“The question of who authorized the torture is still not completely known … What this all means is that no one was supposed to be on the record as giving approval. It was all to happen off the books. This had to be designed. Hence, I don’t think there was an EO, at this point, or why the need for deniability and CYA.”

But “who authorized the torture” is not really the relevant question, at least not from the military command-authority point of view. The question is “who SHOULD have authorized the torture before it could happen?” To put it another way, “who was derelict in his or her duties?”

The traditional service chain of command is designed to make deniability impossible. Orders have to be traceable. You ahve to be ab le to follow them up the chain of command. If they aren’t traceable, if the chain just stops at some point, this fact is in itself evidence. The officer that should given an order or approved an action and did not is culpable. The officer that did not know what his subordinates were doing is doubly culpable. There just isn’t any way out.

The missing Presidential finding is, I suspect, an instance of the above. I suspect that you are right and there is no finding–or if there is, it was concocted recently. But I expect it is only the tip of iceberg. Start checking equipment requisitions, travel authorizations, TDYs, and all the other things that have to be approved and documented in service life, and clear patterns of responsibility will emerge. The Tagouba report on Abu Ghraib started down this path. No doubt consientious officers also wrote scads of memos-to-file documenting what they were told to do and by whom.

If the President and Congress want to do it, this can all be unravelled. But, for that matter, if they wanted to, they have enough to act on now. All currently serving flag officers who have in any way touched Iraq or Afghanistan could–and I think should–be forced into retirement just for what they claim to NOT know.

Bottom line, Joint Forces Command is the highest level of military authority we currently have on record as giving authority (although it was supposedly to be vetted first through CENTCOM legal). What this all means is that no one was supposed to be on the record as giving approval. It was all to happen off the books. This had to be designed. Hence, I don’t think there was an EO, at this point, or why the need for deniability and CYA. This was run as a kind of black op, and any traceability was designed to lead the investigator into a blind alley.

You may be interesting in the following from the statement Kleinman gave to the SASC (emphasis added):

The question is, Why did the special operations community feel that it was necessary and appropriate to request interrogation support from a command that you’ve pointed out has a mission of providing, not interrogation, but resistance to interrogation training?…

From the beginning, there was incredible pressure placed on interrogators to elicit actionable information—we can define that as information that operators can act upon within a 24- to 48-hour cycle—from almost every individual that we took into custody. And some of these detainees were complicit, and some were innocent….

The resourceful special operations community, to which I’m assigned right now, sought, then, solutions outside the intelligence community. With their clear memories of their experiences during intensive resistance to interrogation exercises that are a key part of SERE training, their search led them to the cadre of very talented survival instructors, who demonstrated exceptional skill in conducting interrogations using the high pressure, often threatening tactic deployed by countries that were not signatories to the Geneva Convention. These special operators were understandably impressed by the ability of these instructors to compel compliance with both force and subterfuge.

To the nonintelligence officer, the transfer of SERE methods from the training environment to real-world operations seemed a logical option.

I also wish to direct readers to an article by Marcy Wheeler not very long ago that covered the SMU/Kleinman episode, and in some greater detail, but with a different emphasis, than this article: see A Bush EO on Torture?

The question of who authorized the torture is still not completely known. Did SMU Commander Koenig take it upon himself, or did McChrystal give the okay. Or, as MW speculates, was there a Bush Executive Order giving such authorization, which the generals were aware of?

Traditionally, military organizations have been suspicious of special forces and have sought to eliminate or severely restrict their scope once the immediate wartime need that gave rise to them had passed. Witness America’s first special unit, the Rangers. The Rangers were formed early in WW2 as the counterpart of Britain’s Commandos. They were a small-unit raiding and ireegular warfare force. But regular officers viewed the whole special forces premise as a threat to good discipline. In the post-war years, the Army quickly transformed them into a much more conventional elite airborne force, much as Britain did when it returned the Commandos to the traditional duties of the Royal Marines. When Eisenhower wanted his own commandos for work with the CIA, he had to reinvent them in the form of the Green Berets.

Special forces created hostility in the traditional officer corps for the same reasons that they appealed to politicians like Eisenhower: they give the executive branch the illusion of eating its cake–fighting wars–and having it too–in the form of minimal casualties, low costs, little or no bad publicity, little or no accountability, and little or no legislative oversight. Honest officers know that the negatives of war cannot be eliminated–there are no violent shortcuts through complex geopolitical realities. The unglamorous and politically unpalatable parts of war-fighting, from logistics and drafts to slaughter, chaos, and madness are what war is about. Military organization and discipline are about holding some form of civilized behavior together under horrible circumstances while achieving some sort of realistic objective. Since the consequences of mistakes are severe and the likelihood of making them is high in wartime, the chain of command is designed so that no one has deniability. Real soldiers want to know what the objective is and what they are supposed to do. And when the objective is wrong or the orders lead to disaster, they want to see a career ruined, a court martial, or an election lost.

The tradtional marginalization of special forces started to change during Vietnam and vanished completely in the Reagan MisAdministration. John Kennedy wanted to draw the line against China in Vietnam, but, given his own war service, he was unwilling to accept the kind of casualties that a Korean War-style intervention would involve. Traditionalist, WW2-era generals resisted however, and while they held sway, special-operations doctrine did could not get more than a foothold in policy. Lyndon Johnson followed military advice and relied on massive intervention by conventional forces.

But the next generation of general officers were far more politicized than their predecessors, less professional, and more careerist. They were anxious to provide politicians that could help their careers with whatever was wanted. Special units proliferated as each service strove to outdo the others in what it could offer the politicians. A succession of disastrously incompetent Republican administrations siezed on them and used them in a vast number of poorly hidden “secret” wars around the globe. As so often in American politics (witness the banking scandals), bad outcomes and secrecy bred more of the same. Special forces grew in stature and emerged as a separate command, a virtual separate branch of service that is now seen as the keystone of defense and foreign policy. What’s more, they have to be–now that the little secret wars have, inevitably, blossomed into big ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wastage of trained troops in regular units has become so high that rebuilding regular units in the near term is probably impossible.

Those of us outside the DC beltway have seen the results of deregulation in the financial industry. We are now seeing the results of deregulation in war-fighting: Abu Ghraib and the rest. To save our military, we have to end the specialness, stop exempting soldiers from the rules, disband the special forces and place their members under normal military discipline. We have to assign blame at the top, where it belongs, end careers, ruin reputations, and then start over.

Forget the Gitmo detainees – I don’t want THESE people in my police department, tazing my grandma!

The commander of the 116th Air Control Wing is an Air National Guard (USAF) Brigadier General Thomas R. Moore whose official biography shows he was promoted to Brigadier General in March, 2007, long after the time frame in question. His biography does not list any assignment to Joint Forces Command.

USAF Brig Gen Koenig retired as a Colonel several years ago for reasons unrelated to any operations.

As for the Lieberman-Graham bill, it’s an abomination. But I don’t know if the Senate voted for it with such a large margin because they knew it wouldn’t pass in the House, or what.

The appetite to keep the lid on is one way to think of the theme of my post today. After all the good work the SASC did identifying many of the whos and whats of the SERE torture program, in the end, they flinched from actually identifying those at the top who criminally assisted or sponsored these crimes (or at least, that’s the way it seems in the redacted version we have available).

As for the photos, it seems possible that some of them might come from Special Forces atrocities. Certainly, there’s practically a news black-out on the actions of Special Forces, who when they are allowed, must always be in heroic terms. That was part of the issue behind the Tillman scandal.

Anyway, I suspect this posting seemed downbeat in the light of Obama’s big speech today.