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Guest Commentary February 6, 2002
There Must Be No Third Pearl Harbor
The Honorable Richard Shelby
The United States has an Intelligence Community today – and a Director of Central Intelligence – in large part because of the Pearl Harbor disaster of December 7, 1941. The fear of another Pearl Harbor provided the impetus for our establishment of a national-level intelligence bureaucracy. This system was created so that America would never have to face another devastating surprise attack. That second devastating surprise attack came on September 11th, and it killed more Americans than did the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor.
All of us, I think, owe the American people an explanation as to why our Intelligence Community failed to provide adequate warning of such a terrorist attack on our soil. After all, as [CIA] Director [George] Tenet has stated, the Director of Central Intelligence is hired "not to observe and comment, but to warn and protect."
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In the very near future, [the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] will join with the House Intelligence Committee in an effort to provide an explanation to the American people. Once we determine why we were caught completely by surprise, we must then work together to ensure that there is no third Pearl Harbor. ...
Not long ago, our Intelligence Community faced a single clear threat – the Soviet Union and its Communist allies – against which it could devote most of its resources and attention. With the end of the Cold War, the world situation facing our intelligence agencies underwent a fundamental change. Until that point, murky transnational threats had been only sideshows to the "main event" of the East versus West strategic rivalry. Today, however, coping with asymmetric transnational challenges such as terrorism has become the most important duty of our Intelligence Community. To say the least, the post-Cold War period has been one of difficult transition.
Even before September 11th, we had a rocky history of intelligence failures – among them the bombing of Khobar Towers, the Indian nuclear tests, the bombing of our East African embassies, the first attack on the World Trade Center buildings, and the attack upon the USS Cole. Examined individually, each of these failures, tragic in their own way, may not suggest a continuing or systemic problem. However, taken as a whole, and culminating with the events of September 11th, they present a disturbing series of intelligence shortfalls that, I believe, expose some serious problems in the structure of and approaches taken by our Intelligence Community. ...
Just as militaries can face defeat if they keep trying to fight the last war, so can intelligence agencies suffer terrible strategic surprise if they spend their time trying to meet the last threat – or if they try to meet new threats with the mindsets, tactics, and obsolete methodologies of the past.
Richard Shelby, a Republican, is a U.S. Senator from Alabama. The above commentary has been adapted from comments Sen. Shelby made at a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, February 6, 2002. To contact him, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
