NP: from The Guardian

[Tiarnan O'Corrain]

We can't say they didn't warn us

Harold Evans in New York 
Tuesday October 2, 2001 
The Guardian

We were warned. We were warned by some of the best minds in the United
States that without a new emphasis on homeland security "Americans
will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers".  The
warning was spelled out in September 1999, and when nothing was done,
it was emphasised in January this year, this time with a detailed
agenda for action to make America safer from terrorism. It is fair bet
that like millions of Americans you never heard of any of this.

What happened? On January 31, seven months before the World Trade
Centre massacre, former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman looked
with satisfaction on the television cameras and journalists assembled
in the Mansfield room in the senate. They were there as co-chairs of
the bipartisan United States commission on national security, set up
three years before to advise how America could be made safer. The
final document of 150 pages, Road Map for National Security:
Imperative for Change, was signed by their 12 fellow
commissioners. They represent the kind of blue-ribbon brains trust
Washington is so good at putting together and in the light of what
happened to their labours over three years, in which they visited 25
countries and consulted more than 100 academic experts, the weight of
their experience against terrorism is maddeningly pertinent.

James Schlesinger is a former CIA director and defence and energy
secretary, Donald Rice a former secretary of the air force and
president of the Rand corporation, Norman Augustine, chairman of
Lockheed Martin, a former under-secretary of the army. General John
Galvin, former commander-in-chief in Europe, and Admiral Harry D Train
II, former C-in-C Atlantic, provided a military perspective. Two
former ambassadors, Andrew Young to the UN and Anne Armstrong to
Britain, had a good take on resentments of America. Armstrong is a
former chairman of the president's foreign intelligence advisory
board; its executive secretary, Lionel H Olmer, was also a
commissioner.

Two commissioners, Newt Gingrich and Lee Hamilton, know their way
around Washington; the commission, intriguingly, was created in a rare
moment of agreement between Gingrich and President Clinton in
1998. Two more are experienced in communicating with the press: Leslie
H Gelb, a former editor of the New York Times op-ed page who is now
president of the council on foreign relations, and John Dancy,
formerly chief diplomatic correspondent of NBC News.

Hart and Rudman had as their executive director the intellectual
one-time fighter pilot, Charles (Chuck) Boyd, the only graduate of the
Hanoi Hilton to reach four-star general. They and their staffs went to
great lengths to acquaint the press in advance with the gravity of
their findings. "Hell," says Rudman, "it was the first comprehensive
rethinking of national security since Harry Truman in 1947."

The conclusions were startling. "States, terrorists and other
disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction, and some
will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in
large numbers."

Hart told me: "We got a terrific sense of the resentment building
against the US as a bully which alarmed us." The report was a
devastating in dictment of the "fragmented and inadequate" structures
and strategies to prevent and then respond to the attacks the
commissioners predicted on US cities. Hart specifically mentioned the
lack of readiness to respond to "a weapon of mass destruction in a
highrise building".

But the report was not simply alarmist. It was unusually constructive,
shedding grandiose language for a step-by-step blueprint of what
urgently needed to be done to create a national homeland security
agency, revive the frontline public services and pull together the 45
different official bodies that have to do with national security: "We
need order of magnitude improvements in planning, coordination and
exercise. Any reorganisation must be mindful of the scale of the
scenarios we envisage and the enormity of their consequences."

A number of commissioners visited the editorial boards of the New York
Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. It was all to
little avail. Network television news ignored the report; so did the
serious evening news on public television. Only CNN did it
justice. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal did not carry a
line either of the report or the press conference. Boyd told me how he
watched in disbelief as the New York Times reporter left before the
presentation was over.

The rest of the national news coverage was fair, excellent in the
Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, with a smattering of good
stories in USA Today and the smaller and regional newspapers, using AP
and Reuters. But what most astonished and then outraged the
commissioners was that none of the major newspapers, except the Los
Angeles Times briefly, offered any kind of platform or any kind of
critical analysis or opinion. None of the network talk shows took it
up; only the cable channels CNN and CNBC, briefly. Rather than
sensational headlines, the report required elite opinion to engage in
a sustained dialogue to probe, improve, explain and then press for
action. The commissioners were particularly bewildered by the blackout
at the Times and pitched an op-ed article signed by Hart and
Rudman. The article was rejected.

Newspapers, by their nature, are bound to miss stories from time to
time; but there was no attempt to catch up in the Times. The
performance of the country's leading newspaper on the report is
curious since it has distinguished itself over the years by giving
prominence to Saddam Hussein's mischiefs and notable reports by Judy
Miller, William Broad and Stephen Engelberg.

The commissioners were variously "dumbfounded" (Hart), "surprised"
(Schlesinger), "stunned" (Gelb), and "appalled" (Rudman). "The New
York Times," says Rudman, "deserves its ass kicked." Gingrich is more
rueful: "I was very saddened. I thought in particular for the New York
Times and the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal not to give it
really serious coverage was a significant failure in providing
educated citizens with an important report. And frankly, other than
homeland security, they still haven't gone back and contemplated the
scale of change we're describing."

None of the commissioners suggests that headlines or informed comment
for their report would have forestalled September 11. The World Trade
Centre would still be rubble, but national planning would have been
six months ahead. Bush took a belated leaf out of the commission's
report in his appointment of Tom Ridge as national homeland adviser,
but Ridge's powers seem too limited to meet the commission's concept
of the job. The calculation is that it will take two years to fuse the
federal hermetic structures that leave America's door wide open.

There is a keen sense of frustration that the marriage of two
inertias, first one in the serious press then the other in the
administration, so much delayed reorganisation. "We lost momentum,"
says Rudman. Hearings were scheduled for the week of May 7. But the
White House stymied the move. It did not want Congress to run ahead,
not least with a report originated by a Democratic president and an
ousted Republican speaker. On May 5, the administration announced that
rather than adopting Hart-Rudman it was forming its own committee
headed by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, who was expected to report
in October. The hearings were cancelled. "The administration actually
slowed down response to the report when momentum was building in the
spring," says Gingrich. Nobody puts any significance in the fact that
Cheney's wife, Lynn, was a member of the commission who resigned over
differences of view about the importance of China.

The failure of the most respected agenda-setting editorial pages to
grapple with the Hart-Rudman analysis of the complex, but essentially
life-and-death issues of national security, is
puzzling. Finger-pointing is discomfiting in the light of the unique
malevolence of the atrocity at the World Trade Centre, but the print
and electronic press, which has been legitimately pointing the finger
at gaps in the intelligence system, has so far failed to point the
finger at itself.

That is hardly healthy for a mature democracy. Its oxygen may be a
free flow of information and opinion, but a capacity for
self-criticism among those entrusted with the duty of providing it
would not go amiss, not least in the United States where the press
enjoys such constitutional privilege.

Additional research by David Lefer




--
Tiarnán Ó Corráin
Technical Writer
CMG Cork.
Email: tiarnan.o'corrain at cmg.nl
Phone: + 353 21 4933316