Yet more SAP

Digby has some good comments on Hersh's article. What I think is devastating about this article is not the revelation of the existence of the SAP. Like Digby, I always assumed that some kind of "black" operation like this would occur after 9/11. It is only the criminally naive who think that we never get our hands dirty.

What is different here, though, was that a highly specialized intelligence tool was converted to a use it was not meant for. The SAP was meant only for "high-value targets" in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld and Cambone perverted it to deal with the growing problem of the insurgency in Iraq and then compounded their mistake by including amateurs in the operation.

Hersh has several sources within intelligences circles for this article. The reason why is obvious: the spooks are pissed at Rumsfeld (and Bush by extension) for exposing what they do to the light of day:

[...] Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. [...]