Product Description

Since September 11, 2001, Seymour M. Hersh has riveted readers -- and outraged the Bush Administration -- with his stories in The New Yorker, including his breakthrough pieces on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Now, in Chain of Command, he brings together this reporting, along with new revelations, to answer the critical question of the last three years: how did America get from the clear morning when hijackers crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to a divisive and dirty war in Iraq?

Hersh established himself at the forefront of investigative journalism thirty-five years ago when he broke the news of the massacre at My Lai, Vietnam, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Ever since, he's challenged America's power elite by publishing the stories that others can't, or won't, tell. In expos#233;s on subjects ranging from Saudi corruption to nuclear black marketeers and -- months ahead of other journalists -- the White House's false claims about weapons of mass destruction, Hersh has cemented his reputation as the indispensable reporter of our time.

In Chain of Command, Hersh takes an unflinching look behind the public story of President Bush's "war on terror" and into the lies and obsessions that led America into Iraq. He reveals the connections between early missteps in the hunt for Al Qaeda and disasters on the ground in Iraq. The book includes a new account of Hersh's pursuit of the Abu Ghraib story and of where, he believes, responsibility for the scandal ultimately lies. Hersh draws on sources at the highest levels of the American government and intelligence community, in foreign capitals, and on the battlefield for an unparalleled view of a crucial chapter in America's recent history. With an introduction by The New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, Chain of Command is a devastating portrait of an Administration blinded by ideology and of a President whose decisions have made the world a more dangerous place for America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #486851 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-01
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Amazon.com Review
Seymour Hersh has been a legendary investigative reporter since 1969 when he broke the My Lai story in Vietnam. His considerable skill and well-placed sources inside the government, intelligence community, military, and the diplomatic corps have allowed him access to a wide range of information unavailable to most reporters. Chain of Command is packed with specific details and thoughtful analysis of events since the attacks of September 11, 2001, including intelligence failures prior to 9/11; postwar planning regarding Afghanistan and Iraq; the corruption of the Saudi family; Pakistan's nuclear program, which spread nuclear technology via the black market (and admitted as such); influence peddling at the highest levels; and the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, among other topics. The book collects and elaborates on stories Hersh wrote for The New Yorker, and includes an introduction by the magazine's editor, David Remnick, on Hersh's background and his sources.

Part of Hersh's skill lies in uncovering official reports that have been buried because government or military leaders find them too revealing or embarrassing. Chain of Command is filled with such stories, particularly regarding the manner in which sensitive intelligence was gathered and disseminated within the Bush administration. Hersh details how serious decisions were made in secret by a small handful of people, often based on selective information. Part of the problem was, and remains, a lack of human intelligence in critical parts of the Middle East, but it also has much to do with the considerable infighting within the administration by those trying to make intelligence fit preconceived conclusions. A prime example of this is the story about the files that surfaced allegedly detailing how Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger in order to build nuclear weapons. Though the files were soon proven to be forgeries, the Bush administration still used them as evidence against Saddam Hussein and therefore part of the reason for invading Iraq. In these pages, Hersh offers readers a clearer understanding of what has happened since September 11, and what we might expect in the future. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
Based on previously published articles and supplemented by fresh revelations, this book by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Hersh, who writes for The New Yorker and has authored several books (The Dark Side of Camelot, etc.), charges the Bush administration with being propelled by ideology and hamstrung by incompetence in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas. One former intelligence official observes that the Bush administration staffers behaved "as if they were on a mission from God," while another laments, "The guys at the top are as ignorant as they could be." It’s no surprise, then, that the dissenters want to talk or that the Hersh, who has a reputation for integrity and enviable inside access, ferrets them out, assembling critiques from diverse, mostly unidentified sources at home and abroad. According to Hersh, the dire conditions that "enemy combatants" suffered at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, presaged detainee abuses at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. Hersh reveals the depravities purportedly occurring at Guantánamo and argues that Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t the only one responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib: "the President and Vice President had been in it, and with him, all the way." The book also covers some familiar ground, exploring pre-9/11 intelligence oversights and the administration’s misconception that Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Israel, Turkey and the Kurds would jump on the democracy bandwagon after the invasion of Iraq. But Hersh reserves his sharpest words for President Bush, suggesting the "terrifying possibility" that "words have no meaning for this President beyond the immediate moment, and so he believes that his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real." Hersh’s critics may dismiss these explosive, less than objective conclusions. For others, however, this sobering book is the closest anyone without a security clearance will get to operatives in the inner sanctums of America’s intelligence, military, political and diplomatic worlds.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Renowned (and sometimes reviled) for investigative feats extending back to My Lai, Seymour M. Hersh is a muckraker and proud of it. He picks up rocks to expose the ugly crawly things beneath, a specialty that most recently helped bring to light the prisoner-abuse scandal in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

In Chain of Command, Hersh draws upon his Abu Ghraib stories along with others that first appeared in the New Yorker, all touching in one way or another on President Bush and his advisers' conduct of the global war on terror. He takes a dim view of the Bush administration, charging it with incompetence, dishonesty and recklessness.

Hersh directs most of his fire against Donald Rumsfeld and the senior civilian officials in the office of the secretary of defense. These are the people, he writes, who manipulate intelligence, wink at torture and assassination, and play fast and loose with the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld and key deputies such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone give the back of their hands to "Clintonized" generals whom they think display insufficient ardor, and wage war against foot-draggers at the State Department and the CIA with greater ferocity than they muster against Saddam Hussein or al Qaeda.

Hersh could have provided a major look at the post-Sept. 11 Pentagon, but Chain of Command is a missed opportunity -- an exercise in recycling that shoves previously published articles between hard covers in hopes of approximating a larger whole. The result amounts to little more than a miscellany -- a book without a spine.

Throughout, Hersh maintains a tone of high dudgeon and apparent shock. But only the reader who has managed to sleep through events since Sept. 11 -- or whose worldview has been shaped entirely by Fox News and the Weekly Standard -- will find much here that qualifies as especially startling.

Further detracting from the value of Chain of Command is Hersh's reliance on unidentified sources. However helpful blind quotations are in decoding the daily version of reality propagated by government officials, using them becomes increasingly problematic the further events slip into the past. Few hard facts embellish Hersh's account, but anonymous opinions abound: from former officials and military officers, from aides and advisers once reputedly close to Bush's inner circle, from "consultants" retained by government agencies -- all of them nameless. Hersh tries to make a virtue of necessity: "There is honor in their anonymity." In fact, their anonymity makes it impossible to assess motive, veracity or credibility.

Given the passage of time since much of this material first appeared, Hersh might have added depth and detail to his initial reporting, reducing its hearsay quotient. He has not. Nor has he situated his stories in a larger context. Apart from an angry conclusion that denounces President Bush for "terrorizing the nation" and declares that "the deepening American quagmire in Iraq will not end until there is a change of leadership in Washington," he offers little by way of analysis. In place of reflection, Hersh vents his outrage at those in authority whom he wants held accountable.

This is unfortunate, for despite Hersh's preference for the sensational rather than the substantive, Chain of Command contains the makings of what might have been an important book. The context of this book-that-might-have-been derives directly from the question that the chattering classes took up within days of Sept. 11 and have yet to resolve: How much had really changed about the way America would conduct itself in the world? For the Bush administration, many of whose leading members had long chafed at restrictions limiting the use of American power, the answer to that question was clear from the outset. What had changed? Everything.

When he announced in late September 2001 that the United States confronted an entirely "new kind of war," Rumsfeld declared that henceforth "no fixed rules" would govern decisions on when and how to employ U.S. forces. Ever since Sept. 11, Hersh writes, "President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as engaged in a war against terrorism in which the old rules did not apply." Hersh does not return to this passing observation, but it cuts to the heart of the matter. Abandoning old rules meant chucking out old inhibitions -- about the need for allies and the sanctity of treaties, about the efficacy of force and the proper role of the armed services, about morality and the rule of law. In retracing the steps that culminated with Abu Ghraib, Chain of Command suggests the unhappy consequences that come from discarding traditional norms of statecraft and commonsense notions of prudence in favor of boldness and risk-taking fueled by ambition, ideology and unstinting confidence in the utility of military power.

As one of Hersh's shadowy sources observes, "Now we're going to be the bad guy, and being the bad guy works." Events have yet to demonstrate that it does. In the meantime, this imperfect book provides an oblique but timely reminder of why rules exist in the first place: to guard against the failings to which human beings with all their frailties and foibles are prone and for which, in public life, others -- 19- and 20-year-old soldiers -- are obliged to pay.

Reviewed by Andrew J. Bacevich
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The First Angry Man
Over the last year I've read or become familiar with more than a dozen of the latest crop of books published to criticize or support the White House's policies, and Chain of Command is the best of the bunch. As would be expected, Seymour Hersh's writing is as always clean and angry and compelling. And the conclusions the investigative reporting icon draws are well thought out and more than a little frightening.

In short: if you can read only one book in this genre this year, you've found it.

A reader examining Mr. Hersh's work for the first time here may not realize how far ahead of the curve he has been in exposing scores of intelligence failures, poorly thought out national security initiatives, and the horrible Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Many of Mr. Hersh's points were treated with suspicion when they were made, only to be accepted as common wisdom when the full story became known (though the book's editors would have done well to make that clearer, but more on that in a moment).

His main point in Chain of Command is all these issues -- the selective evidence regarding weapons of mass destruction, the sidestepping of the federal bureaucracy and the diminished importance of Congress, the misuse of intelligence, the abuse of human rights abroad, foreign policy zealotry, and so on (I might add elections-related shenanigans from four years ago) -- amount to a kind of coup d'état, and it's hard to argue against his points.

Clearly, Mr. Hersh is outraged in Chain of Command, but what earns my respect the most if the fact that his anger is not partisan, but instead based on what he seems to see as a widening gulf between what is happening in the U.S. and because of the U.S. and what comes out of the mouths of senior government officials. Mr. Hersh is an old-fashioned muckraker and proud of it.

Now allow me to quibble for a moment.

The vast bulk of Chain of Command was distilled from around 20 articles Mr. Hersh wrote for the New Yorker, though editors updated a few subjects and juggled the order a bit, most obviously to emphasize new reporting regarding Abu Ghraib. I would have argued in favor of printing the original articles as they were published, in chronological order and with dates on them -- something that would have elegantly presented the material without begging the question of what was known when. The updated information could have easily been presented in a short epilogue to each chapter or to the whole book.

Additionally, Mr. Hersh on a few occasions threatens to undermine some of his credibility by relying on speculation on subjects like prison conditions at Guantánamo, and by making only passing references to minor evidence that could weaken his arguments, on subjects such as troop movements between Afghanistan and Iraq. But he never crosses the line in a way that has damned many of the other books out this political season, thanks in a large part to his solid reputation launched when he broke the story about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam 35 years ago.

But these points are very, very minor compared to the points this very important book makes. I rarely give five-star ratings to books, but I have no second thoughts in doing that here.

"Blaming the System" Never Had Sadder Dimensions
In this well-documented, revelatory book, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has fearlessly chronicled a very rocky road between 9/11 and the disclosure of prison abuses at Abu Ghraib. On a deeper level, this book brings to light the questions around accountability when such obvious abuses are exposed, questions that bear certain similarities to the ones faced by those judging the Nuremberg trials after World War II. Does the responsibility rest with the soldiers executing the abuses, or does it go up to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, both of whom Hersh says were made aware of the situation? As horrific as 9/11 was, it was an idealistic notion that a tragedy of such magnitude would produce an epiphany that would inspire the government to bring the nation closer to its founding democratic principles. Hersh proves that quite the opposite has evolved, as he has been doing in the New Yorker, breaking stories that have shocked and repelled on America's war on terror. Breaches are numerous and detailed with dramatic precision in his book - military missteps in the hunt for al-Qaida, abuses at Guantanamo, the Pentagon's manipulation of intelligence, and in the most graphic images from the war, the humiliating treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. What was initially hoped to be a sad one-off incident has become the touchstone for what Hersh sees as fundamentally wrong with CIA intelligence and the US military infrastructure. He makes a convincing argument for whom should take responsibility for the prison abuses. Senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration were repeatedly warned by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused.

Hersh draws on numerous sources - most legitimate, some apocryphal - at senior levels of the government and intelligence community, from foreign officials, and from those on the battlefield, all of whom substantiate his investigation. Sadly the message appears to be that the buck does not seem to stop anywhere. While the investigation faults the Army for "failing to provide leadership," senior commanders in Baghdad and the top commander himself, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, as well as senior Pentagon officials, "were found to have had no role in ordering or permitting the abuse." The message is muddled to the rest of us - it is the system's fault, not the fault of those running it. The book sadly reveals that a lack of leadership equals exoneration of the leaders. There comes a point where closing one's eyes to such evidence is a form of complicity, that ignoring the warnings may be closer to a war crime than anyone cares to admit. In raw terms, Hersh brings the brutality of the post 9/11 journey this nation has taken, and while there have been moments of inspiration, the road has unfortunately been riddled with lapses that spread the imperial hubris this country denies globally rather than the greater good of democracy. This is essential reading on what the war on terrorism has brought us, completing a triumvirate that includes Senator Bob Graham's "Intelligence Matters" and a senior CIA officer's treatise, "Imperial Hubris".

Another remarkable Hersh investigation
As was to be expected, most of those who criticize this book here(and several appear to be the same person) make clear that they have not read it. Why read when you have Sean Hannity to explain the world to you?
First, the idea that Hersh sympathizes with Al Qaeda is a slander. Hersh does suggest the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, because, he argues, there were elements within the Taliban who could have been bribed to hand over Bin Laden. Agree or disagree with Hersh, he still begins on the fundamental principle that Al Qaeda is an enemy that must be defeated. It is only the means that differ. To compare such a position to Jane Fonda (who openly supported a North Vietnamese victory) is outrageous. What makes this book fascinating is that it is not a stream of extreme leftist drivel about empire, but a carefully compiled collection of dissenting voices from within the intelligence, defense and diplomatic services. (Which does not mean, of course, that their analyses is automatically right.)
Neither does Hersh smear the soldiers. While he is unflinching in recounting the crimes that occurred, the entire point of the book is to put those crimes into a larger context, one that cannot help but make one feel a certain sympathy for the soldiers (without excusing them). They were often untrained to handle interrogations and were being told that they needed to perform these acts in order to help stop the daily attacks that were killing their fellow soldiers. One of the heroes in this book is the National Guard officer who refused to follow a Military Intelligence officer's command that he order his soldiers to keep prisoners awake. The Guard officer explained that he was not going to put his men in the position of performing such a duty without the proper training, for fear they might get "creative." Hersh's contempt is for those higher up in the chain of command (get the title?) who did put soldiers in such positions, where abuses were bound to occur (if not directly ordered), and then left those same soldiers to take all the blame. The pseudo patriotism and overblown rhetoric of those who have attacked this book is frightening because it embodies perfectly the mentality of this administration: come to a conclusion based upon ideology, seek out the facts that support that conclusion, when reasonable criticism is raised, impugn the critic personally, and then - as the bill comes due and facts on the ground show up the inaccuracy of your original conclusion - meet that reality with ever greater levels of self delusion. They forget, we are a democracy, our nation is ultimately only that which we make of it. It is the sum of our actions. Taking that principle seriously is the beginning of true patriotism.