Where Did the Warriors Go Wrong?

It has not been a good season for the national security crowd.

Star Wars goes splat. Espionage cases fizzle out. George W. Bush's Chicken-Little charge that Bill Clinton and Al Gore have devastated the military does not catch on with the electorate. The CIA's rascally secretkeepers are under the gun. And, as The Washington Times dramatically noted in an above-the-fold front-page story, there's a move within the Navy to remove urinals from aircraft carriers and replace them with "gender neutral water closets" -- a proposal that has POed the military's traditionalists.

The spycatchers looked exceedingly dumb when the government cut a deal with Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, who had engaged in the unauthorized copying of top-secret computer records pertaining to nuclear weapons. After threatening him with life in prison -- and after lying to a federal judge about the danger Lee's action posed -- the feds allowed him to cop an easy plea and leave prison, where he had been held under the most draconian conditions. It turns out there's no evidence Lee's illegal handling of classified information actually threatened national security or that he engaged in espionage.

As the Lee case ended with a whimper -- and no apology from Attorney General Janet Reno -- it is instructive to recall the hysteria the episode bred. When the case broke in March of 1999, Lamar Alexander, then a Republican contender for the White House, asserted, "It appears that this is one of the most serious national security breaches in fifty years. For his unwillingness to act on this serious matter, Mr. [Samuel] Berger [President Clinton's national security advisor] should resign."

Pat Buchanan, another GOP wannabe then, said, "This is an appalling breach of national security. It is the worst breach of national security since the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage in 1952."

In May of 1999, The New York Times reported that Lee's data transfers "jeapordized secrets to virtually the entire United States nuclear arsenal."

Senator Don Nickles, a Republican, declared Lee was responsible for the "most serious case of espionage " in American history.

Columnist William Safire huffed that because of Wen Ho Lee "our nuclear genie is out of the bottle."

Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican, bleated, "this may be the most serious breach in an espionage case since the Aldrich Ames case."

The Cox report -- put out by Representative Chris Cox, a Republican -- maintained, "The stolen US secrets have helped the PRC [China] fabricate and successfully test modern strategic thermonuclear weapons."

Whoops. None of these howls were justified. Similar outpourings of outrage occurred in June when the news broke that hard drives containing highly classified information disappeared at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Several Republican legislators -- including Senator Richard Shelby, Senator Jon Kyl, and Representative Porter Goss -- called for Secretary of Energy Bill RIchardson to resign.

But, again, the protests outpaced the facts. The culprits in the case of the missing hard-drives have not yet been caught, but federal investigators now say the drives -- which magically reappeared behind a photocopier -- were never removed from the lab's premises nor fell into unauthorized hands. They were mishandled, but apparently not in a fashion that led to the disclosure of the material they contained. These episodes -- and the loose talk they generated -- demonstrate how easy it is for self-proclaimed patriots to cry crisis and point an accusing finger.

The national security establishment has been embarrassed on other fronts. In July, a much-anticipated test of the Pentagon's new missile defense system went bust when an interceptor "kill vehicle" that was supposed to hit a dummy warhead failed to detach from its booster rocket. This $100 million failure caused President Clinton to put off a decision to deploy the system. (By the way, for the cost of this tryout, you could send 10,000 or so young adults to college.)