They Just Don't Get It by Colonel David Hunt

Author:Colonel David Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307237767
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2005-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

“It Ain’t My Fault”

The runaway bureaucratic structure has not only prevented us from doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done, it has also created a lack of accountability. It is time to demand accountability of our leadership. We have watched commission after commission study what went wrong. We have officials from every walk of life saying, “It ain’t my fault,” or “It’s no one’s fault, it’s the system.” We even have former government officials stuffing secret documents down their pants!

This story is so farcical, so out there, so unbelievable that you are going to think it has to be a bedtime story. Brace yourself. Once upon a time there was a former national security adviser to the president of the United States. The adviser’s name was Sandy “I-Ain’t-Going-to-No-Stinking-Vietnam” Berger. The president was Bill “I-Did-Not-Have-Sex-with-That-Woman” Clinton. Mr. Berger’s job was to protect our nation’s secrets while he advised the president on the most sensitive matters in the world. During his tenure (he spent six years as either deputy national security adviser or national security adviser), he had to read our nation’s most classified papers—documents so sensitive that he wasn’t even allowed to remove them from his office. Mr. Berger even had to have special telephones that scrambled his conversations in his car, home, and office to protect America’s vital secrets. In fact, in this bedtime story it is fair to say that everything Berger did in his professional life was a secret. Now comes the really ludicrous part: Mr. Berger was caught stuffing classified documents in his pants and socks in the National Archives. Could this be true? Yup. You had to wonder, why would this very smart guy do something so stupid as to smuggle out sensitive documents he knew weren’t supposed to leave the secure room at the Archives? Maybe because the documents showed that he and his boss had done little or nothing to try to stop terrorism for eight years.

But the truth is, even if Berger did try to cover up his own failures and the Clinton administration’s failures, it wouldn’t have worked. The reason it wouldn’t have worked is that we all know he and the Clinton administration screwed up. But they weren’t the only ones. They weren’t in office when 9/11 happened, of course. No one in Washington says it because everyone there is looking ahead to the next election, but our government screwed up. On September 11, 2001, nineteen Arab men killed more Americans than did the entire Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That’s a big screwup.

This is not the first time that mistakes have been made. Every administration has had times when bad decisions have been executed and we have paid a terrible price. Remember the October 1983 Marine barracks disaster in Lebanon? A couple of months later, President Reagan received an advance copy of a report on the bombing prepared by a Defense Department commission. The report blamed officers in the chain of command for not ensuring the safety of the troops.

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