Dr. Keyes is founder and chairman of the Declaration Foundation, a communications center for founding principles. Tune into his new television show “Alan Keyes is Making Sense” on MSNBC, Monday through Thursday, 10 p.m., ET.
After swirling under the surface of our national consciousness for half a year or more, these questions are now coming to the surface. This is a good thing.
If we don’t ask the relevant tough questions about our preparedness, or lack thereof, we will not be able to fix whatever problems exist. The country needs to know, for example, whether America’s vulnerability resulted from a failure of intelligence gathering, a lack of coordination between various government agencies, some combination of these deficiencies – or from some other cause.
A united response to the threat of terrorism requires national confidence that the measures we are taking will be effective. But how can the nation have such confidence unless our leaders are willing to examine what led up to September 11th, and question whether and by whom mistakes were made that led to those tragic events?
When I and others pointed out the need for such an evaluation last February, some thought it unpatriotic to suggest there had been a national security failure. Certainly such hesitation made good sense immediately after the attacks. We needed a national grace period regarding accountability after September 11, while our first priority was showing the world that America’s response to terrorism would not be divided by internal questioning.
But Congress has been too slow to declare the grace period over. The passage of more time, and the disclosures of the past several days, seem now finally to have convinced Congress of the necessity of treating the 9/11 attacks as evidence of a genuine national security failure. Congressional investigations will try to understand that failure, one hopes, in an objective way that will strengthen us for the future.
Certainly we should insist on such a standard. Americans deserve a serious, nonpartisan quest for answers that will enable us to understand what went wrong, so we can be sure of instituting effective remedies.
Crucial areas of investigation will be the quality of the intelligence data our agencies gather, and how it is processed and disseminated. Likely most susceptible of criticism will be the integration of security and intelligence data gathered by various agencies, and its presentation to the President. There is an office specifically charged with this task – the National Security Council. Part of its job description is to serve “as the president’s principal arm for coordinating [national security and foreign] policies among various government agencies.”
The NSC, chaired by the National Security Advisor, is an office crafted precisely to be a coordinating mechanism among agencies in order to deal with national security threats. The investigation of apparent failures to coordinate intelligence crucial to the President’s job should begin with the NSC. But it shouldn’t stop there. We need to have a serious examination of the historical causes of decay in America’s intelligence activities, including the lack of human intelligence operations in parts of the world that were potentially so threatening to us.
Vice President Cheney suggested last week that Congressional concerns over whether the White House had mishandled information which, properly processed, might have “prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11” represented the “incendiary” pursuit of “political advantage.” The Vice President said: “Such commentary is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war.”
There is always, to be sure, the danger of partisan manipulation of any part of such a process of post mortem. There has been, no doubt, some posturing among Democrats eager to recover public confidence on security matters. But I think the American people will be able to tell if the Democrats – or the Republicans – begin to play such games, and will be quick to punish them for it. It would be truly irresponsible for anyone to suggest that it is simply partisan or unpatriotic for the people’s representatives to question how the calamity of 9/11 was visited upon us.
Our leaders need to turn, together, to the serious work of learning from real mistakes. The dismantling by Congress and Bill Clinton of our covert intelligence assets is one such mistake. There likely are many others. But wherever the responsibility for failures lie, the Bush administration will accomplish its duty more effectively with a commitment to accountability, and a humble acknowledgment that the loss of the World Trade Center and a chunk of the Pentagon suggests that something did certainly go wrong with our national security system. Let’s get down to the necessary business of having the executive branch join the legislative in its determination to find out what it was.
