Pentagon incompetence
The Pentagon's commendably candid report on this summer's terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia induces a disquieting sense of deja vu. Once again, the Defense Department has proved more adept at investigating its security lapses than in preventing them. Many lives would have been saved if the Pentagon had learned from its previous failures to safeguard American forces stationed in the Middle East, including the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 people.
The report on the June 25 truck bombing in Dhahran that killed 19 Americans is a searing indictment of Pentagon incompetence. Wayne Downing, the retired Army general who directed the inquiry, makes clear that the security breakdown started at the upper levels of the Pentagon and ran down through the chain of command to the Air Force general on the ground in Dhahran.
The Pentagon brass in Washington, and the U.S. Central Command, which directs American forces in Saudi Arabia, provided no guidance or security training standards to protect the airmen in Dhahran. Intelligence reports about terrorist threats, including indications that the Khobar Towers apartment complex was under surveillance by terrorists, were not acted on aggressively enough by the Air Force commander in Dhahran, Brig. Gen. Terry Schwalier.
In an assessment of his work in Dhahran that Schwalier completed just hours before the bombing, he did not even mention security issues, despite several warnings during his yearlong tour that the apartment compound was particularly vulnerable to a terrorist strike.
Contrary to initial Pentagon accounts that Saudi authorities persistently blocked additional security measures, the Downing inquiry found that no serious effort had been made by General Schwalier to extend the narrow security perimeter of the apartment compound. That common-sense step would have made the buildings less vulnerable to a powerful truck bomb. Even the simplest safety measure, covering the apartment windows with plastic film to prevent them from shattering in an explosion, was put off. Wounds from flying glass were a major factor in the deaths of 12 Americans.
The inattention to security is astonishing. The Downing report shows that all the exculpatory Pentagon talk of unanticipated threats and unexpectedly powerful bombs is folderol. The problem was negligence. After the Beirut bombing and the unflinching investigation that followed it, plus last year's terrorist attack on American military offices in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, there is no plausible excuse for inadequate security.
Those responsible for the feeble security measures at the Khobar complex must be held accountable, including the senior civilian officials and generals who considered terrorism a secondary threat. Cashiering or court-martialing junior officers, the Pentagon's favored way of assigning blame after a serious failure, will not suffice in this case.
Given the Defense Department's dismal security record, including the lax performance of Defense Secretary William Perry and Gen. John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the joint chiefs, the White House and Congress must keep close watch on the latest security enhancement program outlined by Perry on Monday.
His plan to set rigorous security standards, give antiterrorism efforts a higher profile in the military and make better use of intelligence sounds sensible in theory. The real test is whether it is carried out more effectively than similar programs initiated after earlier attacks.
It should not have taken another truck bombing to get the attention of the Pentagon. More American servicemen, 265, have been killed in three terrorist attacks in the Middle East since 1982 than have died over the same period in combat operations worldwide, including Grenada, Panama, Somalia and the Persian Gulf war.
-- The New York Times