Untitled Document

11 May 2004

The Other Government

Major General Gen. Antonio M. Taguba is going to testify to Congress today. He will be questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee about the scathing report he wrote documenting the systematic pattern of abuse against the detainees in Iraq. He will presumably be asked about the OGA, who is apparently responsible for some of the outrages in Iraq.

I had not heard of them before, but the acronym features prominently in the official report on the Abu Ghraib prison. They are a ghostly bunch, the OGA. The letters stand for "Other Government Agencies," who are not the United States Army. Or the 800th MP Brigade of the West Virginia National Guard who are the successors to Saddam's regime in some small but significant places.

There was so much noise, so much static from the Theater that it was hard to break out what meant anything. The stage was set by early intelligence from out West, where the news cycle runs a few hours later than it is here on the Potomac. I got a call saying that Coalition Forces assaulted the headquarters of punk-rock Ayatollah Moktada al-Sadr.

Tom Brockaw had signed off for the evening, but Stone Philips or someone like him talked about it on one of the knock-off cable channels. I think it was one powered by the Bill Gates butterfly.

That thread continues this morning, discernable in the general noise. Twenty dead yesterday, twenty or so on Sunday, forty last week. The story peaked and diminished before the morning press cycle broke today.

There are two other main threads, if you count the insirgency and not the war crimes. The first is the conflict around Falluja and the disgruntled Sunnis and other Arab fighters. That was quiet last night, but the residents of the town are going to be allowed to return, fifty families a day, and there will be a quota on the weapons they can carry with them.

Nothing larger than a single family AK-47 will be permitted. The Rules of Engagement issued to the Marine sniper teams has thus far permitted them to take out anyone carrying anything larger on sight.

And then there is the war against the oil export in the south, where things had been quiet. But exports have been cut by a quarter, and the attacks are coming by sea and land.

But we cannot stop staring with lurid fascination at the pictures from the jails. Learned commentators are calling for the heads of the Ministers and Secretaries responsible for defense. But there is the ghostly hand of the OGA in this, another country heard from.

The OGA could refer to the people you think of immediately, and several others with which you are not so well acquainted. It is a catch-all euphemism. I have been part of several OGA's, if by that we define anything that is not the United States Army. It is a most excellent term of convenience.

The poor Army. There is an old saying that we went to Vietnam to save the South, and we left it to save the Army.

Two-and-a-half years ago I knew that the "gloves had come off," but had hoped that the military would be held to a humane standard that could, by exception, lessened for those few detainees who were close to al Qaida and who had a high probability of possessing actionable information.

It was not to be. Errors were compounded and amplified, from the rash decision to go to war, to the failure to send enough regulars to prosecute the peace. I would not be surprised for the official report to blame some OGA- perhaps the Department of Health and Human Services- for the decision-making that led us down this path.

Aub Ghraib was left to the West Virginians, Military Intelligence, and some contract civilians, all of them under pressure to produce results. It boggles the mind. I have always made it a point not to be arrested in West Virginia, or in fact, anywhere south and west of that state.

I had a pal, a dedicated member of an OGA, who represented the best of the business. He described how we missed chances to get bad guys because we were prohibited from even the mildest of the abuses now being described as routine. I would trust him to do the right thing in the most humane way possible. But his business is a boutique trade.

What we have here is the industrial version, under the supervision of the non-OGA thus far identified by name.

I'm confident the witch-hunt will spread. There are plenty of institutions to investigate.

One night just after 9-11 I had a chat at the Special Forces Club with a senior official from the counter-terror branch of New Scotland Yard. I asked him if there was a professional standard to deal with evil. He indicated that it was his experience that democracy and civil rights are essentially incompatible with democracy, and that if only one side is actually at war, it complicates the process.

He said that a whole alternate structure, a sort of anti-justice, had to be devised to keep the committed revolutionary killers locked up. He was pretty sure they had the right chaps, though.

I asked him if that was how he had beaten the Irish Republican Army. He looked at me over a vodka squash and said in his slow British drawl, "No, of course not." He took a sip. "We surrendered."

Well, we certainly can't do that. But the embarrassment and humiliation of our once-again proud Army is so monumental that the full dimension hasn't sunk it yet.

That will take some time. We will have to finish the court-marshals, and we have not yet advanced to the leadership who permitted this mess, not yet. I can see them preparing the way for this, setting up the OGA as the unaccountable bad guy.

I remember with some trepidation that young 1st Lt. William Calley took the blame for the policy decisions that resulted in My Lai.

Little Billy didn't think that up on his own But he was the only one who paid.

Him and the dead, that is.