It is axiomatic, whether the context be military, corporate or government, that the elements comprising the strands that work in parallel to supply information to a chain of command need to have a clear and unambiguous understanding of their roles, responsibilities and relationships with each other. Ambiguity and lack of clarity results in duplication, confusion, unnecessary rivalries leading to little, if any, vital co-operation and the top of the chain receiving mixed signals and misinformation, while some elements in it who believe themselves less favoured will suffer a loss of morale and tend to underperform.

As Seymour Hersh demonstrates, this simple but obvious precept was ignored, if not purposely flouted, in the US administration’s handling of its response to the 9/11 attacks.

Hersh won a Pulitzer prize for his1969 news-breaking reportage of the 1968 massacre by US troops of about 500 villagers, mainly women, children and elderly men, in the Vietnam hamlet of My Lai. Subsequently, as a freelancer and staff writer for The New York Times and, since 1998, The New Yorker, his investigative skills have been directed at several matters the US government – particularly the State Department, Pentagon, CIA and FBI – would rather they hadn’t, and resulted in eight books, the sobriquet “muckraker”, being called by neo-con Pentagon adviser Richard Perle “the closest thing we have to a terrorist”, and the trust of a vast and diverse array of contacts, here both anonymous and acknowledged.

Chain of Command represents the collection of the twenty six stories that Hersh produced for The New Yorker between 11 September 2001 and August 2004 that went far deeper into the pre- and post 9/11 environment in the US and Middle East than routine media and official reportage. It was Hersh’s coming into possession of some of the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs that forced CBS’s hand in broadcasting their own smaller holdings on 28 April this year, along with an Army spokesman’s expression of regret, after agreeing to hold off at the Pentagon’s request. A fuller account by Hersh was published on The New Yorker website two days later and became the basis of subsequent reporting by major papers around the USA.

Apart from the few pages of epilogue, Hersh’s style eschews analysis and judgement – he lets the facts, or what is passed to him as either fact or opinion, speak for themselves. It all adds up to a depressing picture of a deluded government run by wishful thinkers with neither knowledge nor respect for the norms of management and intelligence processing, and to whom honesty and accountability are apparently a foreign language. A small number of his informants may be grinding particular axes, but overall his exposing reportage has, in the US at least, more or less become part of the accepted background to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 response – the only argument is what degree of significance should be attached to it.

Thus, for anyone who has closely followed overseas reporting on the Bush administration’s involvement in the Middle East, much of what is contained here will be already known. For the merely interested layperson with a healthy cynicism about the workings of government when under pressure, prejudices will be reinforced.

It was a pressure that distorted the investigatory response to the 9/11 attacks – the aim became not just to ascertain who was responsible, but to prove that Saddam Hussein was not only deeply involved but capable of even worse. To this end Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, scornful of formal intelligence agency caution, established a small personal intelligence grouping in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. From its own sources – in particular the axe-grinding nest of defectors known as the Iraqi National Congress – plus the regular agencies, it collected any raw information apparently linking the Iraqi president to Al Qaeda and WMD. With little collation and less analysis, the information was then passed directly to the White House, a process called “stovepiping”, thus cutting the CIA, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Defense Intelligence Agency out of the policy formulation loop, leaving them dispirited and disinclined to vehemently dispute some of the Administration’s outlandish claims later shown to be completely false.

Wishing to give the Pentagon’s civilian leadership, not the CIA, the lead in fighting terrorism, Rumsfeld has also initiated, under presidential authority, a highly secret Special-access Program, or SAP, a clandestine team of Special Forces members and others tasked to kill, or capture and interrogate, Al Qaeda operatives anywhere in the world. Countries allowing interrogations resulting from seizures included Egypt, Afghanistan, Thailand and Singapore. Poor intelligence from hapless Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib detainees led to the SAP extending its activities to supervising interrogations at the latter establishment. Disgusted at the way many prisoners apparently lacked terrorist credentials and the abuse they received, the CIA ended its SAP activities in Abu Ghraib – some months earlier the FBI forbade its operatives to attend interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects.

Fabrication of operational reports for PR purposes, agencies unwilling to exchange intelligence, distortion of what intelligence was available if it fitted the Administration’s agenda and ignoring what didn’t, help to add up to what Hersh calls the refusal of the Washington ideologues to deal with the world as it exists. He doesn’t see the President as a liar so much as someone for whom “words have no meaning beyond the immediate moment and so he believes his mere utterance of the phrases makes them real. It is a terrifying possibility.” Indeed.

Seymour M. Hersh, ‘Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib’, . Penguin. 2004, Softback, 394 pp., RRP $29.95.