The Pentagon is trying to deny it, but I'm not convinced that this story reflects all that poorly. In essence, it says: A covert program was running to find, capture and kill very high-value al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan and elsewhere. (bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Mohammed Omar, etc.) The project seems to have been populated with excellent people, and given essentially free rein as far as techniques - but it was kept very small, and the only people put on it were people that could be trusted to do the right thing.
I've met some people like this before. I do believe that there are people that you could trust with this sort of thing, that they were in fact found, and that such a program was a perfectly reasonable solution - and that such could and ought to be continued, in just as covert a manner. It does not need to be brought up for analysis at this time, since that could jeopardize a legitimate and important task. (In the future, it should be - as all black programs should be, IMO. Otherwise black programs have no eye on them to make sure they don't go crazy. But there's no reason for that right now)
The indication of Hersh's story is that a serious mistake was made later on (and points the finger specifically at Under-Sec'y for Intel Stephen Cambrone, and to a significantly lesser extent, at Rumsfeld; I have no idea how accurate this attribution actually is) the mistake was to expand this program into a traditional war zone like Iraq, and most of all, to pull in ordinary military intelligence people and ultimately reservist prison guards in, and give them the same effective free reign as was given to much more expert people before.
This smells about right to me. It also is an overall good sign - it suggests that the problems really were somewhat more localized than the worst initial estimates. I'd still say that the list of people so far named for courts-martial is a pretty good list of people to courts-martial in this regard, and it further dropped my estimation of Gen. Karpinski (the base CO) for somehow not noticing or deciding it wasn't her place to be alert to things happening under her watch. Even if she was very far out of the loop (and I have no doubt that a reservist general was) that's still no excuse for ignoring one's command.
But it indirectly raises quite a few questions about just what is going on at Guantanamo, whether the people who are being held indefinitely and interrogated (using very harsh measures, I don't doubt) are people that there's any reason to be holding like that, and if there's any plan to ever release them. I suspect that the answers to these questions will on the balance be much worse of a black mark than what happened at Abu Ghraib.
Key lesson from this: There are some very ugly things that are sometimes necessary. When those things have to be done - and sometimes they have to - it's not something that can be delegated to just anyone. It requires people who are not only supremely competent at their work, but have the maturity for moral introspection, and the ability to thereby control their own impulses even when doing such things. Not a job to farm out to random schmucks.
Anyway - a very interesting read, both for the main story and for the incidental glimpses it gives into many of our operations and the people behind them. Whether or not you agree with my opinions on the matter. :)
