Wednesday — January 28, 2004

Treating honesty
as a crime

Commentary by Pat Murphy

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The CIA’s George Tenet still has his job. Ditto presidential national security adviser Condileeza Rice and several of the subalterns who helped engineer the Bush presidency’s worst humiliations.

Tenet and Rice had a hand in President Bush’s State of the Union gaffe last year that Iraq was seeking nuclear materials in Africa. They also bolstered the president’s now discredited claim that Iraq posed an "imminent threat" with weapons of mass destruction.

But truthfulness by others is considered disloyalty.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was canned for warning Bush against further tax cuts. Now, farther down the bureaucratic chain of command, National Parks Service Police Chief Teresa Chambers is about to be fired for honesty with the public.

Chief Chambers was hauled into the Interior Department’s Park Service office and in the presence of subordinates stripped of her badge and pistol by deputy director Don Murphy and told to shut her mouth, go home and wait to be fired. Such theatrics are reminiscent of the French military ritual of ripping shoulder epaulettes from uniforms of disgraced officers.

Her crime? Chief Chambers truthfully answered a Washington Post reporter’s question—her force is under funded and undermanned and can’t provide proper security patrols around Washington’s monuments.

To the Interior Department, this was unthinkable "lobbying" of the media. How laughable, but not new. Remember Army Capt. James Yee, the Muslim chaplain, originally accused of espionage by the Pentagon, held in solitary confinement, then released and stuck with an adultery charge when higher ups couldn’t find evidence he was a spy and resorted to a trumped up charge to conceal their utter incompetent clumsiness?

The Bush administration gets snake bit whenever it avoids the truth or dishes out misinformation. The classic was the flight-suited president arriving by combat jet on an aircraft carrier emblazoned with the "Mission Accomplished" banner, only to be quickly eclipsed by more U.S. troops being killed in an upsurge of Iraqi terrorist attacks. And the repudiated weapons of mass destruction justification for attacking Iraq has returned to haunt the White House.

Another blunder is in the making if Park Service Police Chief Chambers is fired for leveling with the public instead of ladling out rosy deceptions about security. Such a turn of events would leave the impression that job security in the Bush administration requires dissembling and cheating the public out of straight talk.

This is malfeasance by disinformation and misinformation, the device of scheming authoritarian regimes that thrive on poorly informed citizens.

To the everlasting shame of their families, several recent presidents have lived to see their biographies rewritten to emphasize disgraceful misconduct in office and abuse of the public trust.

Perhaps he’s a hapless hostage to intellectual betters and clever manipulators around him. Yet, the record ascribed to President Bush of secrecy, deception, broken promises, favoritism and squandering national assets surely eliminates him from the roster of great American presidents.

 

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