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Have you noticed what's happening to chief executives who lie ?
The Professionals' Revolt
First Arsenic, Now Mercury .
Have you noticed what's happening to chief executives who lie ?
They are going on trial and they are going to prison.
They are discovering that no matter what floor the executive suite is on, it is not above the law.
We who signed this page are business people. We are painfully aware that if America's institutions are ever to win back public confidence, lying and abuse of trust in high places must be punished.
Which brings us to the Oval Office of George W. Bush.
This weekend happens to be the first anniversary of the President's war on Iraq. It is a war which has already cost America 566 precious lives and 125 billion dollars.
We now know that the case the President made for his war was built entirely on falsehoods.
There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction. There was no stockpile of chemical weapons. There were no mobile biological weapons labs. There was no uranium from Niger. Saddam Hussein was not in league with Osama bin Laden. He was not an "imminent" threat. He was not a "grave" or "gathering" threat. He was a vicious but petty tyrant, defanged by a decade of sanctions, surveillance, inspections and air attacks.
The terrible, terrible cost of this state-sponsored deception already dwarfs the damage done by the worst corporate scandals. What price tag can ever be put on lives unnecessarily lost, soldiers crippled, soldiers scarred for life ? How can we honor their sacrifice ? How do we commemorate the anniversary of a lie ?
It's past time for finger pointing. It's time for someone in this government to step forward and take personal responsibility for the deadly deceptions used to mislead this great nation into war. And that someone must be George W. Bush.
This text was a full page ad in the New York Times on Monday, March 22, 2004. It was signed by "Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities", of whom the President is Ben Cohen, founder of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. To learn more, visit their website at truemajority.com.
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, March 24, 2004; Page A21
Just a few minutes after 8 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, with the bombs still falling on Pearl Harbor, Pacific Fleet intelligence officer Lt. Cmdr. Edwin Layton, who'd been predicting a Japanese attack for that very weekend, was scurrying through fleet headquarters when two of his superiors stopped him. "Here is the young man we should have listened to," said Capt. Willard Kitts, the fleet gunnery officer. "If it's any satisfaction to you," added Capt. Charles "Soc" McMorris, the fleet war plans officer, "you were right and we were wrong."
You can read any number of accounts of our latter Day of Infamy, Sept. 11, 2001, without coming across any equivalent verbal acknowledgments addressed to Richard Clarke, the chief of counterterrorism in the Clinton and second Bush administrations, who'd been predicting a major al Qaeda attack on the United States to the point that some colleagues thought him obsessed. But, then, an assault from al Qaeda did not fit into the Bush administration's view of the world. Just one day later, the president was directing Clarke's attention to Iraq, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was all but insisting that the proper response to al Qaeda's murder of thousands of Americans was to bulldoze Baghdad. Acknowledging that Clarke had been right might mean that there was more to heaven and earth than the neocons had dreamt of in their philosophies.
But Clarke did receive a huge if unspoken acknowledgment on the morning of Sept. 11: National security adviser Condoleezza Rice declined to run the so-called principals meeting in the White House Situation Room, choosing Clarke instead to coordinate the urgent information-gathering and to formulate the security responses to put before the president. Rice repaired, with Dick Cheney, to the White House basement's bomb shelter. A hijacked plane over Pennsylvania was headed toward Washington, and the rest of the White House evacuated at full sprint -- with the exception of Clarke and a handful of security professionals, who remained in the West Wing to continue their work.
But the security professionals who stayed at their station on Sept. 11 soon found they had philosophical differences with the neos in the shelter. They were empiricists: They took in as much information as they could and derived their conclusions on that basis. And, as Clarke and many of his fellow professionals were soon to discover, this has been a tough administration for empiricists.
Step back a minute and look at who has left this administration or blown the whistle on it, and why. Clarke enumerates a half-dozen counterterrorism staffers, three of whom were with him in the Situation Room on Sept. 11, who left because they felt the White House was placing too much emphasis on the enemy who didn't attack us, Iraq, and far too little on the enemy who did.
But that only begins the list. There's Paul O'Neill, whose recent memoir recounts his ongoing and unavailing battle to get the president to take the skyrocketing deficit seriously. There's Christie Todd Whitman, who appears in O'Neill's memoir recalling her own unsuccessful struggles to get the White House to acknowledge the scientific data on environmental problems. There's Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, who told Congress that it would take hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to adequately secure postwar Iraq. There's Richard Foster, the Medicare accountant, who was forbidden by his superiors from giving Congress an accurate assessment of the cost of the administration's new program. All but Foster are now gone, and Foster's sole insurance policy is that Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress were burnt by his muzzling.
In the Bush administration, you're an empiricist at your own peril. Plainly, this has placed any number of conscientious civil servants -- from Foster, who totaled the costs on Medicare, to Clarke, who charted the al Qaeda leads before Sept. 11 -- at risk. In a White House where ideology trumps information time and again, you run the numbers at your own risk. Nothing so attests to the fundamental radicalism of this administration as the disaffection of professionals such as Foster and Clarke, each of whom had served presidents of both parties.
The revolt of the professionals poses a huge problem for the Bush presidency precisely because it is not coming from its ideological antagonists. Clarke concludes his book making a qualified case for establishing a security sub-agency within the FBI that would be much like Britain's MI5 -- a suggestion clearly not on the ACLU's wish list. O'Neill wants a return to traditional Republican budget-balancing. The common indictment that these critics are leveling at the administration is that it is impervious to facts. That's a more devastating election year charge than anything John Kerry could come up with.
America learned this week that tuna, and many other fish, can contain harmful levels of toxic mercury. Forty-five states already post warnings of mercury contamination in their lakes and streams. So why is President Bush trying to weaken controls on mercury pollution?
It's déjà vu all over again. Early in his presidency, George Bush tried to allow more arsenic in drinking water. Now, he wants the EPA to let coal-fired power plants treat their mercury pollution as "non-hazardous" even though mercury threatens pregnant women and children.
The Bush administration's ploy would allow coal-fired power plants to put more mercury into the air, where it rains down on lakes and oceans, is swallowed by fish, and could wind up on your plate. Exposure to mercury can cause learning disabilities and neurological damage in kids and the developing fetus.
Guess who is praising this scheme? Coal power companies, who are big mercury polluters and big political contributors, too.
The Mercury Money Trail
The big mercury polluters and their trade associations are aggressive political players in Washington. Their executives and PACs are also generous political donors. It's no surprise that the Bush administration is following the industry's script for weakening mercury regulations.
Last time around, President Bush had to back down on arsenic in the face of a massive outcry from people across the political spectrum.
Let's make history repeat itself.
Tell President Bush to get serious about reducing mercury pollution. Our kids deserve no less. Let the Bush administration and the EPA hear your voice about its proposed mercury rule. Go to www.nrdc.org, The Earth's Best Defense.
