Inside the Current Issue:

Comments or questions about the site?:
advocate webmaster

This site last updated on:
May 14, 2004

The current issue will be available online within 7 days of printed publication.

Thoughts on the September 11 Commission

Dan Skinner and Gerasimos Karavitis

In light of the President’s peculiar stance toward the September 11 Commission, we wish to put forth a small collection of hypotheses and questions about the content of the controversial August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB), the meaning of the president’s refusal to testify under oath, and the standards of “precision” that the president has employed in addressing issues of national security. We believe that if the September 11 Commission is fully committed to executing its putative tasks, it will in time demonstrate that—among other things—it has thoroughly explored the following avenues of inquiry.

What is the purpose of a PDB? How does it function?

One would assume that the method of constructing important briefing memos such as the August 6 PDB is not left entirely to the literary and semantic preferences of their authors. It seems reasonable, that is, to assume that there is an instituted method for the construction of such memos, a method whose end is to minimize the possibility of miscommunication between their authors and their intended reader—i.e. the President. Moreover, if this method is to achieve its end, it must be predicated upon—at least—the following two, related parameters. First, it must require that PDBs are authored with two specific standards in mind: a standard of consistency (whereby the same word does not have different meanings at different instances), and a standard of specificity (whereby the meaning of words is not arbitrary within a single interpretative moment). Secondly, in order for these standards to be met consistently by the authors of the PDBs, the structure and word choices involved in the construction of each PDB must in some way be codified—if not in a separate text exclusively dedicated to their codification (i.e. a manual of some sort), then through their repeated use. Summarily, it seems reasonable to suppose that the normally subjective aspects of spoken language are highly circumscribed in intelligence reports in order to ensure a reliable basis upon which expectations of meaning could be formed.
Moreover, if one were to assume that these hypotheses are verifiable, one would inevitably develop a particular expectation. Specifically, one would come to expect that when a phrase like “Bin Ladin (sic) Determined to Strike in US” appears on a document that only the president is directly authorized to read, the phrase must have a different meaning and directive weight for the president than it would for an ordinary citizen replicating the phrase in an everyday conversation. If, in other words, a communicative code does in fact exist between the authors of PDBs and the president, then we must conclude that the authors of the PDBs choose their words and phrases with a knowledge of the possible meanings that these words and phrases have and, consequently, that the president (as reader of the PDBs) is obliged to apprehend these words and phrases in the context of their assigned possible meanings.
And it is reasonable, we contend, to hold our hypotheses as verifiable. For the process of communicating with a figure of supreme political authority—such as the president of the US—through official documents may safely be understood as a distinct professional discipline, and, just as each professional discipline has its own instituted vocabulary and set of inveterate discursive practices through which its communicative domain is demarcated and animated, so the discipline of communicating with a president through official documents must have its own instituted vocabulary and set of inveterate discursive practices.
Consequently, we are inclined to ask: how can our president claim that he did not act more decisively on the August 6 PDB because its contents (phrases like “determined to strike America” and “patterns of suspicious activity”) were not “specific” enough? The communicative institutions by which his reading of the PDBs is conditioned function to prevent the possibility that he reads and understands these phrases as would an ordinary citizen. And even if the president did read and understand the crucial phrases on the August 6 memo as an ordinary citizen would, then he did not read and understand them as a president should. Thus, his explanation of why he remained passive after reading the August 6 memo seems quite untenable.

Why did the President refuse to testify under oath?

How can we understand the President’s refusal to testify under oath? If the President has nothing to hide, then the whole question of testifying under oath would be irrelevant: he would simply testify under oath. To take an oath is to commit to some variation of the conjunction “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The refusal to testify under oath implies, then, a commitment to the negation of the conjunction, or a commitment to the sentence: “I do not swear to tell the truth, nor do I swear to tell the whole true, nor do I swear to not say something that might not be the truth.” Essentially, then, the choice of not testifying under oath is a choice which disjoins honesty from testament and, by extension, truth from justice. The refusal to testify under oath can only be interpreted as the choice made by one who fears incriminating him- or herself by the things he or she might say.
Given the premise that the President indeed has something to hide, we may proceed to consider his possible choices, the likely consequences of each, and the logic behind his decision to not testify under oath. Prior to the moment of his choosing to not testify under oath, the president had two options. The first was to testify under oath and not tell the truth (i.e. the information that he wants to conceal, which might either be a euphemistic variation of “I didn’t feel a sense of urgency” or something more specific and cacophonous). The second option was to not testify under oath and to not tell the truth. The first option could have, in theory, yielded higher rewards, but it was also riskier. The political benefit that could have accrued from choosing it would be in assuring people that the president is not afraid of the truth. However, its inherent risk was that, if it were to be discovered at some point in the near future that the president’s responses were untruthful, he and the ensemble he leads could not avoid accusations of perjury as the nation enters pre-electoral high season.
Being that they are conservatives, it comes at no surprise then that the President’s advisors chose to reason conservatively—to risk less in case the truth should come out—and choose option two. This decision allows the president to retain his faith in a November victory even in the event that things do go awry during his testimony to the September 11 Commission. (Incidentally, if Clinton had reasoned conservatively when first asked about the Lewinski affair and admitted that he engaged in sexual activity with her—instead of attempting to evade all political costs through an acrobatic deception—his trial and the negative implications that his trial had on the institution of the American presidency would not have ensued.)

The logic of security and the problem of specificity

The pretense for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that—in conjunction with Hussein’s inimical attitude toward the United States—this constituted a casus belli. Of course, at the time of their report to the United Nations, UN weapons inspectors stated that they had not found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Nonetheless, the president decided to proceed with the invasion.
When later asked about the missing WMDs, the President claimed that more precise information was not necessary to justify the invasion of Iraq. On the other hand, when asked to explain his reaction to the August 6 PDB—which warned, however tepidly in the President’s eyes, of the possibility that attacks would be carried out on American soil—the President claimed that there was not enough specific information for him to take more active measures toward defending the nation from a terrorist attack in the weeks prior to September 11.
We cannot help but wonder: does the logic of security—an essentially conservative logic, since it proceeds, above all, on the principle of minimizing loss—not dictate that the statesmen of a country have more reason to act on the basis of less evidence when it comes to orchestrating a defensive operation within the country than they do when orchestrating an operation outside of it, regardless of whether the latter is defensive or offensive in its nature?