From The Los Angeles Times, 1/13/05:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-carlson13jan13,1,4437220.column
The Truth Shall Set You Back
Lying is no sin for Bush's minions.
By Margaret Carlson
At CBS, four high-level people (five, if you count Dan Rather giving
up his anchor chair) have been fired for being taken in by phony
documents.
You may not think that's enough, but what strikes me is how rare such
firings are.
When there's lying, cheating and stealing on Wall Street, a prosecutor
has to have the corporate executive dead to rights -- at Fannie Mae,
at Marsh & McLennan, at Sanford Weill's Citigroup -- before heads
roll.
And even then the dismissals are generally accompanied by a payday so
lavish it would make Croesus blush.
It is not surprising that an administration that rose so directly from
corporate America would operate the same way.
Has anyone, for instance, lost his job for being wrong about weapons
of mass destruction or for failing to put enough troops in place to
secure Iraq before a deadly insurgency could take hold?
In the Bush administration, you lose your job not for lying but for
telling the truth, as the axing of Gen. Eric Shinseki and economic
advisor Lawrence Lindsey shows.
No wonder most government officials wait until they're former
officials before speaking out, as former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill and former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke
did.
Those who speak in real time are soon gone.
Consider the case of the Department of Homeland Security's former
inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin.
When Ervin, a Republican and a Harvard Law School graduate, reported
that only 6% of oceangoing cargo was being inspected, that known
felons were operating airport checkpoints, that no consolidated
terrorist watch list had been compiled and that the managers
responsible for these failures had been feted at a lavish awards
ceremony that cost half a million dollars, the White House allowed his
appointment to lapse, costing him his job, according to Susan Collins
(R-Maine), the Senate Government Affairs Committee chairwoman.
The opposite happened over at the inspector general's office at the
Department of Health and Human Services.
The IG there decided it was perfectly fine for former Medicare chief
Thomas Scully to repeatedly threaten to fire a subordinate if he dared
tell Congress (which had asked) that the prescription drug bill would
cost nearly $200 billion more than the president was letting on.
The subordinate's silence carried the day.
It wasn't until after the bill passed with the vote of 13 Republican
deficit hawks (who had sworn they couldn't vote for a bill costing
more than $400 billion) that President Bush said, oops, the price was
$534 billion after all.
Then there's poor Dr. David Graham, who wouldn't keep silent over at
the Food and Drug Administration.
When Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) called him to Congress to
testify, the Yale-trained physician said Merck and the FDA had ignored
studies that showed Vioxx doubling the risk of heart attack.
Graham estimated that 55,000 people had died as a result.
Dr. Sandra Kweder, deputy director of the FDA's Office of New Drugs,
insisted nonetheless that "our system works very well."
Protected by civil service laws, Graham still has his job, but he says
he has been made to feel "that I'm an enemy, a traitor, a pariah."
Graham shouldn't be a pariah.
He should get the Medal of Freedom.
Unfortunately, Bush gives those medals to people who keep their mouths
shut, like L. Paul Bremer III, who got one for not saying until he
retired that Bush hadn't sent enough troops to Iraq.
Another went to former CIA Director George Tenet, who provided on
request the "slam-dunk" pretext for the war Bush was determined to
wage.
With that medal around his neck, will Tenet also be a
less-than-forthcoming memoirist in the book for which he reportedly
got a $4-million advance?
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales has put off telling the truth,
perhaps forever.
He went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and pretended he didn't
mean the things he wrote in his memo calling the Geneva Convention
"quaint" and "obsolete," and that, in any event, he just hates
torture.
However, when asked whether torture could be used by U.S. personnel
under any circumstances, he said he didn't think so, but "I'd want to
get back to you on that."
Like Tenet and other architects of the war in Iraq, Gonzales gave the
president what he wanted and is now being rewarded for it.
Abu Ghraib was indeed a rogue operation, but as the female private
with the leash heads to trial, we shouldn't forget for a minute that
the real rogues who let it happen are in the administration.
For his counsel, Gonzales will be elevated to attorney general, a post
where he will be the symbol of justice in this country.
He's lucky he doesn't work at CBS.
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"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
Aldous Huxley
Harry
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