Marc Garlasco

By JOHN NORTH

The United States went to war with Iraq on flimsy — if not manufactured — evidence of Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qaeda, according to Marc Garlasco, who is now the senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch.

After the 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S., “I was asked to see if there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” Garlasco said of his role as a senior analyst for the Department of Defense for Iraqi targeting. “We found no link — no way” was there any connection.

However, he added evenly, “I guess they liked someone else’s report better,” which said there was a link, an allegation that, he said, was used — in part — to justify the war in Iraq.
Garlasco addressed “Acts of Conscience” during his Sept. 15 speech to the World Affairs Council of Western North Carolina in Owen Conference Center at UNC Asheville.

About 120 people attended, mostly older WAC retirees, along with dozens — an unusually large contingent — of UNCA students.

Garlasco spoke for 35 minutes and then fielded questions for another 35 minutes. His talk opened the 2008-09 Great Decisions lecture series.

Earlier in the evening, the WAC WNC branch celebrated its 20th anniversary during a ceremony that honored the group’s founders and enthuiasts.

With a grin, Garlasco began his lecture by apologizing for being from New York City — in a self-mocking reference to New Yorkers’ propensity to speak rapidly. The WAC crowd laughed as he promised to slow his delivery so that he his remarks would be intelligible.

Garlasco also apologized to the UNCA students who were attending as a class assignment, noting that he would strive to make his talk interesting to them, too.

He said his lecture would focus on what it was like to go from working at the Pentagon to HRW, but Garlasco said that, perhaps, his most distinguishing characteristic was that he had seen so many wars — first-hand and up-close, as an observer-analyst — over the past five years.

Garlasco, a graduate of St. John’s University who holds a master’s in international relations from George Washington University, served for seven years in the U.S. Department of Defense as a senior analyst, where he was chief of high-value targeting during the Iraq War, recommending strike targets. He also served on Battle Damage Teams during Operation Desert Fox and during military operations in Kosovo.

He now heads HRW’s work on Abu Ghurayb, civilian military contractors and non-lethal weapons.

After finishing St. John’s, Garlasco said pointedly to the students in attendance, “I decided to stay in school and become more marketable” with his choice of a master’s degree.

After working briefly for a private contractor, he met someone he knew slightly from college who urged him to apply for a job opening at the Pentagon.

To his surprise, he got the job, prompting him to note, “Make sure you’re friends with whoever’s sitting next to you because it really is who you know” that means so much in advancement in the world.

He started his new job “with blinders on” on Jane 21. 1997, working in the information warfare shop. His first year, Garlasco said, mainly involved learning and traveling.

In 1998, he happened to be a junior analyst on Iraq, “when we decided to bomb Iraq.” He joked that the operation “ruined my vacation,” but, after that, he realized his job “was becoming serious.”

His performance with the Iraqi post was well-regarded by his superiors, so Garlasco was called in to help with the war in Yugoslavia in 1999 and with the war in Kosovo after that. “I was ‘getting it’ for the first time — seeing, first-hand, victims of cluster bombs.”

When his boss left in 2000, Garlasco said that, “for some reason, I was given the responsibility for Iraq” — and took his place at the helm.

“I must say, I enjoyed working at the Pentagon — I really have a high regard for a lot of them,” he said of his fellow workers.

Notwithstanding, Garlasco noted that he was in the Pentagon when it was bombed on 9/11, although the fateful airplane hit the other side of the building from where he was. He recalled “the men in black pajamas” rushing into the building and ordering everyone to evacuate and smelling the odor of horse-hair insulation smoldering in the World War II-vintage building.

“After 9/11, things changed for me,” he said, referring to his personal and professional life. As a New Yorker, he said he knew a number of people who died in the World Trade Center bombing there. In his career, “I was asked to see if there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. We found no link — no way” was there any connection.

However, he added evenly, “I guess they liked someone else’s report better,” which said there was a link, an allegation that was used to justify the war in Iraq.

As a humorous aside, Garlasco told of visiting Fort Bragg, N.C., to brief SEALS, when one of the biggest of the group said they were having remembering the names and faces of those on the black list, about 55 people they were charged to kill; and those on the white list, about five people wanting to help and cooperate.

In one of his shining moments, Garlasco said that as he joked with the SEALS, he came up with the novel idea of putting the 55 men on the black list on playing cards. However, his boss later told him he could not receive royalties for the idea.

On a more serious note, Garlasco noted that he finished up with Iraqi war planning in January 2003, when, for three weeks, he charted 50 missions trying to kill Saddam. “We dropped on 50 (targets) and hit none. We did kill several civilians” in the process.

After his wife had a baby, they talked about returning to their native NYC, especially after she found a job with the Bronx Zoo. However, the idea did not reach fruition until he found a job listed in The Washington Post for a military analyst for HRW.

During his years with HRW, he has visited war-torn areas, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza.
He told of dealing with an Army captain who approached him about some attrocities committed by U.S. troops, under his watch, in the Middle East. They called in Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, who was able to help them resolve the situation, so that “at the end of the day, we got it done.”

Nonetheless, Garlasco said, “My issue with human rights is, it takes a long time” to make substantive progress.

On his latest mission with HRW, he flew into nearby Armenia, where he hired a car and driver to take him to Georgia on Aug. 8, “when things started heating up” between the Russians and the Georgians.

While Garlasco, along with other HRW members, was observing the goings-on in Georgia, a separate HRW team visited South Osetia, one of Georgia’s so-called “break-away” territories.

Despite travel restrictions imposed by Russian troops, Garlasco recounted how his band of HRW members and journalists outfoxed those manning the armed checkpoints, including a harrowing three-hour drive on a goat trail around a mountain, to reach Gori and the villages beyond it. He recounted that “the smell of death was overpowering” in their travels in the region.

Garlasco also told of a farmer leading him to a close encounter with a cluster bomb, upon which a chicken was scratching in a coop, where several of the unexploded devices were lodged. He warned away the villagers, noting that the bombs can be made to explode with little effort.

“Cluster bombs scare the bejeebers out of me,” he said. “When they go off, they blow up an area the size of a football field.” Garlasco also noted that cluster bombs, which have high failure rates, do not explode upon initial impact 25 percent of the time.”

Later that evening, the New Yorker said he met with Georgia’s minister of defense, telling him of the need to make his countrymen aware of the dangers of unexploded cluster bombs, which littered the landscape in the war region.

After a pause, Garlasco observed, “With victims of war violence, it’s very hard not to re-traumatize them.”

In summarizing HRW’s procedures, he said, “Basically, what we try to do is get on the ground as soon as possible and learn what happened. Then we get a report out — and the main thing is to seek change, positive change.”

While Garlesco noted that he saw his “very first” cluster bombs in Iraq five years ago, he said he is proud of his participation in efforts that will culminate on Dec. 3 with 111 countries — but not the United States and the other major cluster-bomb-makers and users (Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan) — signing a treaty on Dec. 3 in Oslo, Norway, banning the use of cluster bombs.