Devil in the Details:
Don't Look! It's a War!
Issue Date: 6.17.02
As Dick Cheney sees it, the very idea that the public has a right to know what went wrong with our security agencies in the months before September 11 falls somewhere between treason and heresy. On the Sunday morning news shows, the Dick of Darkness has argued that nothing more than a behind-closed-doors review of precensored documents by the congressional intelligence committees is even thinkable. On matters 9-11 -- as with the composition of Cheney's energy task force and other potential presidential embarrassments -- the White House apparently fears, like Dracula, that a single ray of sunlight can spell its doom.
And nothing raises the administration's ire (and nervousness) more than the thought of congressional oversight during wartime. Never mind the achievements of the Truman Committee in World War II, which spotlighted and helped curtail outrageous profiteering by defense contractors. Never mind the work of the Senate's Preparedness Subcommittee in the early months of the Korean War, or, under Lyndon Johnson's leadership in 1958, that subcommittee's definitive post-Sputnik inquiry into how the Russians beat us into space. Never mind the Vietnam War hearings of William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which put forth alternatives to the policy of escalation on which Johnson had disastrously embarked. Wartime is no time for public scrutiny.
What's troubling here is not merely the administration's opposition to Congress doing its job. It's the administration's indifference, at a time of national catastrophe, to letting the public know what mistakes were made, who made them, and what's been done to keep those mistakes from recurring. Now, here's how an administration supremely sensitive to the nation's security needs but more deeply rooted in American values responded to a similar situation. On December 18, 1941, just 11 days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt established a special commission with the mandate -- to quote from Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept, the most authoritative history of December 7 and its aftermath -- "of determining whether 'derelictions of duty' or 'errors of judgment' had influenced the Japanese success at Pearl Harbor and, if so, who was responsible" and what recommendations were in order. The commission was composed of four military officers and Supreme Court Associate Justice Owen Roberts as chairman. The commissioners took testimony in Washington and Honolulu, then delivered their report to Roosevelt, who released it to the press the following day. On Sunday, January 25 -- 49 days after Pearl Harbor -- the complete report was being read all across the land.
This was not a congressional investigation, of course; if anything, it was a product of the executive and judicial branches. Its hearings were not open, and the transcript of the testimony was not released for several years thereafter.
A commission that issues its report just seven weeks after a stunning attack that plunges a nation into a world war isn't likely to be a model commission. And yet, at its best, the Roberts Commission spoke truth to power -- even though it embodied power itself. Perhaps most tellingly, it found the officers in command on December 7 (Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short) -- and in a larger sense, the Navy and the Army -- guilty of "dereliction of duty" for failing "to consult and confer with each other respecting the meaning and intent of the [intelligence] warnings and the appropriate means of defense required by the imminence of hostilities."
For all its shortcomings, the Roberts Commission explained some of the whys and wherefores of our failures at Pearl Harbor. And its findings on the lack of interservice communication almost eerily prefigure what we are now learning by dribs and drabs of the FBI's and the CIA's own "protect-our-turf" failures to share information in the weeks before the bin Laden assault -- which cost about 600 more lives than were lost at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt understood that keeping people largely in the dark during wartime actually hindered the prosecution of the war and undermined the principles for which we fought.
But George W. Bush knows better.
Copyright © 2002 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: , "Don't Look! It's a War!," The American Prospect vol. 13 no. 11, June 17, 2002 . This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org |
