In a new book, “Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” Hersh expands upon his work in the New Yorker to contribute new insights and revelations. He discloses how a CIA analyst’s report on abuses against captured Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, made its way to the White House in 2002, putting National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on notice two years before the Abu Ghraib scandal that human rights violations were taking place in U.S.-run prisons abroad.

In March 2002, Hersh writes, a military action against al-Qaida, known as Operation Anaconda, was botched in Afghanistan’s mountainous border with Pakistan. Billed at the time as a success story by the Pentagon, it was in fact a debacle, plagued by squabbling between the services, bad military planning and avoidable deaths of American soldiers, as well as the escape of key al-Qaida leaders, likely including Osama bin Laden.

Hersh’s story is well known. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which American soldiers killed more than 500 civilians. He is the author of eight books, including 1983′s “The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House.” And, since 1998, he’s been a staff writer for the New Yorker

I visited with Hersh this week in his tiny, unadorned two-room office in downtown Washington, where he works amid a whirring fax machine, a constantly ringing phone and delivery men knocking on the door with packages. A map of the world, slightly off-kilter, is taped to the wall behind his desk, which is piled high with papers.

He speaks quickly, answering questions before the sentences can be completed, and hopscotches through conversational topics, as if everything’s a race against time. “I have some Brazilians coming in. You know, just to talk about … wait! Turn it off for a second,” he says, gesturing at my recorder. He shares with me a lead he’s working on. He flashes me a look at an intriguing document before stealing it away. “OK, let’s talk about the book. I’ve gone over the top here. I’m not pimping anymore. I’m now a full-fledged whore, with red paint,” he says, pretending to smear rouge on his cheeks. He loosens his tie. “Let’s get on with it!”

What is new in the book, and what is based on your published work?

I’d say about 35 percent of the opening material on Abu Ghraib is new, maybe about 15,000 words, altogether about, I don’t know what percentage. Maybe about a third, maybe a little less, is either new or revised or significantly changed. But the bulk of the book is the articles I did, put in a different form and combined in a different way by a very competent editor of mine. This book was edited by the New Yorker and fact-checked by the New Yorker. Everything that is new in the book was fact-checked by the New Yorker.

Who was the editor?

Her name is Amy Davidson. She’s a senior editor, and she’s great. A man named John Bennet, who is a wonderful editor, was my editor for the first couple of years, and then Amy came on because John’s good that way. John is very avuncular, and he wants other people to start editing significant stuff, because among other things, he’s always stuck with the big pieces. It was fact-checked by the same people, and the publisher paid for it. And Remnick, to his everlasting credit, David Remnick the editor, agreed that even though there’s a very good story at the beginning — the whole Condi Rice meeting issue — he said publish it in your book and go make some money. It was sort of nice of them. It reflects well on the New Yorker. His point was, your being out there reflects well on the New Yorker. We all fight for making a living.

To talk about the new revelations …

Let me tell you the one I like the most; aside from the obvious stuff about Abu Ghraib, there was a story I didn’t write two years ago about Operation Anaconda. I didn’t write it because, oh, a lot of complicated reasons. One, it was very hostile to our soldiers, and the military, and General [Tommy] Franks, and [Major Gen. Frank] Hagenbeck, a very nasty story. And then secondly, there was bad blood between the Marine Corps, and General Franks, and CentComm and the Air Force, and it just didn’t, uh … it’s one of those stories. The real reason in a funny way is that even though my sources were angry in talking about it, it’s one of the stories they really would have regretted, because you’re talking about internecine warfare among the services. It’s about boys … anyway.

They would have regretted it?

They would have regretted talking to me about that. In there is an account of the Marines insisting that General Franks sign an MOU, a memorandum of understanding, of how the Marines would be used. We’re talking about in combat, this kind of war going on between the services. And, you know, I probably guess it was the right decision, because I had to do obviously an alternate history of the war. And obviously there were certain people talking to me. People on the inside know what’s going on. And so, I probably agree it was OK to do it. But I felt bad when I saw [former Gen. Wesley] Clark later. I had talked to Clark about the story at the time. Then two years later I ran into him when he was running for president, or right before, and he said, “Whatever happened to that story?” I said, “Well, I just decided not to write it.” And he said, “Well, you should have. It’s your job.”

He’s an amazingly straight guy. A difficult guy. “You should have.” He basically told me, “Punk kid. You didn’t know what you were doing.” I also respect him because …

Let’s talk about some of these revelations.

Oh, so that was the one I liked the most.

But why didn’t you write it at the time? You thought it would be too hostile?

No! There was, you know, it was a tough story about troops running from the battlefield, you know; it was just a tough story. [Hersh is referring to the lost battle of Anaconda.] I was writing a lot of other tough stories, and, uh … it just didn’t work. Let’s put it that way.

Isn’t that what a lot of the mainstream press get accused of — certainly not you — but holding back important information out of sensitivity for the feelings of the nation?

Ain’t none of us perfect. It just seemed at the time, some of the people who were talking to me at the time, it would cause a big stink, and some of the Marines who were talking to me would not talk anymore. I also know, in order to do the story right, I would have had to go find some of the guys who were in the mission … There was a lot of reporting to do, and I don’t know, I just didn’t do it.

But now you’ve gone back and revisited it in the book?

Oh yeah. Give me the book. I’ll show you right where it is. So I’m not backing off. It was a story that should have been written. Of course I should have written it.

Let’s talk about this anecdote about Vice President Cheney saying there would be no resignations [over the Abu Ghraib scandal]. Your publisher emphasized this in the press release, and I wanted to know …

Now, wait a minute. Are you asking about a press release? Excuse me. That’s like asking me about a headline.

Just tell me why you feel it’s important.

What? Tell me why I feel it’s important that Cheney called up?

What does it reveal?

It’s more complicated than you think. For one thing, it reveals that they’re all as one. The notion that they’re going to fire [Donald] Rumsfeld, as people actually entertained, is comical. After 9/11 he gets in this swaggering mode and says we’re going to smoke those terrorists out of their snake holes. And then it’s clear there’s prisoner abuse and torture going on. But does Cheney call up and say, “Oh, my God! What’s going on over there, Don? What kind of craziness are you doing to those prisoners? This is devastating to our campaign. What’s going on?” I don’t hear that. What I hear is, “Let’s all pull together and get past it.” Very interesting.

You’re an expert on Henry Kissinger. Is there someone who …

I’m an expert on the side of Henry Kissinger that lied like most people breathed.

Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?

Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn’t it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn’t believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that’s moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There’s no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They’re like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.

They thought it would happen quickly?

Very quickly. I don’t have any empirical basis for it, but if I had to bet, the plan was to go right into Syria. That’s why the fourth division was hanging for so long in the desert out there right on the border with Syria. In the early days of the war, before this government figured out how much trouble they were in — which took them a long time — they would drive practice runs, somebody told me. Again, I’m just saying what was told to me; this is not something I reported, but I was told pretty reliably, they were doing practice runs that amounted to the distance from the border to Damascus. It’s my belief always — again this is not empirical, it’s sort of my heuristic view — that the real reason [Paul] Wolfowitz and others were mad at [Gen. Eric] Shinseki when he testified before the war about [the need for] 200 or 300 troops — it wasn’t about the numbers — was, “Didn’t he get it? What had he been listening to in the tank? Didn’t we explain to him in the tank what we told the chiefs? This is the way it’s going to be. Didn’t he understand what it’s all about?” He didn’t get it. He hadn’t understood what they meant. This was all going to fall down. It was all going to be peaches and cream. And Shinseki just didn’t get it! It wasn’t about the numbers. He wasn’t a member of the clan. He didn’t join the utopia crowd.

You’ve answered one of my questions. Let’s elaborate on it. Clearly there’s very little that’s, well, in touch with reality in these policies.

Ha, ha, ha. It’s so easy for you to say that!

But it’s not so clear actually. Many Americans …

I think I used actually … I’ll get you this word [grabs book from my lap and begins flipping through it] … there was a “fantastical” quality to the White House’s deliberations. Fantastical. That was the phrase I used.

Yes, I read that. And that was my next question. With Kissinger, there were lies, and he knew exactly what he was doing …

Yes, one of his aides was assigned — literally assigned on one of the secret flights they made to China — to keep track of the lies, who knew what. I think they used to describe it as keeping track of what statements were made, but essentially it was who was being told what, because so many different people were being told different things. But these guys, do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it’s not! It’s not about oil. It’s about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism. But it’s idealism that’s dead wrong. It’s like one of the far-right Christian credos. It’s a faith-based policy. Only it wasn’t a religious faith. It was the faith that democracy would flourish.

So you don’t think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative …

I used to pray it was! We’d be in better shape. Is there anything worse than idealism that doesn’t conform to reality? You have an unrealistic policy.

It seems that they are very selective not only about what kind of information they present to the public but even in what they decide to believe in themselves.

I think these guys in their naiveté and single-mindedness have been so completely manipulated by — not the Israelis — but the Iranians. The Iranians always wanted us in. I think there’s a lot of evidence that Iran had much to do with [Ahmed] Chalabi’s disinformation [about nonexistent Iraqi WMD]. I think there were people in the CIA who suspected this all along, but of course they couldn’t get their view in. I think the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report’s a joke, the idea this CIA was misleading the president. They get some analysts in and say, “Were you pressured?” And they all say, “No, excuse me?” Is that how you do an investigation? The truth of the matter is, there was tremendous pressure put on the analysts [to produce reports that bolstered the case for war]. It’s not as if anybody issued a diktat. But everybody understood what to do.

Talk about the …

Wait. You’re missing something now. The Iranian stuff. I think Iran probably had more to do with Chalabi’s information than people know.

We know that Chalabi had Iranian agents on his payroll.

Yeah, but, well, he admits to that. He had a villa in Tehran. But basically I think Iran was very interested in getting us involved. We get knocked down a peg; they become the big boys on the block.

Are you working on this now?

Yeah, I’m thinking about it. I’m reporting on it. But I’m not working on it. I’m just — it’s too cosmic.

Was Chalabi the conduit?

I think Chalabi thought he could handle the Iranians. They were helping him all along with disinformation and documents he could give to the White House. Don’t forget, once the neocons decided to go to Iraq in the face of all evidence, they were like a super-reverse suction machine, and anything in the world that furthered the argument that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was hot. I call it stove-piping, because it’s a technical work of art. But it was much more than that. It was anything — vavoom! — into the president’s [office]. It was so amateurish, it was comical. How hard was it to get some crapola into the White House about WMD without the CIA looking at it?

Do you have any idea of the origin of the forged Niger documents that Bush cited in his January 2003 State of the Union address as proof that Iraq was seeking uranium to make nuclear weapons?

I don’t really know. I know that they think it was an inside job. And my idea is that there were people in the government who knew that you could give these guys [the neoconservatives] anything, and within three days, if it said the right thing, there would be a principals meeting [of the senior foreign policy officials] at the White House on it. And one idea would be to get them in a position where they really walked on their dongs, in a way. Give them some bad stuff. They’d have a big meeting about it and [the neocons] would finally be exposed as ludicrous. Nobody anticipated that [the forged documents] would end up in the State of the Union address. I mean, it’s beyond belief. I don’t believe in these conspiracy theories, about [Michael] Ledeen [a neocon operative] and these things. He’s too smart for that. Because it was designed to be caught.

Do you think the responsibility for Abu Ghraib goes directly up to Rumsfeld?

I think they [Rumsfeld and senior administration officials] had a chance in the fall of 2002 to set the limits, and they chose not to. I don’t think the CIA analyst who did the report was very explicit in his written document about the abuses. That isn’t the way to get ahead. But he certainly told his peers there was a real mess there, so they know it. All she [Rice] had to do was put the word out there. The chain of command is very responsive. If you put out the word that you’re not going to tolerate this crap, it’s not going to happen. But that’s not the word they put out.

Nobody would have countenanced in his right mind Abu Ghraib. But then again, if you think a bunch of kids from West Virginia understood the way to the soul of an Arab man is to take off his clothes and photograph him … they didn’t know that. Somebody told it to them. And that’s the thing about the military. In loco parentis. They have an obligation to take our children and protect them, not only from land mines but from doing stupid things that could land them in jail.

The book is filled with reporting that shows how newspapers either got it wrong, or simply accepted the official version of events. What do you think of the performance of the main newspapers people look to as sources of information?

Well, so here I am, I’m busy trying to peddle a book and you’re asking me to commit self-immolation! (Laughs). Well, all I’ll say is, it speaks for itself.

Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.

Because incumbents can’t run for reelection promising “change,” and because “hope” during a lingering recession was also off the menu, the Obama campaign’s 2012 theme of  “forward” — a word that often follows “plow,” mind you — was the best available alternative. That said, and substituting the economy for terrorism, Obama is implicitly if not explicitly advancing the same theme Bush did in 2004: America suffered a tough blow, but the situation could have been worse and, more to the point, under my stewardship the nation is steadily regaining its footing.

This counterfactual campaign theme — vote for me not because of what happened, but what might have but didn’t — is a common thread for Bush and Obama. It’s not an uplifting message, but it sufficed in 2004 and Obama is counting on it working again in 2012.

Politics 101 further dictates that when an incumbent’s reelection is in doubt, he must go negative against the challenger. Obama political operatives in the White House and at the Democratic National Committee long ago made it abundantly clear they were willing to do just that. Team Obama may not go negative against Romney to the degree the Bush camp did against John Kerry in 2004. (By mid-summer 2004, 75 percent of Bush’s TV ads were negative attacks on Kerry.) But don’t be surprised if attacks on Romney’s record and even character are plentiful, harsh and relentless. In 2008, America saw candidate Obama’s toothy grin; four years later, expect to see President Obama’s fangs.

Expect the Obama camp to emphasize two major critiques of Romney: that he is a flip-flopper willing to say anything or reverse any position to win; and that he is an economic royalist whose personal and public life suggest a person incapable of understanding the lives and struggles of average Americans. Again — note the unusual parallels with 2004.

Although Romney is a Republican former governor and Kerry was at the time his state’s Democratic junior U.S. senator, the two Massachusetts pols make for similar targets. Each man is an extraordinarily rich preppie and Ivy Leaguer. Each represents the liberal wing of his respective party. Each has shown a propensity for ruining an otherwise valid point with sloppy, backfiring language. And each has a reputation for lacking political spine.

The flip-flop frame is candidate character assassination of the first order. Like the lone negative number in a string of multiplied positives, the critique that nobody can trust any statement or claim made by a politician has the potential to negate every accomplishment or promise. If it sticks, it can be fatal, as Kerry learned in 2004.

Obama and the Democratic National Committee know their electoral history and, sure enough, last November — a year before the election and two full months before a single Iowan had caucused — the DNC released a four-minute “Mitt vs. Mitt” ad and its accompanying website with the damning tag line, “the story of two men trapped in one body.” The site is a brilliant homage to the Bush campaign’s 2004 windsurfer attack ad and the devastating, 11-minute ad the Republican National Committee produced chronicling Kerry’s “evolution” on Iraq.

And then there is what might be called “the Willard factor”: Romney as Richy Rich, the Monopoly Guy with the Bain Capital background and the Swiss bank account. His bio would be political gold to Romney’s opponent any election cycle, but it’s gold-plated platinum in the first full presidential campaign following the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the long overdue national debate over income inequality.

Again, the wealth-personified line of attack mirrors the out-of-touch, Martha’s Vineyard yoke the Bush team put around Kerry’s neck in 2004. Right on cue, in the first public event of his reelection campaign, last week Obama attacked Romney by name and invoked the economic disconnect card with relish. “He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money the rest of us will automatically prosper as well,” said Obama of Romney, adding that “corporations aren’t people – -people are people.” (For the record, Kerry is actually wealthier than Romney, who would become one of the richest men ever to occupy the White House, should he win.)

Obama will also try to shift the national debate toward areas of strength, as Bush did. Historically, this meant the same strategy, but with inverse implications for each party: The so-called mommy party Democrats would encourage voters to focus on more favorable kitchen-table economy issues — healthcare, jobs, education — and away from less favorable “daddy party” Republican issues surrounding foreign wars abroad and culture wars. Because Obama is net-positive in foreign policy approval and net-negative on the economy, rather than mirroring by inversion, Obama will try to duplicate Bush’s shift-in-emphasis in 2004. GOP complaints that Obama is politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden reveal Republican fears that Obama is going to play the terrorism card in 2012 just like Bush did eight years ago.

The 2004 parallels extend beyond message. Obama will be amply resourced and enjoy a field technology by virtue of his campaign’s state-of-the-art Web, donor, volunteer and social media innovations. Remember the Bush reelection campaign’s vaunted “72-hour” voter turnout model? That seems like an Edsel compared to the Ferrari the Obama team will be sporting this summer and fall. Among the perquisites modern presidential incumbents enjoy is the option to test-drive the best mobilization machines before anyone else.

Finally, what most connects Obama 2012 to Bush 2004 is the stability of the electoral map itself. Only three states — two net to Bush — flipped from one party to the other between 2000 and 2004; only nine states flipped between 2004 and 2008. Split the difference and a good, back-of-the-napkin over-under for number of states likely to flip between 2008 and 2012 is six. And thus, like the lead sailboat during a windless race, Obama doesn’t need or want conditions to change much from 2008: He merely has to replicate the map that swept him into office, with the burden of figuring out how to shake up the Electoral College falling to Romney, just as it did for Kerry against Bush. Even Karl Rove’s mapping of the 2012 election concedes this reality.

The 2008 election was memorable; to borrow the title of one best-selling chronicle, it was a “game changer.” But 2012 will not be. In many respects, it will be a game repeater, with Obama playing Bush to Romney’s Kerry of 2004. The president may be asking Americans to look “forward” in 2012, but the best preview of his reelection campaign can be found by looking backward eight years.

Republicans lost their popularity on security issues for one reason: George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a disaster. And yet, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, has assembled a foreign-policy team composed almost exclusively of individuals with the same war-always mentality and ideology that served Bush — and the United States — so poorly. In some cases, the exact same men responsible for Bush’s catastrophic national security policies are advising Romney. The former Massachusetts governor could have included some of the pragmatists and realists from the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, a Romney presidency seems like it would be Bush 43 all over again.

Richard Grenell, who served as United Nations spokesman under Bush, may be gone from the Romney campaign after an uproar over his sexuality, but there are plenty more former Bushies. First off, there are Romney’s “special advisors.” There’s Michael Chertoff, W.’s Homeland Security director. Chertoff oversaw DHS’s failures during Hurricane Katrina, and amassed unprecedented powers of secrecy. Next up is Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department for Bush’s last two years and on the Defense Policy Advisory Board for the president’s entire term. Cohen was an adamant supporter of the Iraq War and advised Bush directly on the issue. Or take Cofer Black, the man who infamously said to Bush in September 2011 about al-Qaida that “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Black went on to become chairman of Blackwater, where he resigned after the company illegally bribed Iraqi officials.

Then there are the 13 “working groups” composed of equally worrisome individuals. The Middle East and North Africa Working Group is co-chaired by Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long, and Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s special assistant and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. The remaining co-chair is Walid Phares, who never worked for Bush but advised Lebanese warlords in the 1980s. Romney has reportedly promised Phares a top job in his administration, despite his virulently anti-Islamic views.

All told, Romney lists 37 holdovers from the George W. Bush administration — the very same administration he and all other Republican candidates barely referenced during their many debates because it was so discredited and toxic, even to the Republican base.

It didn’t have to be this way. There are, in fact, people in Republican circles who are sensible on international affairs. The Cato Institute, in particular, has experts that could dramatically change the direction of American foreign policy. Men like Justin Logan and Christopher Preble were prescient on Iraq and a host of other issues. Similarly, the Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) has a host of solid scholars, including ones like Dimitri Simes and Geoffrey Kemp, who have valuable government experience in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, respectively, and a history of perceptive analysis. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, would have been another good pick.

So why aren’t guys like this being tapped? Why is the GOP sticking with a discredited foreign-policy approach rather that looking to its own past for wiser counsel? “Most of the realists and pragmatists have simply been driven out of the Republican Party,” says Stephen Walt, who writes a blog at Foreign Policy and teaches at Harvard. “The neoconservatives have been driving the agenda since Bush was elected and they remain well-entrenched.”

Another factor is that the Republican Party’s base remains strongly militaristic and reluctant to recognize limits on American power. Jon Huntsman’s failed presidential campaign illustrated that problem. The good news is that nobody seems to be calling for nation-building and occupying foreign countries in the mold of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s the only lesson that seems to have been learned from the last decade of foreign-policy debacles.

Finally, it may just be that the United States has too much power to change course. While the Unites States has undoubtedly made disastrous decisions in the last decades, it is so powerful that it is largely insulated from the consequences of them. If Romney’s foreign-policy advisor list is anything to go by, a Romney administration would have to teach the U.S. all over again about the problems with trying to police the world. Prepare for Bush redux.

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.”  In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.

An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.

Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.

The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.

With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”

Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.

The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.

Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.

That’s quite a fall for a man who frequently spoke of his Christian faith and family values when asked to comment on the mammoth success of his brand in the early 2000s. “When I got saved, God became my art agent,” Kinkade explained in a 2004 video. He went from a childhood in Placerville, Calif. (invariably characterized as “hard-scrabble”) to an apprenticeship selling his work in supermarket parking lots to his apotheosis as the nation’s “most profitable” artist, the Painter of Light™, and multimillionaire. He was profiled in the New Yorker by Susan Orlean.

I first learned about the dark side of the Painter of Light™ — sorry, couldn’t resist that one — when I reviewed “his” novel, “Cape Light,” in 2002. The novel, first in a series, was produced much as his paintings are: by a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade. He wasn’t the only artist to work in this way; he wasn’t even the only novelist. To the best of my knowledge, his novels — heartwarming, fuzzily pious tales of small-town life — have been coming out ever since, one more facet of a lifestyle brand that, at its most ambitious, included an entire Thomas Kinkade-themed housing development.

My review was just a goof intended to amuse Salon’s readers, but after it appeared, I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries (essentially, mall and shopping-district outlets for his prints) and been fleeced. I didn’t really understand how the financial architecture of Kinkade’s gallery empire worked, and I sure didn’t share their taste in wall art, but these people struck me as decent and sincere. They’d believed in Thomas Kinkade — not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his work, one in which (to quote Kinkade’s introduction to “Cape Light”) “people have the time to savor life’s simple pleasures” and lead “deep, satisfying lives.”

My conversations with these victims made me uneasy. Was there some relationship between the franchisees’ naivete, perhaps even their willful self-delusion, and their terrible taste? Was it hopelessly snobby to wonder that? What about Kinkade himself? He seemed to be at best a hypocrite and at worst a crook. Was there a meaningful connection between his bad conscience and his bad art? German thinkers of the 1930s would have said so, and they had plenty of opportunity to observe bad fascist art up close. Hermann Broch maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is “ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.” The novelist Milan Kundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism. That’s a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings, but Kinkade was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology.

I felt compassion for the ripped-off gallery operators, and at the same time I was aware that quite a few of them had probably also fallen for the similarly sanctimonious, bogus folksiness of George W. Bush, thereby subjecting our nation to one of the worst presidents in its history. Kinkade and Bush struck me as of a piece, probably because they had both borrowed from Ronald Reagan in promising that we could get back to a better way of life that never existed in the first place. In nearly every encounter with the press, Kinkade delivered a diatribe against the art-world “establishment” that had shut him out. They were “elites” touting unfathomable, downer junk to hardworking people who needed uplift instead. Art snobs were the aesthetic counterparts of the so-called liberal elites, a group that surely included me.

At the same time, I must admit that I, too, like a cottage. Granted, I like the stylized, art-deco kind painted on bone china, rather than the insanely detailed and phosphorescently lit specimens in Kinkade’s pictures. And I’m in little danger of equating my new teacup with a Brancusi just because it’s cheerier. Nevertheless, I suspect that my idea of what’s pleasing about a cottage isn’t too different from that of Kinkade’s fans: an aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort not too cut off from the past. It’s as if we’re speaking the same word, but in different languages.

I suspect this is why Kinkade’s paintings have exerted their weird, hypnotic effect on me. They are so preposterous (especially the stream-side ones; he really needed to sit down with an architect and go over the basics of drainage), so awful. And yet I can still detect — beneath that cacophony of hollyhocks and cobblestones and snapdragons — the whisper of something intelligible. I’m pretty sure I know why the hordes of Kinkade collectors love his work, even if I don’t like it myself. Kinkade’s paintings are irredeemably false, like all kitsch, but through them you can just barely glimpse the honest desires they seek to exploit, sinking under the dreck.

Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit,” meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world. From that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that art wallows in shit, but art doesn’t exist for the primary purpose of denying it, either. Kitsch is, first and foremost, a lie; its very existence is founded on bad faith.

Kinkade, like Bush, peddled a falsely simplified image of the world — one without mildew or flooded basements, for one thing — which, no surprise, turned out to be plastered over a whole lot of stinky stuff. The true believers, the ones who bought into these men the most during the 2000s, ended up paying some of the highest prices, from the Kinkade acolytes who invested in his gallery Ponzi scheme to the working-class red-staters who sent off their kids to die in a pointless war. Bad taste, harmless as it may seem, can end up costing you a lot.

Further reading

Los Angeles Times obituary for Thomas Kinkade

Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of Thomas Kinkade for the New Yorker

A 2006 Los Angeles Times story documenting Kinkade’s business problems

Salon’s Janelle Brown visits Hiddenbrooke, a Kinkade-theme housing development in Northern California

Laura Miller reviews “Cape Light,” a novel by Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer