Center for International Policy

Killing the messengers
By Jim Mullins, CIP Senior Fellow
South Floriday Sun-Sentinel – 11/26/2004

President George W. Bush has been reelected with the support of the majority of the American electorate, however small, that eluded him in 2000. It would seem president that he would call in the best minds of our country to give the benefit of their wisdom and experience in devising a program that would lead us into a brighter future of peace and prosperity domestically and regain the respect of the rest that the rest of the world once had for America.

It worked for Bill Clinton in formulating his economic policy in 1992. He had inherited expanding deficits and declining value of the dollar in world markets. He brought together the nation’s best financial minds, Republican and Democratic, who advised him to raise taxes – thus lowering the deficit and
reviving world confidence in the dollar.

Although he had campaigned on lowering taxes, he successfully prodded Congress to raise higher-level tax rates and, during his eight-year tenure, presided over the greatest increase in jobs in our history and conversion of the deficit into a surplus.

Bush has failed to rise to the occasion. His lack of concern for the tanking dollar and deficits as far as one can see are deeply troubling. His appointments and promotions accompanies by resignations in the National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency and Justice Department, appear to reward those who facilitated the disinformation that got us into the Iraqi quagmire, to promote a legal adviser who advocated ways and means to bypass time-honored legal restrictions on wartime conduct, and to purge those who respectfully disagreed.

Condoleezza Rice came to her post as head of the National Security Council as a former provost at Stanford University and professor in Soviet studies. She ignored both her predecessor, Sandy Berger, and Richard Clarke in their posing of al-Qaida as America’s most imminent threat, concentrating instead on antiballistic-missile defense as her priority. In the runup to the Iraqi War, she made constant references to Iraq’s aluminum tubes as potential nuclear bomb material – although the U.S. Energy Department had concluded that they were unsuitable.

She is not slated to become secretary of state and her former second in command at the NSC, Stephen J. Hadley, promoted to take her place. His best-known act as Rice’s deputy was his failure to inform the White House about two urgent memos from the CIA cautioning the president not to use the information based on forged documents that Saddam Hussein had attempted to by uranium from Niger.

The CIA is in turmoil. Many in Congress had opposed the appointment of Peter Goss as director to replace George Tenet. The fear that he would take a partisan approach may not be unfounded, based on recent developments as in a Goss memo to all agents describing their job as to “support the administration and its policies in its work.”

Although the CIA needed a shakeup, bringing in partisan staffers of the House Intelligence Committee from when he was its Republican chair to take over newly created posts has exacerbated dissension.

One of them, Patrick Murray, enraged that someone leaked that a Goss appointment for the CIA’s No. 3 post was a convicted shoplifter, threatened retailiation against the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence. She reported the threat to her boss, Michael Sulick, and he in turn to his boss, Stephen Kappes. When Murray was confronted, he ordered Kappes to fire Sulick, Kappes refused
and both resigned.

Michael Scheuer, chief of the bin Laden unit of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (and author of Imperial Hubris, revealing CIA internal dissent over Bush policies that he left were fomenting terrorism and misdirecting the threat from al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein) has resigned, as has Deputy Director John McLaughlin.

Alberto Gonzales, the president’s nominee to take John Ashcroft’s place as attorney general, is particularly troubling in that he – as the president’s counsel – wrote memos legitimating violations of the Third and Forth Geneva Conventions and the U.S. War Crimes Act banning torture and defining humane treatment of prisoners of war.

He wrote that the president is only constrained by “prudence and policy,” though the Constitution requires that the president must faithfully execute the laws of the land, including international treaties.

The only bright light on the horizon is that Rice may take the opportunity to persuade the president to bring the State Department and all its expertise into the equation as countervailing force against the neocons who strive to remake the Middle East according to their theories. Our disastrous incursion into Iraq is a harbinger of things to come if they prevail.

America’s survival depends on free marketplace of ideas. Killing the messenger to drown out the message is counterproductive – and ultimately impossible, if Americans rise from the apathy and demand to be heard.