Where's the accountability?

SSgt (Join to see) I feel your pain. And I have no answers that make sense to me so I'm certain those same answers won't make any sense to you.

I can address some things that I've seen in my time - probably won't make any sense - and I ask your indulgence.

In my time at Ft. Meade decisions were made based on information that was provided. The information presented was the best there was - but I promise you it was often fragmented and not clear at all. Often we (meaning decision makers - often civilian authority, but sometimes military authority) make decisions based on the information available at the moment of the decision. Sometimes that information turns out to be wrong. It happens. A lot.

If an authority, whether civilain or military makes a decision on the best currently available information and the decision is of such seriousness that it is not prudent to wait - a decision has to be made. Right or wrong a decision has to be made. If the decision is found to be wrong - do we punish the decider for making a decision based on the best currently available (at the time of the decision) information? Let's take the WMD issue. You have information, which turned out to be false, but at the time, the best minds in the intelligence say it is possibly WMD's with potential deaths in the hundreds of thousands if used. What do you do? Is it appropriate to wait to see if hundreds of thousands of people die - including our allies (such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, etc) or do you go with the possibility and wage war? Do you want to be the President of the U.S. that allowed hundreds of thousands of innocents to die just so you would be correct? Either way, go or no go, the possibility is that hundreds of thousands can die. Not an easy choice.

I'm not trying to apologize for the decision made on Iraqi WMD's - I'm thinking there's a lot of information that's still out there regarding this issue.

The reason I'm saying that is a lesson I learned from an old intercept operator from WWII. His job was to keep track of certain morse code frequencies, etc. In the process of his work, he discovered that an enemy operator broke procedure enough that the code breakers were able to read coded messages for several months. So much information was gleaned from this single error the codebreakers were able to determine that a particular Allied operation was compromised so badly that to go forward with the operation was certain doom to nearly a division of soldiers. The authorities decided that protecting the knowlege that the allied codebreakers were reading the German military codes for a particular area was too valuable. Calling off the operation could tip the Germans off to the fact their messages were being read - almost as fast as the Germans themselves were. The allied operation went forward - and many allied soldiers went to their death, precisely as had been predicted. The secret knowlege of the code breaking was intact - though anyone that knew of the cost were certainly sick to their stomach and heartbroken. Of course, the Germans eventually changed thier coding and once again the allies were faced with the hard task of trying to break the nearly unbreakable.

How do we handle this type of accountability?

Like I said, I don't know all the answers - and often the answers don't help a bit. But perhaps a bit of different perspective will help.

I'd like to clarify that I'm not only talking about those two examples.

Accountability would entail taking responsibility and civilian leadership seems to avoid those "ility" words