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Volume 13, Issue 11. June 17, 2002.
Print-Friendly Version
Don't Look! It's a War!
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
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