by Russ Baker
Signs of Intelligence
This obsession involved a double standard of no small proportions. While the administration sought to protect its own secrets at all costs, it wanted to know everything about everyone else, including ordinary citizens. As the extent of the administration’s spying came out, it became clear that the White House had skipped even the modest requirement that a judge be consulted on domestic surveillance cases—modest because over 99 percent of applications submitted for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approval are approved each year.7 Bush and Cheney didn’t like that law, so they just ignored it. Even telecommunications companies had been persuaded—or strong-armed—to turn over private records of their customers.8
Anyone who had lived in an authoritarian or totalitarian society might have felt a chill of recognition. Few could feel comfortable knowing that a Karl Rove might have access to their personal data. Reassurances from the White House were not helped by the cavalier leaking of the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame as retribution when Joseph Wilson, her husband and a former diplomat, blew the whistle on the administration’s falsification of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.9 The Plame affair showed the administration’s willingness to effectively shoot one of its own soldiers to advance strategic ends. The White House even covered up the actual shooting of a soldier—hiding the fact that the heroic professional football player Pat Tillman, who had volunteered for Afghanistan duty after 9/11, died not at the hands of the enemy but by “friendly fire.”
Politicization of intelligence was also apparent in W.’s appointments to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), a little-known entity with superhigh security clearances. W. initially followed the family course and selected Brent Scowcroft, his father’s national security adviser, to be chairman. But he forced out Scowcroft in 2004, after the retired general’s criticism of W.’s Iraq occupation began to circulate publicly. The new chairman was James Langdon, the energy lawyer who played a role in W.’s Texas Rangers deal.
It is common for big donors to get places on the PFIAB, but W. went whole hog.10 Bill Clinton had appointed a former secretary of defense, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a former Speaker of the House. W.’s picks included his old oil company rescuer and Rangers baseball partner William DeWitt, and also Ray Hunt, the Dallas oil billionaire who was a major financial backer of W.’s. As a member of the Halliburton board, Hunt had played a major role in determining CEO Dick Cheney’s lucrative pay package. The oilman’s former top aide James Oberwetter was appointed as W.’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Hunt, sitting on a gold mine of secret information at PFIAB, would, coincidentally or not, obtain an exclusive drilling contract in the Kurdish parts of Iraq after the invasion.11
The primacy of connections over qualifications was underscored when W. chose his old friend and top fund-raiser Don Evans to join Hunt on the board. After leaving his post as commerce secretary, Evans briefly considered an offer to run a large Russian oil company. In the end, that was deemed too controversial for a Bush lieutenant, and instead Evans became CEO of the Financial Services Forum, an organization representing twenty giant financial institutions from around the world that do business in the United States.
The growing role of the corporate world in spying was underlined in 2007, when the government revealed that 70 percent of its intelligence bud-get was contracted out to private firms. In essence, the Bush administration was putting the most secretive part of government into outside hands with little oversight.
AUTHORITARIANISM THRIVES IN a climate of fear, and the administration invoked fear continually. Fear justified invading Iraq; fear justified spying on American citizens; fear was the trump card in vanquishing political opposition. In July 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that America’s terrorist watch list had hit one million names. One month later, a congressional investigation concluded that a half-billion-dollar emergency program to retool the flawed watch list was “on the brink of collapse.”12
But when it came to security, there was the usual exemption for large corporate entities. Though grandmothers were strip-searched at airports, the Bush team resisted calls for more stringent security at ports, power and chemical plants, and other vulnerable sites. Otherwise, the tattoo of terror was relentless, especially during the political high season. There was a steady stream of warnings, often in the form of so-called orange alerts, in the months leading up to the 2004 election. Even when other nations found potential terrorists, the administration sought political gains, in one case prompting complaints from the British that the White House was pushing for premature arrests before full intelligence gains had been realized.13
The psychology of fear tends to seep outward, and to justify ever greater intrusions. It was a short step from perceived security threats to the political inconvenience of oppositional speech. W. made it a pressing objective to put an ideologue in charge of “reforming” the Public Broadcasting Service—not so much for its purportedly liberal bias, but simply because it exhibited indepenence.14 In one of many examples of what certainly looks like harassment of critics, Jim Moore, the journalist who first asked W. about his National Guard record, found himself on a no-fly list.15 And so he joined a long list of people— from Bill Burkett to Bill White to John Kerry—who had challenged the Bush apparatus and suffered the consequences.
The Hackocracy
Bush and Cheney had campaigned on the conservative principle of limited government. But their actions upon attaining office showed that they weren’t interested in limited government, so much as in one that was theirs. This was evident in many ways: the intrusions on basic American rights such as voting; state sanctioning of some religions through government “faith-based” contracts and other policies; the cynical uses of power for political expediency and personal enrichment; the secrecy that withheld the people’s business from the people; the cronyism and self-dealing that treated government and its bounty as a personal entitlement and fiefdom.
Republican National Committee chairman Kenneth Mehlman was not subtle about this: “One of the things that can happen in Washington when you work in an agency is that you forget who sent you there. And it’s important to remind people—you’re George Bush people . . . If there’s one empire I want built, it’s the George Bush empire.”16 The quaint notion that federal employees are actually responsible to the people who pay their salaries seems to have gone down the drain as well.
To be sure, they continued to invoke the banner hoisted by GOP activist Grover Norquist, who famously declared, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” But in practice, the only parts that went down the drain were the ones that were distasteful to friends. The Food and Drug Administration, the agency that monitors the safety of what Americans put into their bodies, faced drastic Budget cuts and restrictions in its abilities to inspect products before they went to market.17 At one congressional hearing, former FDA chief counsel Peter Barton Hutt said the agency was “barely hanging on by its fingertips.” He begged for more funding and skilled personnel.18
Faced with the overwhelming evidence of climate change, the Bush administration seemed content to pass the buck. Though the Supreme Court provided the Environmental Protection Agency with the power to create emissions standards for motor vehicles, EPA administrator Stephen Johnson found that even his agency’s modest suggestions fell on deaf White House ears. He had his staff write a draft of new regulations for limiting carbon emissions, but once sent to the White House, it “fell into a black hole.”19
Nearly every federal agency became politicized. The regulated were controlling the regulators, and cooking the books. A few career employees were willing to speak out. At NASA, leading climate scientist James Hansen revealed how the White House had worked to suppress the truth about climate change.20 David Kuo, former deputy director of the office of faith-based initiatives, claimed that the White House
used taxpayer funds to plan events that recruited evangelical votes for the Republicans.
Government spending mainly took a hit in areas such as food stamps, energy assistance, community development, public housing, and the like. But once the Bush team had inflicted pain on the needy, they opened the public spigot of largesse for their friends. The well-connected benefited from contracts, jobs, and the indulgence of forbearing regulators. Financial institutions were rewarded for recklessness. Just as Poppy Bush had sheltered savings and loan executives from the consequences of their own greed, W. bailed out big investment houses such as Bear Stearns that had rewarded their executives with giant bonuses for taking even bigger—and ultimately dangerous—risks with other people’s money. These moves violated the bedrock conservative principle that people must bear the consequences for their own actions. Yet these gamblers were taken care of, and W. himself was never made to answer for the policy. Even a measure presented as in the public interest, like the Medicare prescription benefit plan, was essentially a political play, with a Cinderella’s slipper for the pharmaceutical industry thrown in.
In 2007, W. vetoed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), which would have utilized an increased tobacco tax to provide health coverage to millions of uninsured children. Bush’s decision reflected his distaste for anything resembling universal health care. “After all,” the president suggested, “you [can] just go to an emergency room.”21 As Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out, the S-CHIP program would have cost less over five years than the country spends on four months in Iraq. So W.’s opposition to the program was philosophical in nature. After all, if the nation were to experience a federal health care program that worked, what would stop people from demanding universal health care?
Krugman saw this as representing a fundamental Bush doctrine:
He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.22
W.’s crony statism and his contempt for regulation helped plunge the nation into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Even before the crash of 2008, he presided over the poorest job-creation rate in modern history. And according to a series of USA Today–Gallup polls, only once in Bush’s eight-year reign did even a slight majority of respondents characterize the economy as “excellent” or “good” rather than “fair” or “poor.”23
The cronyism was rampant, the corruption rife. The name of the GOP’s favorite super-lobbyist and fixer, Jack Abramoff, became a synonym for “business as usual.” If one did not believe in government by the people to begin with—as the Bush crew didn’t—what difference did such behavior make? How can one degrade that which one already holds in contempt? The result was evident in scandals large and small. Every week came new revelations about no-bid contracts awarded to contributors, loyal functionaries hired despite dubious qualifications, regulations and data skewed on behalf of powerful industries, and on and on.
For the cooperative and the connected, lack of qualifications was no bar. It became so evident that the New Republic devoted an entire issue to indexing the Bush “hackocracy.”24 A typical appointment was Julie Myers, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Homeland Security Department. Ms. Myers is the niece of General Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She had recently married the chief of staff for Michael Chertoff, who was secretary of Homeland Security. This led Frank Rich to label the appointment a “nepotistic twofer.”25 Even conservative columnist Michelle Malkin noted, “Great contacts, but what exactly are the 36-year-old lawyer’s main credentials to solve . . . dire national security problems?” She answered: “Zip, Nada, Nil.”26 Myers’s main qualification: working for Kenneth Starr, the man who prosecuted the Monica Lewinsky case.
Regulatory agencies hung out the sign: Foxes, Report to Henhouse Duty. All manner of chemical, nuclear, and coal industry executives and the like rushed in to provide oversight of their former (and future) employers.
Even when the administration seemed to be taking care of ordinary people, there was always a skunk at the picnic’s close. The historic overhaul of Medicare was within a few years marred by revelations of fraud and improper payments to medical equipment manufacturers, to the tune of $2.8 billion.27
All in the Family
It seemed there was always room at the table for contributors and friends. It wasn’t just the occasional Billy Carter or Roger Clinton who regarded the White House as a winning lottery ticket. It was an entire clan that had built its political rhetoric around the need to curb government spending.
The dossier is thick. Back in 1985, while Poppy was vice president, third son Neil Mallon Bush had become a director of the Silverado Savings and Loan. Soon he was embroiled in one of the biggest financial scandals in U.S. history—one that cost taxpayers about one billion dollars.28 In February 1993, a month after Poppy Bush left office, the World Trade Center was bombed. In the wake of that, an American firm with Kuwaiti backing got a contract to provide security to the buildings, and Poppy’s fourth son, Marvin, joined the board, remaining until 2000. W.’s brother Jeb, the one Poppy and Barbara thought would rise highest, set up shop in Miami and established strong ties to the right-wing Cuban exile community. He was quickly brought under the wing of Armando Codina, a real estate developer and longtime political supporter of the family and its staunch backing of the Cuba embargo; Jeb got a 40 percent share of the real estate company’s profits without investing in the firm. The duo were bailed out for a loan default with taxpayers footing the bill, in excess of $3 million.29
With a Bush back in the White House, the process required a bit more subtlety. Neil Bush, brother of the “education president,” backed by money from Kuwait and elsewhere, was busy selling educational software to the Saudis.30 William “Bucky” Bush, Poppy’s younger brother and W.’s uncle, sat on the board of ESSI, a St. Louis–based firm that received multiple no-bid contracts from the Pentagon.31 One was for equipment to help search for—and protect soldiers from—what turned out to be Iraq’s nonexistent store of chemical and biological weapons.32 Friends of the family also got a piece of the taxpayer’s dollar. Ernie Ladd, W.’s faithful buddy since his days supervising Bush’s community service at Project PULL in inner-city Houston, started getting military contracts for spray-on plastic coating.33
And then of course there was Poppy. After leaving the White House, he began accepting handouts from grateful past beneficiaries of one generation of Bushes and those hopeful for largesse from the next. In 1998, Poppy addressed an audience in Tokyo on behalf of telecom company Global Crossing and accepted stock in the soon-to-go-public corporation in lieu of his normal $100,000 overseas speaking fee. Within a year, that stock was worth $14.4 million.34
Poppy also became an adviser to, and speechmaker for, the Carlyle Group, a secretive private equity firm that made its name buying low-valued defense contractors, using connections to secure government contracts, then selling the firms at huge profits. Poppy joined Carlyle in 1995 and earns between $80,000 and $100,000 per speech on its behalf.35 As a former president with access to CIA briefings, Poppy is an indispensable asset to Carlyle. “Imagine what a global enterprise, that does large amounts of business with arms contractors and foreign governments, could do with weekly CIA briefings,” wrote business journalist Dan Briody, author of a book on the Carlyle Group.36
Whether or not Carlyle was a direct beneficiary of inside information, the company’s investors have made more than $6.6 billion off the Iraq War. Referring to the beginning of the war, Carlyle’s chief investment officer said: “It’s the best eighteen months we ever had. We made money and we made it fast.”37
The myriad cozy financial deals involving Bush
es and their friends and associates have attracted only sporadic media interest. This is in contrast to the frenzied coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investment in the Arkansas real estate venture Whitewater. The couple actually lost money in the deal, and an independent investigation headed by Clinton nemesis Kenneth Starr found no evidence of illegality. Other Democrats, in particular Barack Obama, saw every aspect of their personal lives scrutinized, often with the most nefarious possible interpretation.
The Bush crew’s political operation required exemption from, and therefore control over, the law. Thus the infamous White House crusade to fire uncooperative United States attorneys—the highest prosecutors, each supervising his or her own regional office. Most of the targets, though loyal Republicans, had refused to pursue prosecutions that were overtly political in nature.38 Even when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stepped down in the scandal’s wake, his nominally independent-minded replacement, Michael Mukasey, declined to pursue charges against the Justice Department. “Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime,” he said.39 That same approach helped former Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, whose jail sentence was commuted after he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame case.
In 2005, W. nominated Harriet Miers, his friend and fellow Texan, to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court—even though she had never before served as a judge and lacked distinction among her legal peers. Miers’s main qualification was that she had handled some of W.’s most delicate matters in the 1990s. In W.’s gubernatorial campaign, Miers “was deemed to be just the right person to inoculate George W. Bush against any further inquiries into his legal and business dealings.”40 As detailed in chapter 18, it was Miers who helped Bush escape scrutiny for his membership in the controversial Rainbo Club. Thus, even the highest court in the land was to house a Bush family enforcer.
