| Barry Richard McCaffrey | |
|---|---|
| 4th Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy | |
| In office February 29, 1996 – January 4, 2001 |
|
| President | Bill Clinton |
| Preceded by | Lee P. Brown |
| Succeeded by | John P. Walters |
| Personal details | |
| Born | November 17, 1942 Taunton, Massachusetts[1] |
Barry Richard McCaffrey (born November 17, 1942) is a retired United States Army general, former U.S. Drug Czar, news commentator, and business consultant.
He is currently an Adjunct Professor at the United States Military Academy, where he was the Bradley Professor of International Security Studies from 2001 to 2005. He is also an NBC and MSNBC military analyst as well as president of his own consulting firm, BR McCaffrey Associates. [3]
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McCaffrey attended Phillips Academy, Andover. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy (Class of 1964), and earned an M.A. in Civil Government from the American University in 1970. He also attended the National Security and Executive Education programs at Harvard University. His postgraduate military education includes the National Defense University, the United States Army War College, the Command and General Staff College, and the Defense Language Institute's program in Vietnamese.[2]
Following his graduation from West Point in 1964, McCaffrey was commissioned into the infantry.[3]
His combat tours included action in the Dominican Republic with the 82nd Airborne Division in 1965, advisory duty with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam from 1966–67, and company command with the 1st Cavalry Division from 1968–69.[3] During the course of his service in the Vietnam War he was twice awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Heart three times and the Silver Star twice.[2]
During Operation Desert Storm, McCaffrey commanded the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized). Under his command, the division conducted the "left hook" attack 370 km into Iraq. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.[2] 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.
General McCaffrey's peacetime assignments included tours as an instructor at the U.S. Military Academy from 1972–75, Assistant Commandant at the U.S. Army Infantry School; Deputy U.S. Representative to NATO; Assistant Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS); Director of Strategic Plans and Policy, JCS.[3]
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.
McCaffrey was the youngest General in the Army at the time of his retirement.[2]
Barry McCaffrey was Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) under President Bill Clinton from 1996 to 2001. As Drug Czar, McCaffrey 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.[4] This created quite a scandal when it was revealed in Salon.com.
In 2000, the Federal Communications Commission, in response to a complaint by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, sent inquiries to five major television networks about ONDCP's practice of offering millions of additional advertising dollars to networks that embedded anti-drug messages in their programming.[5] The House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources held hearings on the matter on July 11, 2000.[6] In December of that year, the FCC ruled that the networks should have identified the Office of National Drug Control Policy as the sponsor of the television programs.[7][8]
In the spring of 1998, the ONDCP began to develop an accounting system to decide which network shows would be valued and for how much. Receiving advance copies of scripts, they assigned financial value to each show's anti-drug message. Then they would suggest ways that the networks could increase the payments they would get. The WB network's senior vice president for broadcast standards Rick Mater admitted, "The White House did view scripts. They did sign off on them – they read scripts, yes."[9]
Running the campaign for the ONDCP was Alan Levitt, who estimated that between 1998 and 2000 the networks received nearly $25 million in benefits.[9]
One example was with Warner Brothers' show, Smart Guy. The original script portrayed two young people using drugs at a party. Originally depicted as cool and popular, after input from the drug office, "We showed that they were losers and put them [hidden away to indulge in shamed secrecy] in a utility room. That was not in the original script."[9]
Other shows including ER, Beverly Hills, 90210, Chicago Hope, The Drew Carey Show and 7th Heaven also put anti-drug messages into their stories.[9]
In 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that the ONDCP had violated domestic propaganda and publicity prohibitions by preparing prepackaged news stories that did not disclose to television viewers that the government had produced them and had illegally spent appropriations to develop, produce and distribute the covert propaganda.[10] Due to a three year statute of limitations the GAO opinion (B-303495) was limited to fiscal years 2002, 2003 and 2004 however its detailed analysis of the core legal issues involved is applicable to the McCaffrey era ONDCP propaganda scandal.
Appropriation acts had stated, "No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress." (Congress had imposed this same prohibition, using identical language, on the use of all appropriations for publicity or propaganda purposes annually since 1951.)
21 U.S.C. 1802(a)(1)(H), does not relieve ONDCP of the need to comply with the publicity or propaganda prohibitions.
One of the activities banned under the publicity or propaganda prohibition involves what is referred to as covert propaganda.
The critical element of covert propaganda is the concealment of the agency's role in sponsoring the materials. (citing B229257, June 10, 1988).
Use of appropriated funds in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition also constitutes a violation of the Antideficiency Act, 31 U.S.C. 1341(a).
In The General's War, authors Michael R. 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 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 position to make contact with retreating Iraqi forces.
McCaffrey claims his division received fire from an Iraqi. Units of the 24th Infantry Division, under McCaffrey's direction, returned fire in under the doctrine of self-defense, according to the book. The Iraqi forces engaged were destroyed.
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."[4]
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:
McCaffrey denied the charges that on three occasions, General McCaffrey or his men of the 24th infantry division either fired on enemy soldiers who had surrendered in an "unprovoked attack", or "went too far" in responding to a non-existent threat. He attacked what he called Hersh's "revisionist history" of the Gulf War. BBC reported that "General McCaffrey said an army investigation had previously cleared him of any blame and he accused the New Yorker of maligning young soldiers.... White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said President Bill Clinton felt the charges were unsubstantiated."[11]
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.[5]
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."[6]
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 2000.
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 (180 m) 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."
McCaffrey has harshly criticized American treatment of detainees during the War on Terror. According to McCaffrey: "We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A."[12][13] He "supports an investigation of the government lawyers who knowingly advocated illegal torture, and he specifically cited Bush's White House counsel and attorney general in the same discussion, emphasizing that 'we better find out how we went so wrong.'"[14]
In June 2005, he surveyed Iraq on behalf of U.S. Central Command and wrote an optimistic report afterwards.[7] 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 withdrawals 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."[15] In an official memorandum,[16] 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.
McCaffrey returned a third time in March, 2007, and followed the visit with a third memorandum.[8] The grimness of the 2006 assessment was repeated, additionally asserting a concern about the effect of the continuing war on the readiness of the small-sized U.S. military. He tempered his optimism about the future saying: "There are encouraging signs that the peace and participation message does resonate with many of the more moderate Sunni and Shia warring factions."
In April 2008, the New York Times published a front page report by David Barstow confirming that military analysts hired by ABC, CBS and NBC to present observations about the conduct of the war in Iraq had undisclosed ties to the Pentagon and/or military contractors. Former Army Major General John Batiste told National Public Radio that there was "a very deliberate attempt on the part of the administration to shape public opinion" about the war. One of the participants, Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Special Forces soldier and former Fox News analyst, said of the program, "It was them saying, 'We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you'." And Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst, called the campaign "a coherent, active policy," and lamented, "I felt we’d been hosed."[17]
McCaffrey was "at the heart of the scandal" detailed by Barstow.[18] In late Nov 2008, the New York Times published another front page article by Barstow, this time specifically profiling General McCaffrey. It detailed his free movement between roles as a paid advocate for defense companies, media analyst and a retired officer.[17] An earlier report[19] with some of the same information had appeared in The Nation in April, 2003 but was not widely picked up. McCaffrey and his consulting firm BR McCaffrey Associates, LLC responded to the Times piece, stating that he is "absolutely committed to objective, non-partisan public commentary". The response highlighted his military record, as well as his history of criticizing the execution of the Iraq War and specifically Rumsfeld.[20] It was later revealed that there had been "extensive collaboration between NBC and McCaffrey to formulate a coordinated response to David Barstow's story."[21]
| Military offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Gen. George A. Joulwan |
United States Southern Command 1994—1996 |
Succeeded by Gen. Wesley K. Clark |
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Lee P. Brown |
Director of the National Drug Control Policy 1996–2001 |
Succeeded by John P. Walters |
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