Keep the Faith!

By Moe White

Last week I was listening to radio personality Bill Press’s talk show. The subject was the failed Dec. 25 “underwear bombing,” and Press was lambasting President Obama for not firing the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair. He fulminated that Blair’s office was created specifically to pull together information from all the different spy agencies — CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, and the rest of the alphabet. “That’s his job!” said Press. “That’s why his job exists! And he didn’t do it!” To Press, Blair failed miserably at doing the one thing he’s hired to do, so he should be fired. And Press is a pro-Obama liberal!

And I thought to myself, “Wait a minute. For all I know, we’ve stopped fifty other guys trying the same thing over the past year.” Maybe not. Maybe only one, or a few, or maybe a hundred. And if we have, there’s no way we’d know anything about it. That’s because spying, or secret agent work, or successful interference with an enemy’s operations, succeeds ONLY as long as it’s secret. If we learn about it, so does the enemy, and therefore they change their tactics, putting us back at square one!

The next day I read an Associated Press story about a study of young
American terrorists — the ones who are born or naturalized here and
grow up here. According to the study, 70 percent of the conspiracies
they hatched were discovered by law enforcement agencies before anyone
got hurt. I didn’t know that; all I knew about were a few of the other
30 percent — like the Virginia-born boys who went to Pakistan, or the
Army Major who went on a rampage in Texas.

Except when a capture becomes public before the fact, like with the
Virginians, or after the massacre, as in Fort Hood, the only way we
find out about successful operations is if someone in authority says,
“We’ve stopped thirty-eight plots in the past six months.” When we hear
that, we have to take it on faith — and on the realization that, sure
enough, we haven’t been bombed or had planes taken down or had the
water supply contaminated.

That’s what Dick Cheney used to do. Every once in a while he’d come out
of some undisclosed location in his Darth Vader guise and hint that
“our” secret teams were discovering scores of “their” secret plots and
nipping them in the bud. And he’d raise the “terror” codes from yellow
to orange just before a crucial mid-term election or Senate vote to
ensure the Republicans won. Or, from time to time, he’d lower them,
with a reminder that all we needed to do to stay safe was trust him —
and give up our freedom, cede him our privacy, hand over our liberties,
in order to feed his paranoia and satisfy his hunger for power.

Well, we threw that mindset out of office a year ago. We chose a more
positive worldview, a mood of hope. So maybe we need to step back and
give Dennis Blair a break. Let the president and his team look into
this failure, figure out what went wrong, and — using all sorts of
inside, secret information that we have no access to — decide what
needs fixing and whether Blair is doing a good job or not. The
president doesn’t want an incompetent (“You’re doing a heckuva job,
Brownie”) in that office, and I think we can trust him to get the man
out of there if he’s no good at fulfilling his responsibilities. On the
other hand, if he is good at it, we probably won’t ever know — we’ll
just sleep soundly in our beds.
My conclusion is that, at least in the field of national security, our
failures are made public, while our successes, by necessity, are hidden
from the world. How different that is from our daily lives!

Or is it? Aren’t we all judged by what goes wrong rather than what we
do right? It’s no news when a community volunteer continues
volunteering, or a businessman grows his business and hires more
employees. But when you learn that the businessman went to prison as a
young man, or the volunteer embezzled funds from an employer twenty
years ago, that’s news. The elected official caught cheating on his
taxes, the pastor with a mistress, the judge with a long history of
covered-up speeding tickets — they’re all fodder for endless unpleasant
news coverage.

On the flip side, there’s the occasional “bad” guy with a string of
offenses from teen years through his forties, who is redeemed by a good
deed — pulling a drowning woman out of the river, saving a child from a
burning building, or just living straight for the rest of his life. But
those stories show up in the religion or human-interest pages of
newspapers, not as television news features (unless a TV movie is made
about it).

News coverage drives a lot of the cynicism and doubt among the
population, just as the bad apple — a dishonest public servant or
pedophile priest — ruins the whole bushel in the public mind. But I
look at Italy, with its 61 governments in the 65 years since the end of
World War II; and at the South American coup-ocracies of the 1960s,
’70s, and ’80s; and at California with its recalls and initiatives; and
I wonder, are we going down that path, where the loudest, most strident
voices in the media and political spheres can delegitimize an elected
government after less than a year in power? Do we want our new
administration to face its Waterloo before the first anniversary of its
inauguration? Is it in our national interest to follow the Viet Nam
path: “destroy the country in order to save it?”

I’m in favor of returning some balance to news coverage and helping the
public regain its trust in our elected officials. Yes, there are always
going to be those who abuse that trust, and there’s good reason for
some cynicism. In this, I vote with Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

But unless we want to Balkanize America, we need to give the Obama
administration continued support — including when we disagree with it —
and to give officials the benefit of the doubt. They love our country
as much as we do, and they are doing everything they can to protect us
from international threats, a still tottering economy, and terrible
inequities in incomes, health, wealth, education, opportunity, and
other measures of equality. Let’s cut them some slack!