America's 'Mission Impossible'
Mark Steyn Jul. 28, 2004
One of the many charming aspects of Hollywood movies is the way they'd have you believe that US government agencies are far more omniscient than they really are.
For example, in the 1997 version of The Jackal, Bruce Willis starts out in Europe, gets a contract to kill some bigwig in Washington, and then flies to Montreal to embark on his elaborate preparations for crossing the Canadian-US border. These involve wearing a peroxide wig, pretending to be gay, posing as a Canuck exporter, buying a boat and, halfway across Lake Michigan, re-flagging it, adopting a new identity and slipping unobtrusively into a regatta heading toward the US shore. Needless to say, this foolproof plan, worked out to the tiniest detail, immediately attracts the attention of the FBI.
Wouldn't it have been easier just to drive across? Back then, the border post between La Patrie, Quebec and Pittsburgh, New Hampshire was unmanned for 15 hours a day. And, even in the manned hours, you hardly ever got asked to show any ID, and the one time I did I only had on me a non-computerized cardboard town library card with my name squiggled on it in the quavery hand of the elderly librarian.
As for the FBI picking up Willis's scent, compare that with the alert the Bureau issued in the run-up to New Year's Eve 2002. Various government spokespersons from the president down urged Americans to be on the look-out for five highly suspicious men. Here's what they knew about them: They may have entered the United States. Or maybe they hadn't. They may have been using false British passports. Or they may have had some other form of documentation. They may have crossed over from Canada. Or they may have come via some other route entirely. Or they may not be in North America at all. But they're somewhere on the planet, and they look like the five guys in these photographs. Except for the one that turned out to be a jeweler in Lahore who's never been to the United States.
But if that jeweler in Lahore did ever want to come to America, I don't think he'd need to buy an expensive boat and blend into a flotilla crossing Lake Michigan.
Here's another example. In Mission Impossible, to get hold of top-secret classified information Tom Cruise has to break into CIA headquarters, crawl through the ventilation shaft, suspend himself from the ceiling, and hack into the computer. The whole room is hermetically sealed and ultra-motion-sensitive and ultra-heat-sensitive. So if Tom's dainty little foot brushes the floor or he starts to perspire heavily, the alarms will go off and all hell will break loose.
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IN REALITY, as we now know, the most sensitive, most classified documents in America's National Archives are not kept in a sealed room that's ultra-motion-sensitive. They've only just introduced a security camera, and they only did that because of a pattern of national security breaches by the, er, national security adviser. Or, to be more precise, the former national security adviser for Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger.
Last fall, while preparing to testify to the 9/11 Commission, Sandy Berger went to the National Archives and <font color=blue>"inadvertently"<font color=red> removed dozens of pages of the most classified documents by <font color=blue>"inadvertently"<font color=red> stuffing them in his pants and <font color=blue>"inadvertently"<font color=red> secreting them in his socks and <font color=blue>"inadvertently"<font color=red> taking them home, where he <font color=blue>"inadvertently"<font color=red> lost some of them, and then he <font color=blue>"inadvertently"<font color=red> returned to the Archives and <font color=blue>"inadvertently"<font color=red> removed other drafts of the same document. Lather, rinse and repeat, inadvertently. He <font color=blue>"inadvertently"<font color=red> made improper cell phone calls from within the secure room and he <font color=blue>"inadvertently"<font color=red> made a suspicious number of trips to the men's room for who knows what <font color=blue>"inadvertent"<font color=red> purpose.
It remains to be seen whether Pantsgate has legs. Aside from Berger's, I mean. The dopey old US media is unconcerned by all those bathroom breaks and seems to think the only suspicious leak is the story itself. But that doesn't alter the fact – that Berger has admitted the illegal removal and loss of highly classified documents relating to the war on terror.
What kind of documents? Well, here's a clue, from the official 9/11 report released last week: <font color=blue>"In the margin next to Clarke's suggestion to attack al-Qaida facilities in the week before January 1, 2000, Berger wrote, 'No.'"<font color=red> Berger was scribbling <font color=blue>"No"<font color=red> in the margin of rather a lot of memos in those days. On three other occasions – May 1998, June 1999, August 2000 – he nixed plans to capture or kill Bin Laden. One assumes he feels that this reflects poorly on him – hence, his frequent visits to the National Archives last autumn to cover his ass, literally. He didn't need to crawl through the ventilation shaft and hang suspended from the ceiling. He just shoveled the stuff in his gusset and walked out.
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If those real-life Federal agencies were like their silver screen versions, trusting the government to save us might make sense. But almost all bureaucracies by their nature are careless and arthritic lower down the ranks and full of self-serving posterior-coverers at the top.
Three years after 9/11, the official report confirms what most of us knew within a week – that on a day when every big-name Federal agency flopped spectacularly, a random sample of US citizens aboard that fourth plane, Flight 93, responded more swiftly and effectively to the threat than the entire US government. They did behave like action stars and, if Hollywood weren't a bunch of counter-tribalist Michael Moorons, they'd have made a blockbuster movie about them by now.
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Whether or not any of the 9/11 Commission's proposals make a difference, I know for certain what won't: Sandy Berger looked on terrorism as an exercise in law enforcement as does John Kerry, to whom he was an adviser. Berger approached the question of seizing Bin Laden legalistically, and so it never happened.
Bin Laden, by contrast, wasn't the least bit legalistic, and so he did pretty much what he wanted. That's usually how it goes. At the National Archives, when Sandy Berger discovered something sufficiently important to him to cease playing by the legal niceties, he too did what he wanted and may yet get away with it.
In the fall of yet another Kerry adviser, there's a lesson here for the candidate: conventional wisdom from the Nineties isn't going to cut it. How does the candidate propose to win the war on terror? He's not saying. But if he's planning to go back to the Berger way, that truly is Mission Impossible.
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The writer is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. |
