A military rant

May 10th, 2004

When I was in the Army Security Agency in the 1970's, we interacted with many of the agencies under fire now for failing to investigate the handling of POW's in Iraq in a timely manner. This seems to me to be the most difficult aspect of this whole affair for our government to explain. In this age of nearly instantaneous communication, why it would take three months for potentially explosive information to wind it's way through the government before it made it's way to the Commander in Chief is nearly impossible to imagine. In times of crises, the last thing you want is a breakdown in communications. Yet that seems to be exactly the situation here. I remember one time we were tracking a Soviet satellite that was re-entering the atmosphere. Because it had a radioactive power source aboard, we were very concerned about the possibilty it would come down in a populated area. For two days, our agency and several others were on around the clock high alert, with everyone from the President to the lowest ranking signal analyst fully informed and waiting for the next bit of tracking information. It can be done...and now it's the task of the current administration to give us a credible reason why it wasn't in this case.