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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paul_philp who wrote (30908)	5/27/2002 8:42:05 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Your line of thought is very seductive. Let's bring the failure out into the sunlight, examine it, find to root cause and fix it. The problem is that it will not work. A lot of well earned cynicism in that post, Paul. But I agree with just about all of it. I would not expect public hearings will solve anything, more likely make it worse. At least, that's been my experience. But I don't think keeping it private will help either; may also only make it worse. Here's why I favor public hearings. Democracies are that rarest of government form, perhaps the only one, that requires that the public be informed about matters of great moment. And this is certainly one. We are, in my view, entitled to know as much as is humanly possible and within very broad security parameters what went wrong and what is on the table to fix it. That's a necessary and healthy form of public accountability. What is done with that information then becomes also a matter of public accountability. But it is another stage. Incidentally, I read the full version of Hersh's article and, as usual, found it full of disparate pieces of wonderful information, scattered around no thread at all. He definitely needs a good editor. It's very uncharacteristic of The New Yorker to publish something so unedited. I guess it's Hersh's stature that does it. But back to Hersh. One of this thoughts that will stick with me for sometime is the ineptitude of the terrorists. In fact, at one point, he drops the sentence, that rather than their success being accounted for by their superior tactics, it was that they were simply less inept that American intelligence. Tough, tough line. Hope your Memorial Day was a good one.