GOVERNMENT GONE WILD, PART I

There is abundant and long-standing evidence that vital parts of the national security and military apparatus of the federal government are out of control. The combination of interagency rivalry, bureaucratic incompetence, the collapse of command and control procedures, an obsession with political correctness, inadequate congressional oversight, and a citizenry that is predisposed to turn a blind eye to security matters accounts for this nightmare scenario. Let's call it "Government Gone Wild," and secrecy is its enabler.

The 9/11 attacks

Since 9/11, enough has emerged to warn us that we've got a real problem. This is not a question of where there's smoke, there may be fire. Instead it's where there's fire, there's fire.

And this is a problem that has little, if anything, to do with partisan Republican/Democratic politics. It's systemic. It's in the DNA and the culture of bureaucracies so vast and so insulated that they've come to believe they can get away with anything. It's what happens when no one minds the store, including the president of the United States or the Joint Chiefs. And it makes no difference whether the president's name is Obama or Bush.

America has been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq for more than a decade, longer than any other war in the nation's history. The cost of these two wars has been reliably estimated to be at least $1.3 trillion. It's closer to $4 trillion when you add medical care for returning veterans and increased interest payments on the national debt attributable to these wars.

Democratic partisans give Barack Obama a pass on the Afghan War, while excoriating George W. Bush on Iraq. GOP partisans do just the opposite. But that aside, what is indisputable is that both wars were a direct consequence of the 9/11 attacks.

But what if the United States had thwarted the 9/11 attacks? The evidence suggests that was possible. What went wrong? The answer is plenty. And was it isolated, an aberration? The answer is no.

In June 2002, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote, "Because now I know that when the pressure is on, when lives are on the line, the CIA and the FBI can dig up intelligence to annihilate the enemy. The only problem is, their enemy is each other.

"As Mark Riebling, the author of ‘Wedge: The Secret War between the F.B.I. and C.I.A.,' has written, the division of labor into foreign and domestic intelligence was never workable, since spies cross borders."

And, of course, that's just what happened. In April 2002, Newsweek magazine reported on the al-Qaida summit in Malaysia in January 2000 to plot terrorist activities. The CIA tracked two suspected terrorists to that meeting and then stood idly by as the terrorists returned to the United States to complete the planning for the 9/11 attack. Newsweek called that "the most puzzling and devastating intelligence failure in the critical months before September 11."

The CIA tracked one of the operatives, Nawaf Alhazmi, from Malaysia to Los Angeles. It also knew that another terrorist, Khalid Almihdhar, had a multiple-entry visa that permitted him to enter the United States at will. What did the CIA do with this information? Nothing. It did not even notify the State Department or the Immigration Service so that the terrorists could have been stopped at the border.

And in June 2002, Time magazine's cover story was "How The FBI Blew The Case." The story recounts the 13-page letter from FBI agent Coleen Rowley to FBI Director Bob Mueller that condemns the FBI for failing to act on requests from her office in Minneapolis to obtain a warrant to search the belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, an al-Qaida agent subsequently convicted of conspiring to kill citizens of the United States as a part of the 9/11 attack. The Time article also highlighted complaints from FBI special agents in Phoenix who were unsuccessful in getting their superiors in Washington to focus on suspected Islamic terrorists who were taking flight training lesson in Phoenix.

We know what happened on 9/11. When the dust settled, Congress ended up belatedly blaming the FBI and the CIA. Using their surrogates in the press, the CIA and the FBI blamed each other, while continuing to rub elbows with each other in the salons of Georgetown. Both ended up getting vastly more money and power. Each promised to work more cooperatively with the other. And because all of this is classified, we're left with having to take their word for it.

In his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm — My years at the CIA," former director George Tenet states, "The main problems were old-fashioned ones: too few people on both sides working on too many issues. We needed more people, better communications, and particularly on the FBI side, better information technology support."

Don't believe it.

Civilian control of military

Civilian control of the military is a prerequisite for the proper functioning of a democracy. That's why Article I of the Constitution vests the authority for the declaration of war in the Congress, and why Article II makes the president the commander in chief.

In April 1951, an immensely unpopular president, Harry Truman, made the necessary and courageous decision to relieve an immensely popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur from command of our forces in Korea.

MacArthur wanted to attack China and use nuclear weapons. An order to that effect had been approved by the Joint Chiefs, and MacArthur had written a letter to House GOP leader Joe Martin that was highly critical of President Truman's policy of limited war on the Korean Peninsula.

Truman had no choice. He fired MacArthur. And Mr. Hoskins, my seventh-grade social studies teacher, used the ensuing firestorm to teach us about civilian control of the military.

But Cadet Stanley McChrystal must have missed that lesson at West Point a quarter-century later. McChrystal became a Green Beret, a Ranger and a Special Operations commander. Like MacArthur, he was a soldier's soldier. Gen. McChrystal went on to command all special operations in Iraq, and was then made commander of American forces in Afghanistan.

But like MacArthur, Gen. McChrystal believed he knew best. Blinded by his "Chrystalized" view of his own brilliance, he sealed his fate by allowing a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine to cover him and his key staff for an extended period of time in theater.

And the lengthy article by Michael Hastings that appeared in Rolling Stone in June 2010 created a sensation. In it is the revelation that Gen. McChrystal is contemptuous of the president, the vice president, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, and National Security Adviser James Jones, who McChrystal describes as a "clown."

Whether McChrystal's strategy of counterinsurgency would have seen us through to victory in Afghanistan, we will never know. A year after having been selected to implement it, Gen. McChrystal was forced to resign and retire.

To be continued next Sunday.

LeRoy Goldman

May 13, 2012

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