The Sum of Our Fears

June 9, 2002

by Brian W. Peterson

Indeed, it is the sum of all our fears. After the demise of the Soviet Union, most people allowed the thought of such a nightmare to be banished from their brains. September 11 changed all that. We are once again thinking about the possibility of a nuclear attack on America.

Ironically, The Sum of All Fears was written by Tom Clancy and made into a film before that tragic day. But given the events of that infamous day, the film is even more relevant than it would have been otherwise.

We live in a society relatively free from government intrusion. We need not seek permission to relocate or travel across the nation, nor to enter into various personal and business agreements. We send and receive mail at will and communicate with whom we please.

This freedom of movement also makes it easier for those with evil designs to move freely, to enter into agreements and communicate freely.

We have two options: we can limit the freedoms - severely so - of the law-abiding in order to stop evildoers, or we can strengthen our domestic intelligence-gathering efforts toward those known to collaborate with our enemies. Allowing the latter does not necessarily result in the former.

Ghosts of FBI’s past have been resurrected to oppose the new guidelines which will allow the Bureau to monitor public activity. Horrors have been re-aired of the bad old days when the FBI monitored such people as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Glossed over in the civil libertarian panic is the reason why the FBI kept tabs on King. President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy each personally warned the civil rights leader that one of his close associates had regular dealings with the KGB and another close associate was a ranking member in the Communist Party USA. Even the Kennedy brothers could not convince King to disassociate himself from such men.

No less than Sen. Frank Church, the man perhaps most responsible for the current impotence of our intelligence-gathering abilities, when fully briefed on the King situation, stated, “I am satisfied that there was every reason in the world for the FBI to be investigating King.”

Also lost in the furor of altering the procedures of the Bureau is that decision-making will be made in the field - not in Washington, far from reality. When the CIA changed protocol away from the field in favor of the Washington bureaucracy, thanks in large part to Sen. Robert Torricelli, (D- NJ), our intelligence-gathering capabilities suffered while politicians feigned surprise at the lack of intelligence information.

If the new FBI guidelines had been implemented pre-9/11, warnings of an impending attack would have been at least considered, if not acted upon. “Twentieth Hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui would have been investigated by the FBI unit in Minnesota. Arab men at flight schools would have been investigated. Field agents would have been free to operate without the shackles of Washington’s political correctness.

The “old way” of structuring our intelligence-gathering agencies served us well in the Cold War, but those days are gone. The bureaucracy now hinders the agents and the lack of communication hinders the messages. The old must give way to the new.

The Sum of All Fears is not about the horrors of a nuclear explosion on American soil, rather an entertaining story about a bright and far-sighted CIA analyst who tries to stop a nuclear war from commencing. But the film also subtly points out the difficulty in stopping what may be inevitable - the arrival in one of our cities of a nuclear device.

We can accept this inevitability and go about our lives until the day comes when we lose a million or so fellow countrymen, or we can move forward with reforming our intelligence agencies and welcome the hunt for our enemies who dwell among us.

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Brian W. Peterson writes a political column for the Antelope Valley Press (circulation approximately 60,000) in Palmdale, California. He is a graduate of Oral Roberts University, where he majored in TV/Film. Brian’s weekly commentary and newspaper columns can be found at www.LifeAndLiberty.com.

Send the author an E mail at Peterson@ConservativeTruth.org.

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