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From the Editor
Untruth and Consequences
“William H. Webster, a former director of central intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has urged the Pentagon to inject truth serum into defiant Qaeda and Taliban prisoners.”
The New York Times, June 16, 2002
I nominate William Webster, alias Dr. Feel-Honest, as this year’s unwitting master ironist. Webster ran not one but both of the agencies now under scrutiny for the U.S. government’s failure to foresee and forestall the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He might more fruitfully give the serum to the super-sleuths and super-spies who failed to communicate the truth about what they knew to one another, or to the White House, over the course of at least a decade.
Let’s hope he and the rest of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, charged with shaping a Cabinet-level Homeland Security Department, home in on truth telling among those entrusted with ensuring Americans’ safety. The odds aren’t good, though, since the narrowest sense of “need to know” still prevails among Washington’s intelligence elite. In April, Webster, as head of a commission investigating FBI security failures in the wake of the Robert Hanssen spy case, recommended that operatives share sensitive information less readily, rather than more.
Truth serum could work wonders in diplomatic and policy-making circles. If it delivers, the rest of us might be spared surreal pronouncements about the heroic qualities of manifestly hapless or tyrannical leaders and their variously lawless, corrupt, or failed regimes.
When the Bush administration embraced Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a partner against terror, it buried its earlier criticism of Putin’s war in Chechnya and his questionable commitment to democratic basics. Bush’s previous fixation on a missile-defense system gave way to endorsement of the Moscow Treaty, according to which each nation would shrink its nuclear arsenal to a mere 1,700 to 2,200 warheads. While Washington-Moscow communiqués now flow with warm talk about dispelling the Cold War miasma that long befogged U.S-Russia relations, reports persist that nuclear material floats freely around the former Soviet republics, turning up in Georgian forests and Central Asian weapons bazaars.
The first step to stop worrying and ban the bomb might be a liberal dose of truth serum for the new treaty’s architects, followed by a conversation focusing on the fact that their plans retain enough weaponry to destroy Earth and a few other planets. Next I would query Bush and Putin as the would-be arbiters of the would-be conflagration over Kashmir. They have been exhorting Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf and India’s Atal Behari Vajpayee to retreat from the abyss of all-out war. But in all their diplomatic shuttling, the putative peacemakers remained mum on the insanity of the South Asian nations’ nuclear arms race.
Imagine what a truth-serum session might elicit from Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Armitage about Gen. Musharraf’s post-Sept. 11 makeover. As they jockeyed Pakistan into place as an instant ally, they began burnishing his image in a Jeffersonian mode, winking at the general’s central role in making Afghanistan—and Pakistan—safe for Islamist extremists.
I haven’t even gotten to the Middle East, but you can see that the truth-serum idea holds promise as a domestic and international panacea—an antidote to 21st-century Newspeak, limited only by the size of the serum stockpile.
