Blame Game

There must be someone to blame. There has to be. These things cannot just happen as if the universe was a random place. Someone has to pay. It is the system.

I think they ought to go back to the big appropriations bills that were passed before the storm and take out the pork, and apply it to the Gulf reconstruction. Like the money for the bridge in Alaska that goes to an island where no one lives. But I am not going to hold my breath.

The President’s people tried to deflect it, sail above the witch-hunt. “We don’t want to play the blame-game here,” they sniffed. But that is what Washington is about

Congress is back in town, and old bones are being gnawed once again. The Committees which have nothing to do with the confirmation of Supreme Court Justices or with disaster relief have their work to do, old accounts to be settled. And so the cry for punishment is raised in the second floor offices of the Senate Hart Building , in the Intelligence Committee, and in the cramped suite of its House counterpart in the attic of the Capitol.

It is a rare bipartisan witch-hunt. Peter Hoekstra and Pat Roberts, chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, joined the ranking minority members of their panels in sending letters to Porter Goss, director of CIA. They are demanding the declassification of an internal report of CIA Inspector General John Helgerson on the Agency’s conduct between 1998 and 2001.

It is highly critical. The Public has a right to know.

The 9/11 Families are behind the request to declassify the report. Or better said, at least one of the coalitions of them is. I don’t want to blame them all. The report is hard on  former DCI George Tenet and his senior leadership. They are still looking for someone to blame, someone they can actually catch. I guess retired government officials fall into the category.

I am looking over my shoulder when I leave Big Pink these days. I once had the privilege to use the men’s room next to Director Tenet, and I saw the famous unlit cigar clenched in his jaw. I was also with him in the undisclosed location when the towers actually came down, and I may be to blame for something.

I don’t know. I have not seen the report.

Porter Goss was chairman of the House committee when the request was made, so I expect he is blaming himself for getting into this pickle.

The minority members of Congress who are so vehement are Senator John D. Rockefeller, who owns West Virginia , and Jane Harman, who is married to the Harman-Karden music fortune. I don’t blame either one of them for their wealth and privilege, even if they didn’t earn it personally. I can hope for that sort of luck, too, though I can’t select my great-grandparents or find a wealthy industrialist to sweep me away.

Sometimes I feel I should take full responsibility for the last four years, and just get it over with, West Virginia and everything.

I got an e-mail earlier in the week that contained the redacted version of the classified 9/11 Commission report. These things do come out, eventually, once enough time has passed to take the edge off the outrage. Most of the blacked-out parts were just citations from classified publications, sources-and-methods sort of stuff, and details on screening criteria.

I wasted the morning reading the account of the hijackings again. I had to close my office door, since I wound up in tears at the end. The cockpit voice recorder on Flight 93 captured the last minutes of the passenger riot that nearly took the airplane back. I read the paragraphs over and over, imagining myself there, wings rocking violently as the passengers rammed the beverage cart into the cockpit door.

Then the airplane pulled over, inverted, before diving vertically into the Pennsylvania field. The last words, audible over the shouts of the passengers, were in Arabic. “God is Great.”

There was some talk at the time about whether it was appropriate for Mr. Tenet to hang around the Agency as much as he did after he retired. The last time I saw him was in the Agency gift shop, where I was making a last stop for logo merchandise. George must have been working on the lengthy reply to the IG’s report.

I didn’t talk to him that day. There were too many people coming up to him, wanting to have a last word and thank him for how he turned around morale at the Agency. But I suspect he thinks that he was not to blame. He said we were at war with al Qaida a long time ago, in 1998, and if the system tied one hand behind his back in the fight, that is not his fault.

That would be Congress who put the handcuffs on the Spooks, if I recall properly. But I don’t blame them. That is their job, and they are good at it.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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