November 27, 2005
Back in mid-October, I noted that informal "walls" and exhibits to honor those Americans (and sometimes Iraqis)
who fell -- and continue to fall -- in the Bush administration's war
and occupation of choice in Iraq have been arising on and off-line for
some time. I suggested then that "the particular dishonor this
administration has brought down on our country calls out for other
'walls' as well. Perhaps, for instance, we need some negative walls
built, stone by miserable stone, to cronyism, corruption, and
incompetence." At that moment, Tomdispatch author (and Associate
Editor) Nick Turse began to build a verbal "wall" of honor
to those who have "fallen" in government service while fighting in some
fashion to hold the line against this administration. A previously
hardly noted "Legion of the Fallen," these other "casualties" -- men
and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their government
duties that they found themselves with little alternative but to resign
in protest, quit, retire, or simply be pushed off the cliff by cronies
of this administration -- turned out to be far larger than we initially
imagined. Here, then, is the second installment in Nick Turse's "Fallen
Legion" series. The names for a third installment, meant for January,
are already largely in place and we're hoping that, by then, we might
have an actual on-line wall to go with it. Tom
Bush's Burgeoning Body Count
Fallen Legion II
By Nick Turse
About six weeks ago, at the urging of fellow TomDispatch author Rebecca
Solnit, I undertook the beginnings of an on-line memorial to the Fallen
Legion of the Bush administration. It was, in effect, a proposal for a virtual "wall"
made up of the seemingly endless and ever-growing list of top officials
as well as beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil
servants who had quit their government posts in protest or were
defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by
administration strong-arm tactics, cronyism, and disastrous policies.
As a start, I offered 42 prospective names for a Fallen Legion (and
brief descriptions of their fates). These ranged from well-known
figures like the President's former chief adviser on terrorism on the
National Security Council, Richard Clarke, former Army Chief of Staff
Eric Shinseki, and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill to the
archivist of the United States, the state director of the Bureau of
Land Management in Idaho, and three members of the White House Cultural
Property Advisory Committee (who resigned over the looting of Iraq
after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops). I also called upon readers to aid
my future efforts and to send suggestions to:
fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com . (And I renew that call in this piece.)
The response has been, in a word, overwhelming. Hundreds of letters
poured in -- from readers who took me to task for the omission of their
own personal picks for such a "Wall" to notes of encouragement from
courageous former officials already included in my listing (like Teresa
Chambers, the U.S. Park Police Chief who was fired for speaking out and
now has a website documenting her long struggle). Some of the fallen whose stories, sad to say, I hadn't even heard of, wrote in as well.
Here, then, is the second installment in what is by now an ongoing
series at Tomdispatch dedicated to continuing to build the Fallen
Legion Wall, "brick" by "brick." Included in this installment is one
honorary legionnaire, former NFL football player Pat Tillman, and a
consideration of some officials picked by readers for spots of honor
whose departure from government service was less than clear cut. This
new installment adds approximately 175 additional casualties to the
rolls of "the Fallen." But bear in mind that this list is not yet close
to being finished. Many suggested Fallen Legionnaires (even some who
wrote in personally) do not appear below, but will take their bows in
future follow-ups.
Additional Casualties
Jesselyn Radack: An attorney in the Justice Department's
Professional Responsibility Advisory Office who worked on the case of
John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, Radack
warned federal prosecutors that interrogating him without his attorney
present would be unethical. When the FBI interviewed Lindh anyway,
Raddack told Tomdispatch, she "then recommended that [the transcript]
be sealed and only used for intelligence-gathering purposes, not for
criminal prosecution." Again, her advice was ignored. Later, when Lindh
was on trial, Radack learned that the judge in the case had requested
copies of all internal correspondence concerning Lindh's interrogation.
Although Radack had written more than a dozen e-mails on the subject,
she discovered that only two of them had been turned over and neither
reflected her contention that the FBI had committed an ethics
violation.
Checking the hard-copy office file, she discovered that the rest of
her e-mail messages were missing. With the help of technical support,
she "resurrected the e-mails from her computer archives, documented
them, provided them to her boss, and took home a copy for safekeeping
in case they 'disappeared' again." She would later turn over copies of
the e-mails to Newsweek
magazine in compliance with the Whistleblower Protection Act. She has
paid a heavy price for her stand against the government. As she told
TomDispatch:
"I was forced out of my job at the Justice Department,
fired from my subsequent private sector job [with the law firm of
Hawkins, Delafield & Wood] at the government's behest, placed under
criminal investigations, referred to the state bars in which I'm
licensed as an attorney, and put on the "no-fly" list. I have spent
$100,000 defending against a criminal investigation that was dropped
and a bar charge that was dismissed. The D.C. Bar Complaint is still
pending after two years and despite the fact that I was elected to the
D.C. Bar's Legal Ethics Committee."
Resigned, April 2002.
Sibel Edmonds: Hired shortly after the 9/11 attacks as an FBI translator of documents
related to the war on terror (due to her knowledge of Turkish, Farsi,
and Azerbaijani), Edmonds alleged security breaches, mismanagement, and
possible espionage within the FBI in late 2001 and early 2002, and was
fired. She then sued the Justice Department, alleging "that her rights
under the Privacy Act and her First and Fifth amendment rights had been
violated by the government,"
but her case was dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge after
then-Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the state-secrets
privilege, which allows the government to withhold information to
safeguard national security. A summary of a report
by the Justice Department's Inspector General, released in January
2005, however "conclude[d] that Edmonds was fired for reporting serious
security breaches and misconduct in the agency's translation program." Fired, March 2002
Stephen R. Kappes: deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine services resigned, according to the Washington Post,
after a confrontation with Patrick Murray, chief of staff to the new
CIA director and Bush administration enforcer, former Congressman
Porter Goss, who was said to be "treating senior officials
disrespectfully." According to the Baltimore Sun, a "former senior CIA official said that the White House 'doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation.'" Resigned, November 2004.
Robert Richer: After less than a year on the job, Stephen
Kappes' replacement as the number two official in the Central
Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations "quit" the agency as
well. In a highly unusual move, the former CIA station chief in Amman,
Jordan, and head of the Near East division, attended "a closed session
of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence… to answer questions
about how his concern over a lack of leadership at the agency triggered
his retirement." But before meeting with the Senate committee, he first
went right to Goss and, according a CIA agent whose identity (wrote the Washington Post),
is protected by law, "Rob laid at his doorstep, in a collegial way,
that Goss is out of touch… It fell on deaf ears." As a result, "Richer
left the meeting angry and walked out of the Langley headquarters for
perhaps the last time, several officers said." Retired, September, 2005.
Central Intelligence Agency (30-90 personnel): Kappes and Richer were not alone. The Washington Post
recently reported that under Porter Goss -- a Bush appointee who is
"close to the White House"-- "[a]t least a dozen senior officials --
several of whom were promoted under Goss-- have resigned, retired early
or requested reassignment." The Post also noted that in "the
clandestine service alone… Goss has lost one director, two deputy
directors, and at least a dozen department heads, station chiefs and
division directors -- many with the key language skills and experience
he has said the agency needs." Since Goss took over, according to
Robert Dreyfuss in the American Prospect,
"between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, some
fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others,
unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency." Resigned/Retired/Reassigned, 2004-2005.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division (dozens of employees): According to a recent report in the Washington Post,
the agency responsible for enforcing "the nation's anti-discrimination
laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has
driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many
of those who remain, according to former and current career employees."
The Post notes that -- in addition to a 40% drop in
"prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender discrimination crimes
traditionally handled by the division" over the last five years,
"[n]early 20 percent of the division's lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in
part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at
pushing out those who did not share the administration's conservative
views on civil rights laws." Additionally, it was reported that
"dozens" of those who remained with the agency were reassigned "to handle immigration cases instead of civil rights litigation." According to Richard Ugelow,
a law professor at American University who left the Civil Rights
Division in 2004,"Most everyone in the Civil Rights Division realized
that with the change of administration, there would be some cutting
back of some cases. But I don't think people anticipated that it would
go this far, that enforcement would be cut back to the point that
people felt like they were spinning their wheels." Retired/Resigned, 2005.
The Office of Special Counsel (7 employees): After Elaine
Kaplan, a Clinton-appointee who headed the U.S. Office of Special
Counsel -- the agency that investigates federal whistleblowers'
allegations -- failed to be reappointed
to a second term by President Bush, she tendered her resignation
stating, "in these times of heightened concern about national security,
it is very important that OSC be viewed as a credible, non-partisan
advocate on behalf of whistleblowers." She was replaced by Scott Bloch,
a Bush appointee who has been called "a gay-hating, secretive,
partisan, political hack" and previously served as deputy director of
the Task Force for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bloch, reports the Project On Government Oversight,
went on to order "more than 20 percent of his headquarters legal and
investigative staff to relocate or be fired. According to a letter of
protest filed… by three national whistleblower watchdog groups, those
targeted for forced moves [were] all career employees hired before
Scott Bloch became Special Counsel, as part of a purge to stifle
dissent and re-staff the agency with handpicked loyalists." Most
refused to uproot their lives and, within a mandatory 60-day time
limit, move from Washington, D.C. to Dallas, Oakland, or Detroit and
were dismissed as a result. Fired, 2005.
Individual Ready Reserve (73 soldiers): Members of a special
reserve program of "inactive troops" who are still under contract to
the armed forces and were called back to service due to the Bush
administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they "defied orders to appear for wartime duty, some for more than a year, yet the Army has quietly chosen not to act against them." Refused service, 2005.
Brent Scowcroft: A retired Lieutenant General, national security
adviser to President Gerald Ford, and longtime friend and former
national security adviser to George H.W. Bush, Scowcroft served as the
chairman of President George W. Bush's President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board (PFIAB). This group advises the chief executive on "the
quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, of analysis and
estimates, of counterintelligence, and of other intelligence
activities" and is composed, says the White House, of "distinguished
citizens outside the government who are qualified on the basis of
achievement, experience, independence, and integrity." In August 2002,
Scowcroft wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal whose title made its point abundantly clear: "Don't Attack Saddam." As a result, "his old friends
in high office -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and so forth -- stopped
speaking to him" and his appointment to the PFIAB was not renewed when
his term expired in 2004. Failed to be reappointed, 2004.
John J. DiIulio Jr.: The first director of the White House
Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he quit his post after
only seven months on the job. In an interview with Esquire
magazine DiIulio disclosed, "There is no precedent in any modern White
House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy
apparatus. What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything --
being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry
Machiavellis." He also decried "a virtual absence as yet of any policy
accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the
flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism." Resigned, August 2001.
David Kuo: After serving in the White House for two-and-a-half
years as a Special Assistant to the President and deputy director of
the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he
left his post in 2003. Kuo wrote, "I have deep respect, appreciation,
and affection for the president," but went on to say that "[t]here
was minimal senior White House commitment to the faith-based agenda"
and that there never really was great concern over what he called "the
'poor people stuff.'" Resigned, December 2003.
Marlene Braun: A 13-year veteran of the U.S. Bureau of Land
Management (BLM), she was appointed manager of Carrizo Plain National
Monument -- 250,000 acres of native grasses and Native American sacred
sites, located about 120 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Once the Bush
administration came to power, the BLM, under Interior Secretary Gale
Norton, "began crafting a grazing policy that lifted protections for
wildlife and habitat across 161 million acres of public lands in the
West, including the Carrizo." In an August 2005 article, the Los Angeles Times
wrote, that Braun "was torn between the demands of a new boss who she
felt favored the region's ranchers, and conservation policies adopted
nearly a decade ago to protecting the austere swath of prairie she
shared with pronghorn antelope and peregrine falcons, the California
condor and the California jewelflower." That boss, said Braun, stripped
her of "almost all my influence on the Plain," transferring it to those
she deemed to be "pro-grazing." She repeatedly clashed with him and
wrote to colleagues, "I ... can't keep fighting indefinitely, I don't
think… [but m]aybe fighting is better than capitulating.... The Carrizo
could lose a lot if I give up.... But hell, you only live, and die,
once!!!!" When Braun contacted other officials at the Department of
Fish and Game as well as the Nature Conservancy about "several public
misstatements she believed [her boss] had made about federal grazing
law," he found out and suspended her. Braun appealed the suspension,
but on February 15, 2005, her appeal was denied. Braun remained in
touch with Bureau of Land Management officials concerning issues
related to management of the Carrizo Plain and was repeatedly
reprimanded for it. As a result, she told friends, she was certain she
would be fired from the Bureau. Braun forwarded the disciplinary memos
she continued to receive to officials at the Department of Fish and
Game and the Nature Conservancy. She wrote, "I will no longer be
participating in this mess.... I will not take being treated like a
whipping girl..." The next day she put a .38 caliber pistol to her head
and pulled the trigger. Committed Suicide, May 2, 2005.
The Used: An Honorary Fallen Legionnaire
Pat Tillman: A defensive back in the National Football League
who turned down a $3.6 million contract to join the military after the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he died in a hail of bullets in Afghanistan.
Tillman, following in the tradition of the long-ago cast aside Jessica Lynch, was embraced by the administration as a poster-boy for the American war effort. His name was invoked by the White House as well as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
as a "symbo[l] of our country's courage and determination." But even in
death, Tillman proved too tough for the administration to tame. Steve
Coll of the Washington Post
revealed that, while "records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably
until his last breath," they also revealed "that his superiors
exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his
legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might
tarnish Tillman's commanders." In fact,"the
Army kept the soldiers on the ground quiet and told Tillman's family
and the public that he was killed by enemy fire while storming a hill,"
reporting that "Tillman
was part of a coalition combat patrol that was ambushed" by enemy
forces. It turned out, however, that he had been gunned down by U.S.
troops and that fact was simply covered up by military officials. Soon
his family spoke up. Said his mother, Mary Tillman:
"Pat had high ideals about the country; that's why he
did what he did. The military let him down. The administration let him
down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate
team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely
heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is
disgusting."
His father, Patrick Tillman Sr., was equally furious, stating:
"After it happened, all the people in positions of
authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely
interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they
thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting
efforts were going to go to hell in a hand basket if the truth about
his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."
And from beyond the grave, the administration's would-be propaganda
puppet (who, it turns out was a major Noam Chomsky fan) had the last
word -- via the recollections of his close friend, Army Specialist Russell Baer, who served with Tillman in Iraq:
"We were outside of [a city in southern Iraq] watching
as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me,
Kevin [Tillman, Pat's brother] and Pat, we weren't in the fight right
then. We were talking. And Pat said, 'You know, this war is so f____
illegal.' And we all said, 'Yeah.' That's who he was. He totally was
against Bush."
The Fallen?
Numerous readers sent in possible additions to the list of "the
Fallen." Among them were cases of high officials who left government
service under somewhat ambiguous circumstances. Did they or didn't they
resign in protest? Were they forced out? Was it cover-your-ass infused
political self-preservation or total revulsion with administration
policies? You make the call:
Christine Todd Whitman: A favorite of readers who want to
believe the best about humanity, Whitman was appointed by Bush in 2001
as chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and served
two-and-a-half years before resigning. Her tenure was plagued by
scandal over an alleged cover-up concerning the air quality in lower Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks and, according to Jeff Ruch,
the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility (PEER), she also "presided over the greatest rollback in
environmental enforcement in history… [and] pushed pollution control
policies that put corporations rather than public health considerations
in the driver's seat." Whitman noted that she sometimes had arguments
with the White House that were "a little awkward" -- and, after leaving office, she authored a book, It's My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America
in which she mildly criticized the current state of the Republican
party. It didn't stop her, however, from becoming co-chair of Bush's
2004 reelection campaign in New Jersey and
one
of the campaign's "Rangers" -- an elite group of fundraisers, each of
whom was responsible for gathering up more than $200,000 for the
president.
Colin Powell: A professional soldier for 35 years, including
service as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell was appointed
Secretary of State by Bush and served in that capacity for the
President's entire first term in office. During his tenure, Powell was
said to have been a lone voice advocating diplomacy in the rush to war
with Iraq. Despite this, it was Powell who appeared before the United
Nations Security Council and made the case for war on the basis of
supposed weapons of mass destruction that were later proved to be
non-existent. In his letter of resignation, Powell stated that he was
"pleased to have been part of a team that launched the Global War
Against Terror, liberated the Afghan and Iraqi people, brought the
attention of the world to the problem of proliferation, [and]
reaffirmed our alliances…" In the time since, Powell has admitted that
making the case for war will remain a "blot"
on his record. "I'm the one who presented it on behalf of the United
States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It
was painful. It's painful now," he said. But as former CIA analyst
Melvin Goodman said recently on a Democracy Now segment devoted to discussing "The Fallen Legion":
"The sad thing about the list… is the resignation that
didn't take place. And that's Colin Powell. So, you have the great
American story. And Colin Powell is that. But he's always going to have
to live with the fact that he used the phony intelligence that the
C.I.A. prepared for him, and he had to know that some of this was
really bogus, that he was really stretching a point. And he had John
Negroponte, the U.N. ambassador, sitting behind him, along with [CIA
Director] George Tenet, while these lies were told to an international
community, therefore jeopardizing American credibility."
Charlotte Beers: A top advertising executive who was, in the
immediate wake of 9/11, tasked with "spearhead[ing] a public diplomacy
campaign aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world,"
she submitted her resignation in March 2003, claiming "health reasons"
as the cause of her departure. CNN, however, reported that an unnamed
"U.S. official" said the real reasons were due to "problems she encountered in the job."
General Kevin P. Byrnes: A Vietnam veteran, he ranked third in
seniority among the Army's 11 four-star generals and headed the Army's
Training and Doctrine Command (TRACDOC). While Byrnes was said to have
"a previously unblemished record [and] was set to retire… after 36
years of service," he was sacked -- the first case, said Army
officials, of a "four-star general being relieved of duty in modern
times." The official reasons for this, wrote the Washington Post,
were "allegations that he had an extramarital affair with a civilian."
But the newspaper also noted, "Relieving a general of his command amid
such allegations is extremely unusual, especially given that he was
about to retire" and some commentators
raised
the possibility that the "White House's need to block anti-torture
legislation on detainees" figured into the general's firing. A number
of others similarly called attention to the odd fact that, as Ariana
Huffington wrote, at the Pentagon, "Torture is Rewarded While Sex is a Firing Offense."
The Mounting Toll
Over the years, presidents who have launched illegitimate military
actions and pursued ruinous policies have often left a trail of wrecked
careers in their wake. While he publicly defended Lyndon Johnson's
policies, Undersecretary of State George Ball privately argued against
military escalation in Vietnam, eventually resigning his post in 1966.
Jimmy Carter's secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, resigned in protest
over the failed military operation to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran,
which he had opposed. In all, "eight of Jimmy Carter's cabinet members eventually resigned during his one term in office," while "[o]ther
top administration officials, including Carter's Ambassador to the
United Nations, Andrew Young, were forced out… because of unauthorized
meetings with PLO leaders." Analysis of their archives by Lexis-Nexis
researchers found that Ronald Reagan "saw all but one of his cabinet
positions change hands during his two terms in office from 1981-1989"
and that he had a total of "four chiefs of staff and six national
security advisors." Lexis-Nexis also determined that "[b]efore he
finished his second term in office, [Bill Clinton] had 10 of his
original cabinet members resign and several of their replacements also
resign." Further, resignations on moral and ethical grounds during the
Clinton Administration included "top Department of Health and Human
Services officials Peter Edelman, Mary Jo Bane and Wendell Primus."
They resigned in protest "over President Clinton's
decision to sign a welfare bill that the officials thought would be a
disaster for the poor and the country." Meanwhile, in a 1998 article in the New York Times, a then-less-known Judith Miller reported that a then-less-known United Nations weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, had resigned…[from
his UN post] charging that the U.N. secretary-general, the Security
Council and the Clinton administration had stymied the inspectors… ."
Not exactly one of Clinton's "Fallen," but, in light of revelations
since, worth mentioning nonetheless.
Over the years, many public servants from many administrations have
been fired, forced out, or have quit their posts in protest.
Unfortunately no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to catalogue them
all. Despite a lack of precise figures, it also seems that no
administration in recent memory has come close to the Bush presidency
in producing so many high-profile public statements of resignation,
dissatisfaction, or anger over administration policies, actions or
inaction. Even discounting an entire class of ambiguously "fallen"
officials and appointees, from Whitman and Powell to Valerie Plame (who
is, apparently, still a CIA employee) and her husband ex-ambassador
Joseph Wilson (the one-mission man), there are a seemingly endless
number of legionnaires whose names have yet to be inscribed next to the
approximately 217 already on "the Fallen Legion Wall." When added to
the rolls of the real
"Fallen" -- Iraqis and Afghans; Americans and other coalition forces;
civilians, guerillas, mercenaries, and soldiers -- the human cost of
the Bush administration's actions and policies will prove staggering.
[NOTE: If you know of others, or are one of the "Fallen
Legion" yourself, please send the information (and whatever supporting
material you would care to supply) to fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com with
the subject heading: "fallen legion" to add another name to the "wall."
This is a subject TomDispatch will definitely return to in the future.]
Nick Turse works in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia
University and is the Associate Editor and Research Director of
TomDispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San
Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch
on the military-corporate complex, the homeland security state, and
various other topics. In addition to sending in suggestions of possible
fallen legionnaires, if you have whistles to blow or muck you think
Nick should rake, send your insider information to fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2005 Nick Turse
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