We understand mistakes, not cover-ups!
TRUTHSEEKER
We understand mistakes, not cover-ups
By JIM HOAGLAND
Osama bin Laden's trail has grown cold in the remote Afghan fastness where
he planned the horror-filled morning of Sept. 11. Smoking Osama out has
given way to the unsatisfying but probably unavoidable strategy of waiting
him out.
"Dead or alive" no longer signifies President Bush's wish for justice at any
price. Those three words now summarize the American leadership's uncertainty
about the fate of the Saudi-born mass murderer. Bin Laden is assuredly one
or the other, Pentagon briefers say defensively. But they admit in
frustration that they don't know which.
Living in uncertainty about bin Laden -- perhaps indefinitely -- is a burden
that Americans can and will shoulder with clarity and patience. Apprehending
and punishing this fanatic is vital to restoring order to the American
universe, however long it takes.
But the transition in the hunt for bin Laden from a black-and-white,
dead-or-alive! approach to a more ambiguous, dead-or-alive? pursuit requires
a steady hand and a steady tone of leadership. In moments like these,
Americans want to be reassured that extending the war agenda will not be
used to mask objectives that are partisan, personal or bureaucratic.
Wars produce that temptation. Odds and history both suggest that somewhere
in the Bush administration lurks the next J. Edgar Hoover or Oliver North
waiting to ride the pendulum of emergency powers to extreme lengths.
President Bush's early demands that the civil liberties of Arab-Americans
and all other citizens be respected in the wake of Sept. 11 suggested a
healthy awareness of that particular danger from government.
But such warnings have become rare as the immediate shock of the terror
attacks and the drama of the unexpectedly swift military successes in
Afghanistan have been absorbed into Washington's unending struggles for
budgetary resources and political advantage. The moral clarity about the
balance of risks and rights in American society that the president voiced
earlier has faded.
Phase II of the war on global terrorism got under way this month, but it is
happening in American courts, media briefing rooms and congressional
committee hearings -- and in other places where the tensions created by a
free society going to war surface and collide.
Those tensions are present in the debate over America's treatment of
prisoners, whether captured in Afghanistan and transported to Cuba or held
in secret in Virginia and elsewhere on insubstantial immigration charges.
Those tensions are also present in a growing concern that Attorney General
John Ashcroft, who hogs every opportunity to go before the cameras to
prosecute in public one lamentable-to-despicable American youth who joined
the Taliban, is playing at politics, not justice.
And they are present in several recent sharp exchanges between the press and
Pentagon briefers over the military's increasingly opaque and unhelpful
rendition of events in Afghanistan as U.S. soldiers and spies -- perhaps not
yet aware or perhaps unwilling to admit that they now operate in situations
more gray than black or white -- make mistakes or are forced into
unforgiving choices about killing people whose identities have not been
verified.
The Pentagon stubbornly refused at its midday briefing on Monday to own up
to any likelihood that U.S. troops beat 27 blameless Afghan civilians,
helped the CIA kill three scrap-metal scavengers with a remote-control
Hellfire rocket intended for bin Laden, or threatened the life of a
Washington Post reporter looking into that incident. Some journalists left
the briefing muttering in amazement, others in anger.
But the transcript of that session is fascinating reading for other reasons
as well. It contains an illuminating Socratic conversation between reporters
and senior officials highlighting the fact that the CIA now operates deadly
combat systems that are as destructive as many of the weapons controlled by
the Defense Department. In Afghanistan, the spooks operate in the fog of
war, but seemingly without the strict rules of engagement and accountability
for lethal decisions demanded of the military. The Pentagon's unease with
this remains unstated -- but clearly implied in that transcript.
I can't think of another country that is a military power where this kind of
concern would be raised in public discussion during ongoing military
operations. In Britain, it would be against the law to discuss such things.
It is no surprise that mistakes happen in wartime and that bureaucracies try
to avoid discussing them. But it is the supreme strength of the American
system that the nation does not just shrug fatalistically at such mistakes
and paper them over. The balance of rights and of risks is a constant and
proper subject of debate in a society based on institutions that survive by
imposing limits on those who would submerge them in excess.
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Hoagland is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist, specializing in
foreign affairs