[Mb-civic] The Truth Shall Set You Back

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-carlson13jan13.story

MARGARET CARLSON

The Truth Shall Set You Back

Lying is no sin for Bush's minions.
 Margaret Carlson

 January 13, 2005

 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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