The policy roots of Iraqi prison abuse

Seymour Hersh may not be the last angry man of US political journalism, but he's arguably the angriest. It's hard to envision him producing the slick, as-told-to narratives that his longtime competitor Bob Woodward of The Washington Post now turns out. No, Hersh is still the avatar of watchdog reporting, pursuing what he perceives to be the mistakes and abuses of the powerful. Professionally speaking, he remains the same guy who broke the My Lai massacre story in 1969. Want proof? Take a look at the jacket photo from this book. Hersh is holding to his ear something that looks suspiciously like the receiver of a rotary phone.

That doesn't mean that his engrossing "Chain of Command" is itself an anachronism. This collection of Hersh's stories for The New Yorker, amplified and rearranged for book form, deals with questions that remain staples of news coverage today - and by "today," I mean Sept. 21, 2004. Who's responsible for the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, for instance? How did the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or its lack thereof, get so messed up? How are things going in Afghanistan? How much trouble is Richard Perle in?

(Caveat: Mr. Hersh is not held in high regard by many members of the current administration. Indeed, throughout his career, subjects of his investigations have complained that he is a scurrilous hack. The aforementioned Mr. Perle, for one, has labeled Hersh the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist. The Pentagon took the unusual step of issuing a rebuttal to this book prior to its publication. Hersh's work "apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources," said the Department of Defense release.)

The Abu Ghraib portion of this book is its most noteworthy and interesting section, if not necessarily its most convincing. Hersh didn't literally break this story - nor does he claim that he did. But it was his possession of now-infamous photos of prisoner abuse and The New Yorker's plan to publish them that forced CBS to rush its own piece about the affair onto the airwaves.

Hersh's litany of the coercive techniques (some would say torture) used by US personnel will be depressingly familiar to anyone who's followed the news over the past few months. Much of it draws upon details unearthed by the military's own investigations, principally the scathing internal report of Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. But Hersh attempts to explain these actions by placing them in a larger context. Abuses also occurred in Afghanistan, and the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he says, as a desperate desire to obtain useful intelligence flowed down through US ranks.

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