Religious Fanatic General At Heart of Prison Scandal
Smiting the infidels
Gen. Boykin, the Bible-thumping crank who said Bush "was appointed by God," is at the center of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
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By Sidney Blumenthal
May 20, 2004 | Saving Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin seemed like a strange sideshow last October. After it was revealed that the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence had been regularly appearing at evangelical revivals, preaching that the United States was in a holy war as a "Christian nation" battling "Satan," the furor was quickly calmed. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained that Boykin was exercising his rights as a citizen: "We're a free people." President Bush declared that Boykin "doesn't reflect my point of view or the point of view of this administration." Bush's commission on public diplomacy had reported that in nine Muslim countries, just 12 percent of people believed that "Americans respect Arab/Islamic values." The Pentagon announced that its inspector general would investigate, though he has yet to report.
Boykin was not removed or transferred. At that moment, in fact, he was at the center of the secret operation to "Gitmo-ize" Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. He had flown to Guantánamo (known as "Gitmo") in Cuba, where he met with the commandant of Camp X-Ray, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, ordering him to extend his methods to the Iraq prison system, orders that had come from Rumsfeld. While Boykin weathered his public storm, he remained the operational officer overseeing Miller's new assignment.
Boykin was recommended to his position by his storied résumé in the elite Delta Force. He was a commander in the failed effort to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980, tracked drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia, advised the gas attack on barricaded cultists at Waco, Texas, and lost 18 men in Mogadishu, Somalia, while trying to capture a warlord in the notorious "Black Hawk Down" fiasco in 1993. Boykin told an evangelical gathering last year how this fostered his crisis of spirituality. "There is no God," he said. "If there was a God, he would have been here to protect my soldiers." But he was thunderstruck with the insight that his battle with the warlord was between good and evil, between the true God and the false one. "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
Boykin was the action-hero side of his boss, Stephen Cambone, a conservative defense intellectual appointed to the newly created post of undersecretary of intelligence. Cambone is universally despised by the officer corps for his arrogant, abrasive and dictatorial style and is regarded as the personal symbol of Rumsfeldism. A former senior Pentagon official told me of his conversation with a currently serving three-star general who remarked, "If we were being overrun by the enemy and I had only one bullet left, I'd use it on Cambone." Cambone set about to cut out the CIA and State Department from the war on terrorism, but he had no knowledge of special ops. For this the rarefied civilian relied on the gruff soldier -- a melding of "ignorance and recklessness," as a military intelligence source told me. |
