Cohen Seeks Accountability for Cole

Wednesday, January 10th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

WASHINGTON (AP) â€” Defense Secretary William Cohen has asked his senior military adviser to review the findings of a special inquiry into the USS Cole bombing to see whether it raises questions about accountability among military commanders.

The Navy has already decided â€” though not announced publicly â€” that it does not intend to punish anyone, including the ship's captain, who was aboard the Cole when it was attacked by terrorists in Aden harbor in Yemen. The attack killed 17 sailors, seriously injured 39 and nearly sank the 505-foot destroyer off the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula.

Navy investigators found that the Cole's captain, Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, did not implement all security measures that were called for. Top Navy officials determined, however, that Lippold did all that could reasonably have been expected.

The question for Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will be whether anyone above Lippold in the chain of command should be held accountable. Cohen said Tuesday that he also asked Shelton to advise the next secretary of defense on how to implement the recommendations of a commission that reviewed the Oct. 12 terrorist incident.

In its report released Tuesday, the commission said the U.S. military must take more aggressive precautions against terrorist attacks abroad.

The commission did not assess the performance of the Cole's captain or crew or investigate why they failed to foresee the attack. Instead it sought to draw lessons from the incident for improving the protection of U.S. forces in transit around the world, particularly those â€” like the Cole â€” that make brief visits to remote ports and airfields.

The Cole was refueling in Aden harbor when a small boat maneuvered close without being challenged and detonated a load of explosives. The blast ripped a hole 40 feet high and 40 feet wide in the hull of the $1 billion warship in the first successful terrorist attack on a U.S. Navy ship.

The bombers had found a ``seam in the fabric'' of the Navy's system of self-protection, the Cole commission said, adding that the way to strengthen that fabric lies in improved anti-terrorism training, better intelligence and a recognition that terrorism is a pervasive threat.

``We do believe that this threat is enduring, it's dangerous, people are dying from it, it is not a transitory threat, it's not going away,'' said retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman, who co-chaired the commission with retired Army Gen. William Crouch.

Gehman said the transition team of defense secretary-designate Donald Rumsfeld has requested a briefing on the report.

Speaking at a Pentagon news conference with Gehman and Crouch, Cohen said U.S. investigators have yet to establish that the attack was orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi who is accused by Washington in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa. Even if such a link were found, military retaliation would not be the only U.S. option.

Gehman and Crouch released a condensed 10-page version of the Cole commission's findings and recommendations. A classified version runs 138 pages; Gehman said it contains details that must remain secret for security reasons.

Among the panel's main findings was that while anti-terrorist protections at fixed, permanent installations used by U.S. forces abroad are adequate, insufficient attention has been paid to such protections for U.S. forces in transit abroad. The report said the military services do too little to detect and deter terrorist threats before they can be carried out.

``We must get out of the purely defensive mode,'' the report said.

Cohen conceded, however, that ``even America's best efforts cannot remove every risk,'' and that U.S. troops will always be vulnerable to what the commission's report called ``a very adaptive, persistent, patient and tenacious terrorist.''

â€”â€”â€”

On the Net:

The commission report: http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/cole20010109.html

Cole site: http://www.spear.navy.mil/ships/ddg67/