GULF WAR CRIMES?

In His Latest Exposé, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh Reports Allegations
That The Military Committed A Massacre Against Iraqi Soldiers And
Whitewashed It.

An investigative report for the New Yorker by veteran muckraker Seymour
Hersh alleges that Clinton drug czar Barry McCaffrey orchestrated a 1991
massacre of hundreds of Iraqi troops, two days after a cease-fire went into
effect at the end of the Gulf War.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist quotes numerous on-the-record combat
veterans, both senior officers and enlisted men, describing the "systematic
destruction" of a 5-mile-long column of Iraqi armor, vehicles and personnel
making what was described as an orderly, U.S.-sanctioned retreat.

According to Hersh's report, McCaffrey ordered an all-out, four-hour
assault based on two or fewer instances of fire from the Iraqis -- a move
that galvanized the general's staff. The article quotes senior officers
decrying the lack of discipline and proportionality in the
McCaffrey-ordered attack. Even McCaffrey's operations officer at the time,
Patrick Lamar, is quoted dismissing the battle as "a giant hoax."

The report also charges that McCaffrey, who is now a member of President
Clinton's cabinet and director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, maneuvered his troops miles beyond what was sanctioned by his
commanders and failed to inform superiors of the exact location of his
troops. As the attack commenced, a helicopter blew up an enemy ammunition
truck, blocking access to a bridge and bottling up the doomed Iraqis.

Hersh writes that "Apache attack helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles,
and artillery units from the 24th Division pummeled the 5-mile-long Iraqi
column for hours, destroying some 700 Iraqi tanks, armored cars and trucks,
and killing not only Iraqi soldiers but civilians and children as well.
Many of the dead were buried soon after the engagement, and no accurate
count of the victims could be made."

McCaffrey, then a two-star general, commanded the 24th Division, which led
the engagement. American forces suffered no casualties in the attack, and
soldiers called it a "turkey shoot" -- which is probably an apt
description, given that, as Hersh reports, few of the retreating Iraqis
returned the fire and some were even sunbathing on their tanks.

Hersh's story also alleges that, in two incidents, McCaffrey's division
fired on unarmed Iraqis. The first incident involved a group of Iraqi POWs,
who were reportedly sitting on the ground as they were shot. A group of
unarmed civilians were shot in the second incident, according to American
soldiers who were present. In both cases, the Army investigated and found
no wrong doing. But Hersh dismisses those findings in his story, writing
that "few soldiers report crimes, because they don't want to jeopardize
their Army careers." In neither case was McCaffrey present.

A series of striking, chronological narratives, the stark tale of alleged
war crimes employs primarily on-the-record interviews and features a
dramatic, unattributed photo of McCaffrey standing on an armored vehicle,
binoculars in hand, overseeing the battle. "He's going to have to wonder
where that photo came from. I talked to a lot of people," Hersh told Salon
in a telephone interview Sunday night.

According to Hersh's account, the carnage following the cease fire raised
questions up and down the chain of command. But it took a detailed,
anonymous letter to the Pentagon to spur the Army to launch investigations.
Full of inside information supporting its authenticity, the letter accused
McCaffrey of committing a "'war crime'" and threatened exposure to the press.

The letter, Hersh writes, stated "that a colleague had overhead McCaffrey
urge his commanders on the command radio net 'to find a way for him to go
kill all of those bastards.'" The origins of the letter are not revealed in
the New Yorker report, though. Hersh told Salon he "probably" interviewed
the letter-writer. "But he didn't identify himself to me," he said.

Hersh said he came across the story while researching U.S. military
involvement in Colombia. "I started in December looking into the Colombia
policy. But I never got far. Generals started talking, and I realized we'd
missed a big story on McCaffrey." In the story, Hersh quotes one colonel's
statement that the assault "made no sense for a defeated army to invite
their own death. ... It came across as shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone
was incredulous."

McCaffrey, who has engaged in pre-emptive strikes against Hersh for several
weeks now, issued a statement Sunday condemning the account. "The
incidences Hersh recycles were the subject almost ten years ago of no less
than four complete investigations, including two which were separate,
independently-led and exhaustive -- one by the Army Inspector General and
the other by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division."

At some 25,000 words and exhaustive itself by the standards of magazine
journalism, Hersh's article exhumes all four investigations and portrays
them as whitewashes. Hersh even depicts internal skepticism about the vigor
of the investigations and about why the Army decided not to press its
investigation further. "They'd just won a war and didn't want to shit in
their mess kit," a retired major general is quoted as saying. One
investigator, Warrant Officer Willie Rowell, told Hersh that, "he felt that
he and his fellow-investigators had established that, at best, only two
rounds were fired by Iraqi forces at the ... platoon on the morning [of the
massacre], but regardless of his and the others' doubts about McCaffrey, he
said, the Dinkel investigation 'came up with nothing that would have won a
trial.'" He added, "If you're a two-star general, you can do whatever you
want to do, under the confusion of war."

Following up on his written statement, McCaffrey also made the rounds on
the morning-news talk shows to question the veracity of Hersh's story. On
NBC's "Today" Monday morning, McCaffrey dodged a direct question on the
assertion by one of his subordinates, Patrick Lamar, that the battle was a
"hoax." Instead, he declared the article, "nonsense, revisionist history."
Citing the accusation of "war crimes," "Today's" Matt Lauer asked the
general if he would support a renewed investigation. McCaffrey said,
"absolutely not," adding that it was "old history." On ABC's "Good Morning
America," McCaffrey said, "I think [Hersh's] story is going to melt like a
snowball this week." Hersh also appeared on both programs, reiterating his
allegations.

In Sunday's statement, McCaffrey charged that "Hersh has the safe luxury of
armchair quarterbacking the every move of the 24th Infantry during the Gulf
War -- 10 years after the fact. We did not have that luxury. We were out
there fighting the fourth-largest army in the world, which was armed with
biological and chemical weapons ..."

Hersh, however, writes of a different kind of war, one characterized by a
one-sided attack led by McCaffrey and his troops, and quotes from a
published account that the Iraqis "hadn't lost the battle, they had
forfeited it." He states that the 24th Division had seen very little
sustained action, and that McCaffrey felt he hadn't unleashed enough
destruction on the Iraqis. While McCaffrey currently emphasizes the Iraqis'
impressive armaments and overall potential as justifying his division's
all-out assault, Hersh quotes an account of McCaffrey telling his troops,
"You knocked them to their knees because they were like an eighth-grade
team playing with pro football players."

The controversy over Hersh's investigation erupted April 18, when
Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz reported McCaffrey's "unusual
preemptive strike" against the reporter. In the article, Kurtz cited a
letter McCaffrey sent to editors at the New Yorker, in which he complained
about what he described as Hersh's "'defamatory'" interviews filled with
"'false allegations'" that were the product of "'personal malice.'" In
assessing McCaffrey's move, Kurtz wrote: "In making the correspondence
available to the Washington Post, McCaffrey is adopting the increasingly
popular tactic of a news subject trying to make the journalist the issue
before he delivers his findings."

The pot was stirred further Friday, when the Associated Press moved a story
with the headline, "Army Probe Cleared McCaffrey." Noting the dispute
between the journalist and the general, the AP cited "newly released
documents" indicating "no wrongdoing on McCaffrey's part." An AP spokesman
said the documents were released as part of a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) filing made by the wire service after Kurtz disclosed the dispute.

Hersh states that his own FOIA request took several months -- not the few
short weeks it took the AP -- to yield documents. Asked about Friday's AP
article, and the speed with which its FOIA request was granted, Hersh said,
"Draw your own conclusions. But getting that story out in the press before
mine comes out -- it's not important. The truth will out."

The damaging Gulf War allegations come at a critical time for McCaffrey,
who was expected to testify before Congress on Tuesday over the efficacy of
a White House program offering advertising subsidies to network television
broadcasters and non-fiction magazine publishers who fill their shows and
pages with government endorsed anti-drug messages. On Thursday, with
knowledge that the New Yorker planned to publish Hersh's report the same
week, McCaffrey postponed his scheduled testimony before the House
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources. (Full
disclosure: This reporter has covered the ONDCP's media campaign for Salon
and was also scheduled to testify.)

A Capitol Hill source with knowledge of the hearings said that an ONDCP
staffer, acting on McCaffrey's behalf, requested that the hearing be
postponed due to a "family medical emergency." When questioned about the
nature of the emergency, ONDCP chief of staff Janet Crist said Friday,
"That's exaggerated. ... It's his personal business." Crist added, "It's no
longer relevant because the hearing has been postponed." When asked why
McCaffrey requested a delay in the hearings, Crist said, "He has a lot on
his plate."

And at least one serving on that plate must have been the 32 pages of
material McCaffrey sent to the New Yorker last week, seeking to soften the
blow of Hersh's article and debunk some of his reporting.

There are no current plans for the Army to reopen investigations into
McCaffrey, the 24th Infrantry and the alleged massacre. "The Army
investigated allegations of wrong doing by elements of the 24th Infantry
Division during the latter stages of Operation Desert Storm," said Army
spokesman Maj. Scott Hays. "Investigations were conducted by the Army
Criminal Investigations Command and Army Inspector General. No new issues
appeared to have been raised by the story by Seymour M. Hersh in the New
Yorker. There is no need to reopen the investigations. The Army has
confidence in the conduct and integrity of soldiers of the 24th ID."

Asked whether McCaffrey should resign, Hersh, who won the Pulitzer Prize
for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, said, "I don't know that we're
there yet."