Newspapers: Brush Your Shoulders Off

It's hardly a partisan complaint to note that the Bush administration has brought Pentagon/Intelligence/State tensions to an absolute boil, and the leaks, rumors, and accusations are raging along at shock-and-awe levels. So it goes without saying that these very angry career civil servants will probably go to extraordinary lengths to save their hides/screw the other guys. We should note that as people are in fact saying quite extraordinary things to America's premier journalist, Sy Hersh, the New Yorker isn't exactly America's premier news source—you know, they're a weekly. They publish fiction and artsy photography. A serious claim, even from a respectible journalist (or terrorist) like Sy Hersh, needs falsification, and this story is going to need corroboration from every front page in America. Fred Kaplan explains exactly what's at stake:

Read together, the magazine articles spell out an elaborate, all-inclusive chain of command in this scandal. Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation.

That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial.

So as much as I appreciate that the Washington Post is irritated enough about visitors abusing Metro-escalator courtesy to run a front-page feature, I'm hoping that behind the scenes they're furiously investigating the possibility that the United States government no longer feels it ought to act like the government of the United States. There's a name to be made for some aspiring young journalist. . . .

Posted by Kriston at May 18, 2004 12:55 PM