Barry McCaffrey

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Barry Richard McCaffrey (b. November 17, 1942, Taunton, Massachusetts) is a retired United States Army General. He currently serves as an Adjunct Professor at the United States Military Academy, where he had been the Bradley Professor of International Security Studies from 2001 to 2005. He is also a NBC and MSNBC military analyst as well as a consultant for BR McCaffrey Associates ([1]). In addition to serving as a professor at the USMA, he is also a military commentator on television.

Contents 1 Military career 2 Political career 3 Allegations of misconduct during the Gulf War 3.1 Account of the incident from The General's War 3.2 New Yorker article 3.3 McCaffrey's and Powell's rebuttals to allegations of misconduct 3.4 ABC investigation of misconduct allegations 4 Comments on Iraq War 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Military career

McCaffrey attended Phillips Academy. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy (Class of 1964), and holds an MA from American University.

He fought in the Vietnam War, where he was wounded, and the Gulf War. During Operation Desert Storm, McCaffrey commanded the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. In Operation Desert Storm he was known for his speed and boldness. Joe Galloway, the co-author of We Were Soldiers Once...And Young, rode with and reported on the division, where he favorably compared McCaffrey with Hal Moore. Over the course of his military career, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross twice, the Purple Heart three times and the Silver Star twice. In his career, McCaffrey rose to become the youngest General in the Army at the time of his promotion.

General McCaffrey's last command in the Army was that of the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the unified command responsible for U.S. military activities in Central and South America. He commanded SOUTHCOM, whose headquarters were then in the Republic of Panama, from 1994 to 1996. Besides managing military personnel, as part of his duties in Panama, McCaffrey supported humanitarian operations for over 10,000 Cuban refugees in 1996. It was also during his last military position that he created the first Human Rights Council and Human Rights Code of Conduct for U.S. Military Joint Command.

[edit] Political career

He is well-known for having been Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) under President Bill Clinton from 1996 to 2001. As Drug Czar, General McCaffrey (ret.) was instrumental in negotiating a deal to place anti-drug messages in prime time television shows without acknowledging that these messages were paid for by his Office.[2] This created quite a scandal when it was revealed in Salon.com, and the practice was later declared illegal by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under President George W. Bush.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Allegations of misconduct during the Gulf War

[edit] Account of the incident from The General's War

In The General's War, authors Michael Gordon (New York Times) and Bernard Trainor (U.S. Marine Corps, retired), note that the U.S. Army's objective in the western desert of Iraq was to degrade Saddam Hussein's military capability by destroying the Republican Guard, especially its equipment, while the Marine Corps forces liberated Kuwait. The VII Corps and XVIII Corps of the army were about to heavily engage the Republican Guard when a ceasefire was declared at the behest of Bush administration officials.

After the cease fire was declared, McCaffrey's ordered his unit, the 24th Infantry Division, to push forward to a point where it would be in between the retreating Iraqi forces, who were coming up from the south, and the northern direction they were headed. He did so without explicit orders from his superiors. This put the division in prime position to bump into retreating Iraqi forces and be fired upon by the Iraqis. Such fire from the Iraqis would give the 24th Infantry Division pretext to return fire under the doctrine of self-defense, and this occurred.

McCaffrey claims his division received fire from an Iraqi. Units of the 24th Infantry Division, under McCaffrey's direction, unleashed a fury of fire, disproportionate force, in return, according to the book. It used all the assets at its disposal and wiped out the Iraqi forces.

[edit] New Yorker article

According to an article written by Seymour Hersh published in 2000 The New Yorker, General McCaffrey committed war crimes during the Gulf War by having troops under his command kill retreating Iraqis after a ceasefire had been declared. Hersh's article "quotes senior officers decrying the lack of discipline and proportionality in the McCaffrey-ordered attack." One colonel told Hersh that it "made no sense for a defeated army to invite their own death. ... It came across as shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone was incredulous." [3]

These charges had been made by Army personnel after the war and an Army investigation had cleared McCaffrey of any wrongdoing. Hersh dismissed the findings of the investigation, writing that "few soldiers report crimes, because they don't want to jeopardize their Army careers."

Hersh describes his interview with Private First Class Charles Sheehan-Miles, who later published a novel about his experience in the Gulf:

When I asked Sheehan-Miles why he fired, he replied, "At that point, we were shooting everything. Guys in the company told me later that some were civilians. It wasn't like they came at us with a gun. It was that they were there -- 'in the wrong place at the wrong time.'" Although Sheehan-Miles is unsure whether he and his fellow-tankers were ever actually fired upon during the war, he is sure that there was no significant enemy fire. "We took some incoming once, but it was friendly fire," he said. "The folks we fought never had a chance." He came away from Iraq convinced that he and his fellow-soldiers were, as another tanker put it, part of "the biggest firing squad in history."

[edit] McCaffrey's and Powell's rebuttals to allegations of misconduct

McCaffrey denied the charges and attacked what he called Hersh's "revisionist history" of the Gulf War. According to Georgie Anne Geyer of the Chicago Tribune from May 2000, Hersh’s accusations were disputed by a number of military personnel, who later claimed to have been misquoted by the journalist. She argues that this may have been Hersh’s misguided attempt to break another My Lai story, and that he "could not possibly like a man such as McCaffrey, who is so temperamentally and philosophically different from him…” Finally, she suggests that Hersh may also have been motivated to attack the general for McCaffrey’s role as the drug czar.[4]

Lt. Gen. Steven Arnold, interviewed by Hersh for the controversial article, was one of the officers who later claimed to have been misquoted. He wrote the editor of The New Yorker saying "I know that my brief comments in the article were not depicted in an entirely accurate manner and were taken out of context…. When the Iraqi forces fired on elements of the 24th Infantry Division, they were clearly committing a hostile act. I regret having granted an interview with Mr. Hersh. The tone and thrust of the article places me in a position of not trusting or respecting General Barry McCaffrey, and nothing could be further from the truth." [5]

Similar criticism came from Gen. Colin Powell, former Secretary of State and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Iraq War, who described the Hersh article as "attempted character assassination on General McCaffrey," in an interview with Sam Donaldson for the TV show This Week, in May of 2000.

[edit] ABC investigation of misconduct allegations

ABC News followed up on Hersh's report in June 2000, interviewing six soldiers from the platoon of scouts under the command of Gen. McCaffrey. All six confirmed Hersh's report, telling ABC News that they witnessed the attack. Two of the scouts, Edward Walker and David Collatt, claim to have witnessed the attack from 200 yards away.

ABC interviewed Major General John LeMoyne, who oversaw the Army investigation into the charges against McCaffrey. LeMoyne denies the incident occurred: "Nobody was killed. None, zero. Soldiers--the Iraqi soldiers were never shot at, ever, at that point. None of us, hundreds and hundreds of us ever saw a body. None of us."

ABC reviewed LeMoyne's investigation and found it "flawed and incomplete. The Army failed to interview the aide Le Moyne told investigators he immediately sent to the area. It failed to interview many of the Scouts, and it failed to interview all the Bradley crews. While the Army did conclude there was firing, it failed to establish which Bradleys were firing. The Bradley crew members who did submit statements denied any knowledge of the incident and denied shooting at anything. Further, the Army failed to establish why there was firing at all in an area known to hold the prisoners. To this day, Battalion Commander Charles Ware does not have a clear explanation."

[edit] Comments on Iraq War

In June of 2005, he surveyed Iraq on behalf of U.S. Central Command and wrote an optimistic report afterwards [6]. In it, he says the U.S. senior military leadership team is superb and predicts the insurgency will reach its peak from January-to-September 2006, allowing for U.S. force withdrawls in the late summer of 2006. A year later, however, after visiting Iraq again, his assessment was grim: "Iraq is abject misery...I think it's a terribly dangerous place for diplomats and journalists and contractors and Iraqi mothers. Trying to go about daily life in that city is a real nightmare for these poor people." He called Abu Ghraib "the biggest mistake that happened so far." [7]. In an official memorandum [8], McCaffrey nevertheless expressed optimism about the operation's longer term future: "The situation is perilous, uncertain, and extreme — but far from hopeless. The U.S. Armed Forces are a rock. This is the most competent and brilliantly led military in a tactical and operational sense that we have ever fielded.... There is no reason why the U.S. cannot achieve our objectives in Iraq. Our aim must be to create a viable federal state under the rule of law which does not: enslave its own people, threaten its neighbors, or produce weapons of mass destruction. This is a ten year task. We should be able to draw down most of our combat forces in 3-5 years. We have few alternatives to the current US strategy which is painfully but gradually succeeding. This is now a race against time. Do we have the political will, do we have the military power, will we spend the resources required to achieve our aims?" His assessment noted several negative areas as well as very positive areas in the struggle for democracy in the country.

[edit] References

Daniel Forbes, "Gulf War Crimes?" Salon.com (15 May 2000).

Georgie Anne Geyer, "Seymour Hersh's Gulf War Misconceptions," Chicago Tribune (19 May 2000) p. 23.

Seymour Hersh, "Overwhelming Force: What Happened in the Final Days of the Gulf War?" The New Yorker (22 May 2000).

Jackie Judd (Reporter) and Peter Jennings (Anchor), "Investigation into Killing of Unarmed Iraqi Soldiers," ABC World News Tonight (15 June 2000). Transcript.

Barry R. McCaffrey, "The New Yorker's Revisionist History," Wall Street Journal (22 May 2000).

George Stephanopoulos (Reporter) and Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts (Anchors), "General Colin Powell Discusses His Group America's Promise," This Week from ABC News (21 May 2000) Transcript.

[edit] External links

• Biography at the National Infantry Foundation website

Preceded by Lee P. Brown

Director of the National Drug Control Policy 1996–2001

Succeeded by John P. Walters