About face.

• Position: Defense Sec. nominee Bobby Ray Inman - Editorial

Bill Clinton's nomination of Bobby Ray Inman to be Secretary of Defense is the President's greatest capitulation yet--which is no mean feat. Even worse that the David Gergen appointment, the nod to Inman is not only a political retreat, it's also a shirking of constitutional responsibility.

Clinton was elected to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but he shows no interest in that role and no appetite for taking on the entrenched powers in the Pentagon and the armaments industry. Now he has simply abdicated to the very embodiment of the military-industrial complex.

Inman was the director of the sleuthy National Security Agency under Jimmy Carter. He was deputy director of the CIA under Ronald Reagan. Then he became a Pentagon contractor. His tenure in all these roles renders him unfit for the office to which Clinton has appointed him.

At the NSA, he was so obsessed with secrecy that even revealing the existence of the agency was a felony. What's more, under Inman, "the agency had a well-earned reputation for not only secretiveness but also a cavalier approach to civil liberties," Stephen Engelberg wrote in The New York Times. With its hightech eavesdropping capabilities, no citizen's privacy was secure.

At the CIA, Inman aided the death-squad government of El Salvador and participated in the secret war against the government of Nicaragua. As Anthony Lewis has pointed out, Inman eagerly lied about the Sandinistas, producing at one press conference bogus photographs to demonstrate that the Sandinistas had Soviet MIG fighters, which they did not. After Inman resigned from the CIA, he stayed on briefly as a consultant to the House Intelligence Committee. But he quit in a huff when the Committee dared to criticize the CIA and the State Department for inadequately investigating the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. That brutal mass-murder, conducted by the Salvadoran military, cost hundreds of Salvadoran lives. The Reagan Administration labored mightily to deny this fact, and Inman did his part in the unconscionable cover-up.

As a Pentagon contractor, Inman was an embarrassment. After he left the CIA, he served on the proxy board for International Signal & Control, a maker of cluster bombs, missiles, and aircraft. The head of this company was James Guerin, "now serving a...