PIECE ON IRAQ PRISONER ABUSE. The more I read--and the news these days is so fatalistically absorbing that it's impairing my ability to function in daily life--the more it seems that this tragedy was caused by the breakdown in the separation between military police, on the one hand, and military intelligence and OGA (other governmental agency, i.e., CIA) on the other hand.

Check this long excerpt from Hersh's piece:

Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the task force in charge of the prison at Guantánamo, had brought a team of experts to Iraq to review the Army program. His recommendation was radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. “Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation . . . to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence,” Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at the prisons should make support of military intelligence a priority.

General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his headquarters issued an order formally giving the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the prison. General Taguba fearlessly took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report, “effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties.”

Taguba also criticized Miller’s report, noting that “the intelligence value of detainees held at . . . Guantánamo is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq. . . . There are a large number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not believed to be international terrorists or members of Al Qaeda.” Taguba noted that Miller’s recommendations “appear to be in conflict” with other studies and with Army regulations that call for military-police units to have control of the prison system. By placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead, Miller’s recommendations and Sanchez’s change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were “either directly or indirectly responsible” for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to disciplinary action.
***
[T]he pressure on soldiers to accede to requests from military intelligence was felt throughout the system.

Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. “I said, ‘No, we will not do that,’” the captain said. “The M.I. commander comes to me and says, ‘What is the problem? We’re stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.’ I ask, ‘How? You’ve received training on that, but my soldiers don’t know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s going to get creative.’”

There are two lesson here. One is that the Rumsfeld/Cheney scorn for Pentagon formalistic pointyheadedness has several fruits, some bitter. This scorn led to a successful military campapign--fast, light American forces were able to take Iraq quickly and efficiently. This approach didn't work, though, after the conquering was done. Gen. Eric Shiseki famously lost his job for saying the administration was underestimating the number of troops ithat holding Iraw and keeping it safe would take. The same approach sees an efficiency, a synergy, in the detention of citizens of the occupied country. They are also possible intelligence assets. The other is another hallmark of this administration, which is the disregard for any formalism as being simple apparatchik-think. Forgive my analogy, but we see a similar breakdown domestically in the traditional and required separation between law enforcement and intelligence gathering.
- posted by thegusdad @ 5/13/2004 10:35:00 PM