Justin Raphael: U.S. can't have it both ways on intel

Everyone has seen the trick. A buxom assistant covers the caged doves with a magical black cloth. The magician waves his hands, sweeps away the cover, and the birds are gone. Now, last time I checked, David Copperfield was not a member of the U.S. Senate, but that doesn't mean his show isn't playing in Washington. The Sept. 11 Commission has spun out of control faster than Fallujah.

The information it has uncovered is no doubt disconcerting. CIA Director George Tenet received information about the odd flight school regimen of hijacker-to-be Zacharias Moussaoui. Vice President Dick Cheney had barely gotten a counterterrorism task force off the ground in early September, months after President Bush asked him to do so. The FBI devoted only 6 percent of its resources to counterterrorism and apparently failed to share and take seriously quite serious information.

The administration should be held responsible not for Sept. 11 -- that was the act of madmen -- but for the clues it missed and the attention it failed to pay. Far more foreboding, however, is the case of the disappearing doves. Bureaucrats, commission members, pundits and elected officials alike are asking the right questions: Why did we not attack bin Laden in Afghanistan? Were we preoccupied with Iraq and other vestigial Cold War threats? Why were our counterterrorism infrastructures fragmented, understaffed and poorly funded? Why did our intelligence officials not have the legal means to investigate and detain terrorist ‚migr‚s?

Yet the answer is most frightening of all: a mirror. I hate to agree with John Ashcroft, but he got it right: "The simple fact of Sept. 11 is this: We did not know an attack was coming, because for nearly a decade, our government had blinded itself to its enemies. Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions and starved for basic information technology."

Why? For decades, one could scarcely find a Democrat willing to defend aggressive law enforcement and immigration standards, never mind an increase in intelligence appropriations. Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie S. Gorelick, shockingly now a Commission member, even drafted a memo that officially segregated law enforcement and intelligence information. This isn't asking the wolf to guard the hen house; it's asking him to solve why he ate the chickens. He knows the answer because he was responsible.

Cue the disappearing act. The same people who foam at the mouth with the very mention of the PATRIOT Act think the FBI wasn't aggressive enough. Those who responded to the personal failures and lies of Vietnam and Iran contra by neutering American intelligence with bureaucracy and a shallow treasury are astonished by the fact of either. How many Democrats would have voted to send troops to Afghanistan in 1998? We'll never know, because the Republican Senate was debating oral sex, but I bet not many.

Most absurdly, the ideological kin of those who rightly deplored Nixon's COINTELPRO and "Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago" now think we should have a domestic intelligence agency. But it is skullduggery to create another program to fix one that already doesn't work. American intelligence can be revived only by treating it not as a scare tactic for demagoguery about fascism and the military-industrial complex, but as a priority. Civil liberties are a great concern, but I don't see how an American MI5 spying on its own citizens is sensitive to it.

We don't need to give the job to somebody else; we need to provide the resources to exponentially increase our commitment, fiscal and otherwise, to helping counterterrorism and intelligence services do the job right. What is more, we need to let them do it. Bureaucratic labyrinths may work well in the welfare state, but they have no place in securing it.

Above all, we should beware of doves with hawkish wings, those who criticize the rest of us for not being enough like J. Edgar Hoover or Douglas MacArthur because they want us to forget that they have been too much like Noam Chomsky. Some may have undergone a sincere change of heart, but their former convictions hurt our security twice over. Not only did the left give the current administration a faulty system, but it forfeited any legitimacy in the vital debate to change that system.

Such critics will not be taken seriously until they demand of themselves what they ask of their subjects: consistency or apology. Barring that, all the Richard Clarkes in the world cannot make this suspicious hawkish renaissance anything other than an attempt to pull that magical sheet over our eyes and blame us for its own Vietnam syndrome.

Hindsight, clairvoyance in reverse, cannot bestow guilt, but history unheeded condemns. Hence, we should learn from the past and, as the left has tried in vain to do, leave it behind. For the political blame game is a largely reflexive exercise: The left cannot ask the administration to be scrupulous about its past and expect us to ignore their own.

Such political abracadabra helps nobody, save those who mouth it. But the language of 3,000 coffins is much clearer: While magic may be useful in November, no David Copperfield will bring back, God forbid, those lost in the next Sept 11.

Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.

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