The Truth Shall Set You Back

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.