#3 - JRL 8344 - JRL Home
Moscow Times
August 27, 2004
Editorial
The Public Has a Right to Know

The question of whether the two airliners that crashed Tuesday night killing all 89 people aboard were brought down by terrorists or some other cause is fast becoming a rhetorical one.

The Federal Security Service says its examination of the wreckage has yielded no evidence of an explosion or a terrorist attack. But the circumstantial evidence of terrorism is mounting, starting with President Vladimir Putin's decision to assign the investigation to the Federal Security Service, the government's lead anti-terrorism agency. Putin also ordered the Interior Ministry to take charge of providing security at the country's airports.

On Wednesday, Sibir announced that someone inside the cabin of its Sochi-bound aircraft, which went down near Rostov-on-Don, sent a hijacking alert to ground control. The plane's wreckage was strewn over a wide area, suggesting that the plane had blown up in the air, the airline said.

And on Thursday Vladimir Yakovlev, Putin's envoy in southern Russia, said terrorism remained the most likely cause of the crashes. Yakovlev said information recorded in the black boxes of both planes broke off abruptly, providing "the main affirmation that something happened very quickly."

Russian newspapers played up the terrorism angle, several calling the crashes Russia's 9/11.

We may never know exactly what caused the two planes to fall from the sky or whether investigators have pursued all the available leads in order to determine if Tuesday's tragedy was caused by terrorists, human error or a mechanical malfunction. Whatever they conclude, the time has come for the public to ask some hard questions. Are Russia's intelligence and law enforcement agencies optimally structured for fighting terrorism? Do they cooperate effectively? Is their performance scrupulously evaluated? Are the personnel in these agencies properly trained and supervised? Do they have the funding and powers they need to get the job done?

The public and the parliament cannot answer these questions because adequate civilian oversight of the intelligence and law enforcement community is lacking. It seems unlikely that even Putin, who is nominally in charge of all these agencies, knows the whole story, because no commission is known to have conducted a comprehensive review of their structure, budget, leadership, personnel or ability to cooperate. The overall performance of these agencies has never been independently assessed.

Major threats to national security in developed democracies lead almost automatically to a search for solutions that involves not just the government, but the academic community, the press and the public at large. The authorities establish nonpartisan commissions of experts in an effort to determine how best to respond to such threats in the future, as was the case in the United States after Sept. 11.

This sort of broad discussion produces a wide range of policy options and recommendations that the country's leadership can draw upon, be it the complete overhaul of the intelligence services, as has been proposed in the United States, or calls for bigger budgets and more agents.

In Russia, however, discussion of law enforcement, the military and the security services is increasingly suppressed under the pretext of safeguarding the swelling domain of state secrets. Instead, the president asks these agencies to reform themselves, offering only such guidelines as a cap on the number of deputy ministers they can have.

This approach has been repeated time and again, even though it is an axiom of public administration theory that when bureaucracies are asked to reform themselves they respond by asking for more staff and more money.

The federal government responds to each new catastrophe and terrorist attack by giving the intelligence and law enforcement agencies more money and broader powers. And the parliament obediently approves its requests. But taxpayers are kept in the dark about how efficiently these agencies operate and how they spend the money they already have.

Occasionally, legislators offer their own proposals. Valery Draganov, head of the State Duma committee on the economy, believes that the crashes Tuesday were caused by mechanical error, and has proposed that in order to improve safety, all of Russia's airlines should combined into a single, Soviet-style monopoly.

The point is not that the current system doesn't work at all. Law enforcement and the security services have thwarted a number of terrorist attacks, and no government is capable of stopping every attack. The problem is that we have no way of knowing when an attack might have been averted had it not been for poor intelligence or tactics, lack of cooperation or insufficient resources.

The current policy of regularly broadening the already enormous power wielded by the intelligence and law enforcement communities and increasing their budgets will function at peak efficiency only if Russia once again becomes a totalitarian state in which everyone is encouraged, if not required, to inform on everyone else. Even the hardliners who dream of a return to totalitarianism know that this cannot happen without enormous sacrifices.

The people have a right to know what is being done to protect them and to have a say in shaping the policies aimed at ensuring their safety.