The policy roots of Iraqi prison abuse

Top officials became convinced that, in this new kind of war, old rules need not apply. Hersh claims that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized creation of a secret team of US operatives cleared to snatch or assassinate terror suspects anywhere in the world.

"The roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists, but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-an-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism," writes Hersh.

It's a safe bet that Secretary Rumsfeld won't be sending Hersh a Christmas card this year. The Pentagon chief is depicted as flattening the Joint Chiefs like a runaway Bradley, insisting on ripping up their extensive logistics plans in favor of a faster and lighter approach to invasion. That backfired when the insurgency bloomed and there wasn't enough US force to go around. As further investigations have revealed since Hersh wrote this book, at the time abuses were occurring at Abu Ghraib, US Army headquarters in Iraq were woefully short of oversight manpower.

But Rumsfeld is not Hersh's only target. Richard Perle is a conservative defense expert who's served as chairman of an important Pentagon advisory board. Note the use of the past tense. After Hersh detailed what appear to be conflicts between Perle's work as an investor in defense firms and his insider status, Perle resigned his Defense Department post.

His threatened libel suit has yet to materialize, and probably won't now that Perle is in much deeper trouble over allegations of financial malfeasance dealing with his service on the board of Hollinger Corp.

As the Perle example shows, Hersh has lately shown a remarkable ability to identify news currents before they appear. He was pounding Ahmad Chalabi, Iraqi exile and would-be leader, in the pages of The New Yorker long before it became apparent that Chalabi might be a conduit of information to Iran.

Yes, as critics claim, much of his best stuff is attributed to unnamed sources. That undoubtedly leads to errors, or at least exaggerations promulgated by people with agendas.

Is there really a Special Access Program to assassinate terrorist leaders? We probably won't know the definitive answer to that for years. And how can we know if the "former intelligence operative" on one page is the same as the "ex-spymaster" on the next? Why is a "retired Navy officer" commenting on an Army operation? There's a reason Bob Woodward chucks that whole approach and writes in narrative form - it's called "readability."

And, think of this: for about double the price of this book, you can subscribe to The New Yorker. You'll get Hersh's stuff - plus cartoons - without having to wait for his next book.

• Peter Grier is a Monitor reporter in Washington.

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