Oath upheld, but at what cost?

By Dennis Byrne
Chicago Tribune

Whatever your politics or your views on the Iraq war, the admission by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee he knew that America was duped into a war, but remained silent because he was sworn to secrecy, was a stunner.

"At the time of this debate," he recently said on the Senate floor, "I was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. And I would read the headlines in the paper in the morning and watch the television newscasts and shake my head. ...

"The information we had in the Intelligence Committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn't believe it. ... So in my frustration, I sat on the floor of the Senate and listened to this heated debate about invading Iraq thinking the American people are being misled, they are not being told the truth."

As many in his home state know, the idea that Durbin could keep his mouth shut about anything is a stunner in itself. He has been known to shoot it off frequently and disastrously. Witness the time he made the inflammatory and false comparison of the U.S. military's treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the millions murdered by the Nazis, Soviet Gulags and Cambodia's Pol Pot.

So, what are we to think now? That Durbin willingly let thousands of Americans and uncounted thousands of Iraqis die when he knew the truth? Is he bringing it up now because he is seeking absolution? Was it just bravado, a childlike "I know what you don't know" moment? Was it a slip of the tongue; did he misspeak? Was it just a routine attempt to again make Bush administration officials look like liars, but he failed to think through the implications and consequences of what he was saying? Did it even occur to him that he was implicating every member of the Intelligence Committee for hiding the truth from the public?

Was Durbin's statement a fabrication? The assumption seems to be that this is a story that concerns only the right wing, because Durbin's statement received prominent play from the conservative Washington Times -- described (by liberals) as an "ultraconservative" publication -- from where it was picked up by conservative bloggers. Durbin's office played on a nasty right-winger theme; the first words of its written response were: "Right-wing publications of dubious integrity -- conservative blogs such as Power Line and the ultraconservative Washington Times ... " In other words, who is saying it is more important than what is being said.

Maybe Durbin's office should have looked harder because some liberal bloggers are even more upset with the idea that Durbin let President Bush get away with what they believe is an unconscionable lie. Was Durbin a part of the cabal? Do he and Vice President Dick Cheney have a secret handshake? They both have the same first names, have you noticed?

Actually, Durbin has stumbled onto a serious and difficult question: What was more important, his oath of silence or stopping a nation from going to a wrong, possibly, immoral war?

The question cannot be easily brushed aside. It is the kind of ethical question that comes up more frequently than we'd like, in both the public and private sectors. Durbin has inadvertently illustrated that such important questions are not always as black and white as antagonists would like to have them. We're all guilty of it, but few of us get to be guilty on such a monumental scale.

What if Durbin had stood up in 2003, before the war, and said: "As a member of the Intelligence Committee, I have access to secret intelligence reports. What you are being told by Bush, the British and most Western intelligence agencies are lies. If you don't believe me, here are the documents. Yes, they're classified, but in a democracy, truth is more important than is whatever justifies keeping these documents secret."

An illegal act? Probably yes. A patriotic act? You might say. Yes, Durbin voiced his concern about the quality of intelligence and going to war, before the war started, as his office reminds us. Yes, he voted against going to war. But could he have changed the course of history? I don't know what Durbin should have done. An oath isn't to be taken lightly; President Bill Clinton found that out when he was impeached, accused of lying under oath. But if the Bush administration's lies were as apparent and real as Durbin now says they were, and so much death and suffering were the knowable outcome of the bad intelligence, doing nothing is not something I'd want on my conscience.