Rolling Stone: Bush's Lap Dogs

[seafan]

Bush's Lap Dogs

By Tim Dickinson
October 31, 2007



Illustration by Victor Juhasz

IN OCTOBER, WITH OSAMA BIN LADEN still at large, the Central Intelligence Agency announced the creation of a new spy unit. Headed by a top deputy and staffed with a select corps of agents, the operation was charged with gathering intelligence on a single man — a foe who was threatening to undermine the president's War on Terror.

The CIA's new target? John Helgerson, the man appointed by President Bush to expose wrongdoing at the CIA. As inspector general of the agency, Helgerson came under attack from his superiors simply for trying to do his job: He was aggressively investigating torture at the CIA's secret prisons.

.....

But as the investigation of Helgerson makes clear, the administration is more interested in turning the watchdogs into lap dogs. Just as he politicized every other facet of government from FEMA to the Farm Bureau, President Bush has ignored the law and stocked the inspector general posts with inexperienced cronies. According to a study by the House Oversight Committee, more than a third of Bush's inspectors previously held a political post in the White House, compared to none of Bill Clinton's appointees. Judging from their résumés — deputy counsel to the Bush-Cheney transition team, special assistant to Trent Lott, senior counsel to Fred Thompson, daughter to Chief Justice William Rehnquist — Bush's appointees seem more qualified to be partisans at a neoconservative think tank than America's last line of defense against fraud and abuse. What's more, fewer than one-fifth of the inspectors appointed by Bush had previous experience as auditors, compared to two-thirds of Clinton's appointees. "The IGs have been politicized and dumbed down," said Rep. Brad Miller, oversight chair of the House science committee.

Rather than root out wrongdoing, Bush's appointees — men with nicknames like Moose and Cookie — have actually helped the White House cover up corrupt defense contracts, conceal the theft of sensitive rocket technology and whitewash a host of scandals from Abu Ghraib to Medicare prescription drugs. "Not only has this administration been aided in avoiding scrutiny by a compliant Republican Congress, they installed inspectors general who were not going to use their positions aggressively — if at all," says Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

Even worse, inspectors have often been hand-selected by the very Cabinet heads they are supposed to oversee — a practice that Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a lonely Republican voice for executive accountability, blasts as "directly contrary to the spirit of the law." As a result, the administration often treats inspectors more like employees than independent auditors. "Cabinet secretaries expect their inspectors general to be members of the 'team,' rather than watchdogs who call things as they see them," says Clark Kent Ervin, who came under fire as Bush's first inspector general in Homeland Security for exposing weaknesses in airport security.

NO ONE EPITOMIZES THE politicization of Bush's inspectors general more than Janet Rehnquist. The chief justice's daughter, who served as a former White House counsel to Bush's father, was named IG of the Department of Health and Human Services in 2001. She quickly eviscerated her own investigative staff, lightened penalties for fraudulent Medicare contractors and doled out political favors to the Bush clan. In 2002, in direct response to a request by Jeb Bush's chief of staff in Florida, Rehnquist postponed an embarrassing audit of the state's pension system until after Jeb's re-election.

.....

If Rehnquist fits a pattern of Bush nominees who, according to Grassley, "weren't qualified to do the job in the first place," Howard "Cookie" Krongard stands as a glaring example of those who "are qualified to do the job — but don't." Before being appointed IG of the State Department in 2005, Krongard had an impressive résumé, having served as general counsel for the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche. But far from putting that experience to work as inspector general, he has set about dismantling his own investigative team, which, according to House documents, currently has twenty vacancies for twenty-seven positions. "Under the current regime," Krongard's assistant inspector general for investigations wrote in an e-mail made public by the House Oversight Committee, orders are "to keep working the BS cases . . . and not rock the boat with more significant investigations." Most troubling, Krongard has stonewalled explosive allegations that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was built with the indentured labor of Filipino workers who were flown to Iraq at gunpoint. Rather than launch a formal investigation, Krongard announced he would personally tour the construction site — and then gave the contractor, First Kuwaiti, six months' advance notice of his visit and allowed the company to handpick the six employees he interviewed. In the summary report he dashed off to Congress, Krongard whitewashed the problem: "Nothing came to our attention," he wrote, "that caused us to believe" the allegations. At a July hearing, Krongard confessed to Congress that he took few notes during his "investigation," saying he didn't want to make the people he was investigating "uncomfortable."

.....

(continued)

[seafan]

1. "Always under the protection of the Almighty."

More

.....

ABUSES IN IRAQ WERE ALSO covered up by Joseph Schmitz, who served as Bush's inspector general at the Pentagon.

.....

Schmitz served Bush well as inspector general. In the wake of Abu Ghraib, he declared — without any formal investigation — that the scandal was the work of "bad eggs" in the junior ranks, not a direct result of the interrogation techniques approved by the president. He also turned a blind eye to war profiteering by contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater. "I haven't seen any real deliberate gouging of the American taxpayer," he said in 2004. "But we are looking."

.....

According to those who worked with him, Schmitz spent much of his time as inspector general obsessively researching the history of Baron Friedrich von Steuben, George Washington's inspector general for the Continental Army. He also devoted three months to personally redesigning the inspector general's official seal to incorporate von Steuben's family motto: "Always under the protection of the Almighty."

But Schmitz always made time to shield administration officials from criminal investigation and congressional oversight. In 2004, according to Congressional documents, Schmitz blocked an inquiry by his own staff into John Shaw, an undersecretary to Donald Rumsfeld who was suspected of steering a lucrative Iraqi contract to an associate. Distrust in the IG's office grew so intense that Schmitz's senior staffers reportedly used code names for officials they were investigating so that their boss wouldn't torpedo their efforts. In a report to Congress, Schmitz also omitted testimony by Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and blacked out the names of White House officials suspected of colluding with Boeing on a fraudulent deal that would have cost taxpayers $5 billion.

Under fire for withholding evidence from Congress to shield the very officials he was supposed to be investigating — as well as for spending more than $100,000 in public funds on a ceremony honoring von Steuben — Schmitz resigned in 2005. He soon found a more comfortable home, however, at the helm of one of the shady contractors he had failed to properly oversee. He is now chief operating officer of the Prince Group, parent company to the mercenary security force Blackwater USA.

.....

A FEW INSPECTORS — NEARLY all of them holdovers from the Clinton administration — continued to do their jobs. Nikki Tinsley of the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that the White House actively misled residents of Lower Manhattan about toxic dangers after September 11th. Earl Devaney of the Interior Department worked tirelessly to bring down Steven Griles, the former deputy secretary now imprisoned for his complicity in the Jack Abramoff scandal. And Glenn Fine of the Justice Department exposed the FBI's illegal abuse of the Patriot Act to spy on average Americans. "A lot of the trouble for Alberto Gonzales came out of the work the inspector general did," says Rep. Miller. "It's the perfect example of why we need competent, tough, independent IGs."

To squelch such independence, the president has turned to his ultimate loyalist, Clay Johnson III — his prep-school pal from Andover and roommate at Yale. As a top official at the White House Office of Management and Budget, Johnson has made no secret that the administration expects inspectors to be seen and not heard. Testifying before Congress, he asserted that the "proper relationship" of the IGs is "to work together" with the agency heads they are supposed to monitor. Johnson also disparaged aggressive IGs like the Clinton holdovers, calling them "junkyard dogs."

To keep the inspectors in line, Johnson has browbeaten them into signing what amounts to a loyalty oath. According to Ervin, the former inspector for Homeland Security, Johnson held a meeting with the IGs and demanded that each of them sign a series of "principles" promising to work "in partnership" with their cabinet secretaries. "Clearly, the intent was to intimidate people," says Ervin, who refused to sign and was soon out of a job. Ervin's replacement, Richard Skinner — who had previously done a heck of a job as the acting inspector general of FEMA — now prints Johnson's loyalty principles at the front of his semiannual reports to Congress.

No inspector general has been more criticized for his lack of independent oversight than Robert "Moose" Cobb, who served as associate White House counsel under Alberto Gonzales before being appointed inspector general of NASA in 2002. According to a report by the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, an office run by fellow IGs to police the work of their peers, Cobb helped cover up the theft of nearly $2 billion in rocket-engine data from NASA's servers. The council also found that Cobb had tipped off Sean O'Keefe, the head of NASA, to impending FBI search warrants, and sought O'Keefe's input on how he should structure his "independent" audits.

.....

[WCGreen]

2. Yawn....

Next...

It's just mind boggling that no one seems to care...

[Cha]

7. Rolling Stone cares...our resident

Rock N Roll magazine writes more of the truth of what's going on in the world than time or newsweak.

The Nation cares, too..that ol' lefty mag :)

I know what you're saying..it's the power elite who want to keep their power so they try to dumb everyone down.

[applegrove]

3. Making government stupid so that industry looks qualified in comparison. Part

of that ole plan to "sink it in the bathtub". But it isn't working. Everyone knows Bush has just purposely made certain departments dumb and useless. And we wait for a sunnier day.

[NJCher]

4. Illustration is sheer genius

Wow, that look on bush's face! Is that perfect or what?!! This illustration captures the situation like a glove fits the hand: the smoking ruins, the money, the utter disaster. The politicians being led around like dogs.

BTW, one is Boehner but who are the other two?

Juhasz is known for capturing the details of a character's face but I am drawing a blank on the other two lap dogs.



Cher

[SoCalDem]

5. Not as good as the one Jen6 drew

[Pastiche423]

6. I love Victor Juhasz's illustrations

(See my sig line.)

[seafan]

8. My guess is Adam Putnam and Dana Perino/Kay Bailey Hutchison. n/t