Trulock: Security Lapses Are Clinton's Fault
WASHINGTON - The former highest-ranking
intelligence officer in the Energy Department says you
can blame the Clinton administration’s pervasive
inattention to security throughout government leading
to last month’s terrorist attacks.
Further, says Notra Trulock in an exclusive interview
with NewsMax.com, some Clinton appointees had a
blame-America-first attitude. This in turn bolstered the
belief in some government quarters that perhaps the
world would be better off if the U.S. did share its
nuclear secrets with China and other nations that hated
us.
"It was a failure across the board," says the man who
blew the whistle on the Chinagate scandal, not just in
intelligence (that much is all too obvious), but also "in
law enforcement. It was a failure in imagination" and
ultimately a failure of policy.
"I put it at the feet of the Clinton administration for the
complacency they displayed on any threat to American
security, not just terrorism, but anything that put in
jeopardy their specious arms control and foreign policy
objectives was really minimized and downplayed and
dismissed as 'a worst-case scenario,' " a phrase of
ridicule that Trulock heard over and over again as he
tried to warn the Clinton appointees in the department
of the loose or almost non-existent security
procedures.
Since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has been taking
remedial measures, though it took the new White House
some time to begin to undo the damage.
The vulnerability to our nuclear secrets was "so difficult
to close." And this did not apply only to Trulock’s area
of jurisdiction.
"My counterpart in the physical part of the Department
of Energy encountered the same kinds of resistance and
a will to disbelieve that there could be any serious threat
… to the nation’s laboratories or the material that they
store out there," at Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in
New Mexico.
The same lackadaisical attitude prevailed in the
Commerce and Defense departments during the Clinton
years.
Aiding the Russians
The mantra that was heard all through that administration
was: "After all, the Cold War was over, and we were in
kind of a new era of globalization." Commercial
diplomacy, as it was called, replaced national security as
any kind of priority. This was the kind of culture that
allowed former Soviet, now Russian, military officers to
be issued badges and allowed to wander around the
Pentagon unescorted.
This includes the unsolved case of the listening devices
that were installed on the seventh floor of the State
Department in a conference room just down the hall
from the secretary of state’s office.
Everywhere in government where national security was
a factor "felt the deadening hand of the Clinton
administration," Trulock says.
This also applies to the Transportation Department. And
it is especially lax at the Federal Aviation Administration,
which is supposed to protect airline and airport security.
Trulock recalls that Federico Pena had been DOT
secretary before moving over to the Energy
Department. This was the kind of blasé attitude "during
the Air Florida debacle" that would later cause airport
security to allow four airliners to be hijacked almost
simultaneously. That same shrug-of-the-shoulders
approach was thus transferred to the area of
government supposedly protecting nuclear secrets. It
was there that Trulock’s warnings were ignored or
ridiculed.
So, in trying to fathom the mentality behind this
seemingly deliberate breaking down of security barriers,
does one dare let the word "treason" escape his lips?
Can anyone really be that naïve?
The Blame-America-First Left
Here is where Notra Trulock pinpoints "a certain
ambivalence about American power" amongst people
"who cut their teeth on the notions that America was to
blame for much of what had happened in the last 30 or
40 or 50 years in the world."
Time and time again, "we would see people in charge of
the laboratories who were just hostile" to the notion that
any scientist from China, Russia or North Korea would
ever attempt to steal any of our secrets. Indeed, some
officials at energy felt "it might be a good thing if the
Chinese sort of knew our secrets and how to build
nuclear weapons. The world might be a better place."
This attitude is eerily familiar to those who recall that
some nuclear scientists during and immediate after
World War II also had this exact same philosophy.
Some of them, such as Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, did
pass secrets to the Soviet Union. In those days, that
sort of action was plainly labeled treason, which is why
Oppenheimer ultimately lost his security clearance. But
in those days, there was a "consciousness of national
security" that was missing in the Clinton era.
Hostility to security was coupled with a frivolity where
"meetings would start late, there would be no agenda,
and meetings would go on forever" which in itself can
be attributed to bureaucratic inertia. But Trulock sees it
as symptomatic of "a lack of seriousness" on security or
counterintelligence.
Trulock does not want to be critical of the Bush
administration. "I support the president, and I voted for
him, but they were slow in addressing the legacy of the
Clinton administration."
For one thing, there are just "way too many holdovers,
too many Clintonites around," in Trulock’s view.
Recently NewsMax.com reported on intelligence
experts who called for the resignations of Jane Garvey
at the FAA and George Tenet at the CIA.
"But the tragedy of September 11 has certainly shaken
people and made them wake up."
It was Trulock’s alertness to the Chinagate scandal that
induced the Clintonites to force him out. At a
subsequent House hearing, he and his Clintonite
supervisor gave conflicting accounts of what happened.
Trulock agreed to take a lie detector test. His Clintonista
opponent declined to do likewise.
newsmax.com
tom watson tosiwmee |
