Conservative Advocate: Hiding the truth about Saddam Hussein
Once, in a private conversation with President Reagan during his years in the White House, I asked him what was the hardest part of being president. He replied instantly, “Talking with someone about a problem and being unable, for security reasons, to tell all I know about it.”
This painful dilemma must afflict every president. Each morning the president receives, as his first order of business, an “intelligence briefing,” containing reports from the CIA, the FBI and countless other sources on everything that has happened, or been discovered, since yesterday morning. Almost nothing is held back from the chief executive, and the briefing includes the most super-secret information imaginable.
Summaries will have just-received information from America’s most deeply buried spies, as well as sophisticated analyses of material gathered from such technical sources as spy satellites. (It was revealed some years ago that our eavesdropping satellites orbiting over the Soviet Union were able to pick up radiophone transmissions from the limousines of high Soviet officials!)
For any president, it must be an almost painful experience to leave one of these briefings and read the front page of that day’s New York Times or Washington Post, seeing their garbled accounts of what foreign leaders are thinking, leaks of authentic information that should have been withheld in the interests of national security, and long paragraphs of outright falsehoods.
So, it was with special interest that I read the Aug. 17 Times article by Elizabeth Bumiller. In discussing President Bush’s coming decision on whether to attack Iraq militarily, she reported him as saying that “he would still make up his own mind based on information that is very tightly held within his administration.”
What was Bush hinting at here? Almost certainly he was referring to intelligence information that simply cannot be made public without doing serious damage to American interests.
Suppose — just suppose — that this country has an informant high in Saddam Hussein’s regime: a disaffected military man, perhaps, or some high-ranking civilian official who secretly despises Saddam. Or that we have some wonderful piece of technology that can eavesdrop on Saddam’s most secret conversations. Or that we know that some scientist working on Saddam’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb. The possibilities are endless, and one or more of them are almost surely true.
If Bush learns, through such a means, that Saddam is within a year of building a nuclear bomb, and intends to smuggle it into the United States — perhaps aboard a container ship — and conceal it in Washington or New York to blackmail us into leaving him alone, even if he attacks Israel or Saudi Arabia, what can the president responsibly do?
He can strike at Iraq pre-emptively. In fact, he would have a moral obligation to do so. But what can he say to the senators and U.N. ambassadors who demand that he “make the case” for such an action? He can point to Saddam’s record, and he has; but why, they will want to know, is a military attack justified now, and in such haste?
Should he call in the members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, swear them to secrecy, and reveal the sensitive information he has? Even if he tries to protect the source, the nature and details of the information will point to it. And — as with the battle plans that recently appeared on page one of the Times — leakage to the press will be inevitable.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) had to be removed from the Senate Intelligence Committee a few years ago for such a leak. And when the committee’s members recently asked the FBI to investigate more recent leaks, they almost went into cardiac arrest when the FBI proposed to give them lie-detector tests, which members haughtily refused.
We can be confident that Bush will tell us everything he can. But there is much, much more that he cannot make public.
We should realize that, and not demand the impossible.
(William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.)