With the country at war and a presidential election approaching, the leader of the opposition got wind of some disturbing information about his opponent: Thanks to decoded messages, the president of the United States had known a surprise attack on this country was being planned by the enemy, yet had failed to prevent it.
The year was 1944, the Republican running against President Franklin D. Roosevelt was Thomas E. Dewey, and the surprise attack occurred three years earlier at Pearl Harbor.
The U.S. fleet had been caught unawares on December 7, 1941 — although the Japanese diplomatic code had been broken and the president had been reading intercepted messages warning of just such an attack. Yet word of the danger failed to reach the commanders on the scene in time to disrupt the attack or mount an effective defense.
Gov. Dewey planned a major campaign speech to reveal Roosevelt’s prior knowledge of the threat to American territory, but Gen. George C. Marshall persuaded him not to make that speech — in the interests of military secrecy and national unity.
Times were different then.
Today, almost three years after another day that will live in infamy — September 11, 2001 — a commission continues looking into how and why the U.S. fell victim to the most devastating attack on its mainland in modern times.
The model for its work should have been the Warren Commission, whose painstaking conclusions have been upheld by every subsequent serious work of history.
Instead, the commission adopted the style of the more prosecutorial Watergate Committee — but without a Sam Ervin or Howard Baker to lend it insight and stature and, most important, control some of its more intemperate members.
Instead, the commission’s hearings have degenerated into a partisan sideshow — a search for scapegoats instead of an exercise in deliberate judgment.
There has been a succession of spectacles. The star prosecution witness was Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief who was supposed to prevent this disaster. He didn’t, but he did publish his memoirs just before testifying and sell the movie rights to his story, too. And now he has granted a major television network exclusive rights to his services as a talking head. Not since Ollie North’s Iran-Contra caper has presiding over a catastrophe inspired such a successful media career.
Prosecutor-in-chief Richard Ben-Veniste sees a presidential briefing paper and reads into it clear warning of a plot to plunge airliners into the Pentagon and World Trade Center — warnings no fair-minded reader saw when the paper was declassified.
Those who have come to relish Mr. Ben-Veniste’s rhetorical tricks particularly enjoy how he prefaces any factually dubious assertion with the phrase, “Isn’t it a fact that … ”
That little shtick became his trademark even before President Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice called him on it. Counselor Ben-Veniste has never recovered from their exchange, though he tried to by making the talk show rounds.
Thomas Keane, commission chairman, now has (a) denied its stars are grandstanding or playing politics, and (b) promised they’ll stop. Or as he put it, “There will be a lower profile.” How delicately put. Bob Kerreys and Richard Ben-Veniste could scarcely have higher profiles at this time.
The most effective committee witness has been Attorney General John Ashcroft, who noted the principal problem with American intelligence-gathering before September 11 — the wall between the FBI and CIA. Despite the Patriot Act, the remains of that wall and the institutional rivalries it fostered continue to hamper U.S. intelligence operations.
Back then, Mr. Ashcroft said, a frustrated FBI agent predicted “someday somebody — someone — will die. And wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective. … ”
It’s 2004, another election year, and there’s another war on, but the temptation to make partisan hay has proven irresistible to this nonpartisan commission. Its final written report will doubtless provide useful grist for discussion and maybe even action. But its headliners have daily embarrassed themselves and the whole idea of blue-ribbon commissions. This is proving the kind of investigation that needs investigating.
Immediately after September 11, 2001, united we stood. But the enemy has been unable to mount another such attack on these shores — so far — and a familiar American syndrome now has set in: historical amnesia aggravated by political backbiting. With the passage of time and the return of complacency, divided we fall.
Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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