Casualties of the Bush
administration By Nick Turse
In late August 2005, after 20 years of
service in the field of military procurement,
Bunnatine ("Bunny") Greenhouse, the top official
at the US Army Corps of Engineers in charge of
awarding government contracts for the
reconstruction of Iraq, was demoted. For years,
Greenhouse received stellar evaluations from
superiors - until she raised objections about
secret, no-bid contracts awarded to Kellogg, Brown
& Root (KBR) - a subsidiary of Halliburton,
the mega-corporation Vice President Dick Cheney
once presided over. After telling Congress that
one Halliburton deal was "the most blatant and
improper contract abuse I have witnessed during
the course of my professional career", she was
reassigned from "the elite
senior executive service ... to a lesser job in
the civil works division of the corps".
When Greenhouse was busted down, she
became just another of the casualties of the Bush
administration - not the countless (or rather
uncounted) Iraqis, or the ever-growing list of
American troops, killed, maimed, or mutilated in
the administration's war of convenience - but the
seemingly endless and ever-growing list of
beleaguered administrators, managers, and career
civil servants who quit their posts in protest or
were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out,
demoted, or driven to retire by Bush
administration strong-arming. Often, this has been
due to revulsion at the president's policies -
from the invasion of Iraq and negotiations with
North Korea to the flattening of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the
slashing of environmental standards - which these
women and men found to be beyond the pale.
Since almost the day he assumed power,
George W Bush has left a trail of broken careers
in his wake. Below is a list of but a handful of
the most familiar names on the rolls of the
fallen:
Richard Clarke: Perhaps the
most well-known of the Bush administration's
casualties, Clarke spent 30 years in the
government, serving under every president from
Ronald Reagan on. He was the second-ranking
intelligence officer in the State Department under
Reagan and then served in the administration of
George H W Bush. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and
George W Bush, he held the position of the
president's chief adviser on terrorism on the
National Security Council - a cabinet-level post.
Clarke became disillusioned with the "terrible
job" of fighting terrorism exhibited by the second
president Bush - namely, ignoring evidence of an
impending al-Qaeda attack and putting pressure on
to produce a non-existent link between al-Qaeda
and Saddam Hussein. (His memo explaining that
there was no connection, said Clarke, "got bounced
and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. Do it
again.'") After 9/11, Clarke asked for a transfer
from his job to a National Security Council office
concerned with cyber-terrorism. (The
administration later claimed it was a demotion).
Quit, January 2003.
Paul
O'Neill: A top official at the Office of
Management and Budget under presidents Nixon and
Ford (and later chairman of aluminum giant Alcoa),
O'Neill served nearly two years in George W Bush's
cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury before being
asked to resign after opposing the president's tax
cuts. He, like Clarke, recalled Bush's Iraq
fixation. "From the very beginning, there was a
conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person
and that he needed to go," said O'Neill, a
permanent member of the National Security Council.
"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was
the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a
way to do this.'" Fired, December 6, 2002.
Flynt Leverett, Ben Miller and Hillary
Mann: Respectively, Senior Director for Middle
East Affairs on President Bush's National Security
Council (NSC); a CIA staffer and Iraq expert with
the NSC; and a foreign service officer on detail
to the NSC as the Director for Iran and Persian
Gulf Affairs. They were all reportedly forced out
by Elliott Abrams, Bush's NSC Advisor on Middle
East Affairs, when they disagreed with policy
toward Israel. Said Leverett, "There was a
decision made ... basically to renege on the
commitments we had made to various European and
Arab partners of the United States. I personally
disagreed with that decision." He also noted,
"[Richard] Clarke's critique of administration
decision-making and how it did not balance the
imperative of finishing the job against al-Qaeda
versus what they wanted to do in Iraq is
absolutely on the money ... We took the people out
[of Afghanistan in 2002 to begin preparing for the
war in Iraq] who could have caught [al-Qaeda
leaders like Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri]."
According to Josef Bodansky, the director of the
Congressional Task Force on Terror and
Unconventional Warfare, Abrams "led Miller to an
open window and told him to jump." He also stated
that Mann and Leverett had been told to leave.
Resigned/fired, 2003.
Larry
Lindsey: A "top economic adviser" to Bush who
was ousted when he revealed to a newspaper that a
war with Iraq could cost $200 billion. Fired,
December 2002.
Ann Wright: A
career diplomat in the Foreign Service and a
colonel in the Army Reserves, she resigned on the
day the US launched the Iraq War. In her letter of
resignation, Wright told then-secretary of state
Colin Powell: "I believe the administration's
policies are making the world a more dangerous,
not a safer, place. I feel obligated morally and
professionally to set out my very deep and firm
concerns on these policies and to resign from
government service as I cannot defend or implement
them." Resigned, March 19, 2003.
John Brady Kiesling: A career
diplomat who served four presidents over a 20-year
span, he tendered his letter of resignation from
his post as political counselor in the US Embassy
in Athens on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. He
wrote:
... until this administration it had
been possible to believe that by upholding the
policies of my president I was also upholding
the interests of the American people and the
world. I believe it no longer. The policies we
are now asked to advance are incompatible not
only with American values but also with American
interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq
is driving us to squander the international
legitimacy that has been America's most potent
weapon of both offense and defense since the
days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to
dismantle the largest and most effective web of
international relationships the world has ever
known. Our current course will bring instability
and danger, not security.
Resigned, February 27, 2003.
John Brown: After nearly 25 years,
this veteran of the Foreign Service, who served in
London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev and Belgrade,
resigned from his post. In his letter of
resignation, he wrote: "I cannot in good
conscience support President Bush's war plans
against Iraq. The president has failed to: explain
clearly why our brave men and women in uniform
should be ready to sacrifice their lives in a war
on Iraq at this time; to lay out the full
ramifications of this war, including the extent of
innocent civilian casualties; to specify the
economic costs of the war for the ordinary
Americans; to clarify how the war would help rid
the world of terror; [and] to take international
public opinion against the war into serious
consideration." Resigned, March 10, 2003.
Rand Beers: When Beers, the
National Security Council's senior director for
combating terrorism, resigned he declined to
comment, but one former intelligence official
noted, "Hardly a surprise. We have sacrificed a
war on terror for a war with Iraq. I don't blame
Randy at all. This just reflects the widespread
thought that the war on terror is being set aside
for the war with Iraq at the expense of our
military and intel[ligence] resources and the
relationships with our allies." Beers later
admitted, "The administration wasn't matching its
deeds to its words in the war on terrorism.
They're making us less secure, not more secure ...
As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being
done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more
concerned I became, until I got up and walked
out." Resigned, March 2003.
Anthony Zinni: A soldier and
diplomat for 40 years, Zinni served from 1997 to
2000 as commander-in-chief of the United States
Central Command in the Middle East. The retired
Marine Corps general was then called back to
service by the Bush administration to assume one
of the highest diplomatic posts, special envoy to
the Middle East (from November 2002 to March
2003), but his disagreement with Bush's plans to
go to war and public comments that foretold of a
prolonged and problematical aftermath to such a
war led to his ouster. "In the lead up to the Iraq
war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum,
true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility,
at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption,"
said Zinni. Failed to be reappointed, March
2003.
Eric Shinseki: After
General Shinseki, the army's chief of staff, told
Congress that the occupation of Iraq could require
"several hundred thousand troops", he was derided
by then deputy secretary of defense Paul
Wolfowitz. Then, wrote the Houston Chronicle,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "took the
unusual step of announcing that General Eric
Shinseki would be leaving when his term as army
chief of staff end[ed]." Retired, June
2003.
Karen Kwiatkowski: A
lieutenant colonel in the air force who served in
the Department of Defense's Near East and South
Asia (NESA) Bureau in the year before the invasion
of Iraq, she wrote in her letter of resignation:
...[W]hile working from May 2002
through February 2003 in the office of the Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South
Asia and Special Plans (USDP/NESA and SP) in the
Pentagon, I observed the environment in which
decisions about post-war Iraq were made ... What
I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to
good order and discipline. If one is seeking the
answers to why peculiar bits of "intelligence"
found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why
the post-Hussein occupation has been
distinguished by confusion and false steps, one
need look no further than the process inside the
Office of the Secretary of
Defense.
Retired, July 2003.
Charles "Jack" Pritchard: A retired
US Army colonel and a 28-year veteran of the
military, the State Department, and the National
Security Council, who served as the State
Department's senior expert on North Korea and as
the special envoy for negotiations with that
country, resigned (according to the Los Angeles
Times) because the "administration's refusal to
engage directly with the country made it almost
impossible to stop Pyongyang from going ahead with
its plans to build, test and deploy nuclear
weapons." Resigned, August 2003.
Major (then Captain) John Carr and
Major Robert Preston: Air Force prosecutors,
they quit their posts in 2004 rather than take
part in trials under the military commission
system Bush created in 2001, which they considered
"rigged against alleged terrorists held at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba". Requested and granted
reassignment, 2004.
Captain Carrie
Wolf: A US Air Force officer, she also asked
to leave the Office of Military Commissions due to
concerns that the Bush-created commissions for
trying prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were unjust.
Requested and granted reassignment, 2004.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor: He
retired from the US Army and stated: "I love the
army and I was sorry to leave it. But I saw no
possibility of fundamentally positive reform and
reorgani[z]ation of the force for the current
strategic environment or the future ... It's a
very sycophantic culture. The biggest problem we
have inside the ... Department of Defense at the
senior level, but also within the officer corps -
is that there are no arguments. Arguments are
[seen as] a sign of dissent. Dissent equates to
disloyalty." Retired, June 2004.
Paul Redmond: After a long career
at the CIA, Redmond became the Assistant Secretary
for Information Analysis at the Department of
Homeland Security. When, according to Notra
Trulock of Accuracy in Media, he reported, at a
congressional hearing in June 2003, "that he
didn't have enough analysts to do the job ...
[and] his office still lacked the secure
communications capability to receive classified
reports from the intelligence community ... [t]hat
kind of candor was not appreciated by his bosses
and, consequently, he had to go." Resigned,
June 2003.
John W Carlin:
According to the Washington Post, Carlin, the
"Archivist of the United States was pushed by the
White House ... to submit his resignation without
being given any reason, Senate Democrats disclosed
... at a hearing to consider President Bush's
nomination of his successor." "I asked why, and
there was no reason given," said Carlin, but the
Post reported that some had "suggested Bush may
have wanted a new archivist to help keep his or
his father's sensitive presidential records under
wraps". Although he had stated his wish to serve
until the end of his 10-year term, and 65th
birthday in 2005, Carlin surrendered to Bush
administration pressure. Resigned, December 19,
2003.
Susan Wood and Frank
Davidoff: Wood was the Food and Drug
Administration's Assistant Commissioner for
Women's Health and Director of the Office of
Women's Health; Davidoff was the editor emeritus
of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine and an
internal medicine specialist on the FDA's
Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee. Wood
resigned in protest over the FDA's decision to
delay yet again, due to pressure from the Bush
administration, a final ruling on whether the
"morning-after pill" should be made more easily
accessible - despite a 23-4 vote, back in December
2003, by a panel of experts to recommend
non-prescription sale of the contraceptive, called
Plan B. In an email to colleagues, Wood, the top
FDA official in charge of women's health issues,
wrote, "I can no longer serve as staff when
scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated
and recommended for approval by the professional
staff here, has been overruled." Days later,
Davidoff quit over the same issue and wrote in his
resignation letter, "I can no longer associate
myself with an organization that is capable of
making such an important decision so flagrantly on
the basis of political influence, rather than the
scientific and clinical evidence." Wood:
Resigned, August 31, 2005. Davidoff: Resigned,
September, 2005.
Thomas E
Novotny: A deputy assistant secretary at the
Department of Health and Human Services and the
chief official working on an international treaty
to reduce cigarette smoking around the world,
Novotny "stepped down," claimed Bush
administration officials, "for personal reasons
unrelated to the negotiations"; but the Washington
Post reported that "three people who ha[d] spoken
with Novotny ... said he had privately expressed
frustration over the administration's decision to
soften the US positions on key issues, including
restrictions on secondhand smoke and the
advertising and marketing of cigarettes."
Resigned, August 1, 2001.
Joanne
Wilson: The commissioner of the Department of
Education's Rehabilitation Services
Administration, she quit, according to the
Washington Post, "in protest of what she said were
the administration's largely unnoticed efforts to
gut the office's funding and staffing" and
attempts to dismantle programs "critical to
helping the blind, deaf and otherwise disabled
find jobs". On February 7, 2005 the Bush
administration announced that it would close all
RSA regional offices and cut personnel in half.
Resigned,February 8, 2005.
James Zahn: According to an article
by Robert F Kennedy, Jr in the Nation magazine,
Zahn, a "nationally respected microbiologist with
the Agriculture Department's research service,"
stated that "his supervisor at the USDA, under
pressure from the hog industry, had ordered him
not to publish his study" which "identified
bacteria that can make people sick - and that are
resistant to antibiotics - in the air surrounding
industrial-style hog farms"; and that "he had been
forced to cancel more than a dozen public
appearances at local planning boards and county
health commissions seeking information about
health impacts of industry mega-farms". As a
result, "Zahn resigned from the government in
disgust." Resigned, May 2002.
Tony Oppegard and Jack Spadaro:
Oppegard and Spadaro were members of a "team of
federal geodesic engineers selected to investigate
the collapse of barriers that held back a coal
slurry pond in Kentucky containing toxic wastes
from mountaintop strip-mining". According to the
Environmental Protection Agency, this had been
"the greatest environmental catastrophe in the
history of the Eastern United States". Oppegard,
who headed the team, "was fired on the day Bush
was inaugurated ... All eight members of the team
except Spadaro signed off on a whitewashed
investigation report. Spadaro, like the others,
was harassed but flat-out refused to sign. In
April of 2001 Spadaro resigned from the team and
filed a complaint with the Inspector General of
the Labor Department... he was placed on
administrative leave - a prelude to getting
fired." Two months before his 28th anniversary as
a federal employee, and after years of harassment
due to his stance, Spadaro resigned. "I'm just
very tired of fighting," he said. "I've been
fighting this administration since early 2001. I
want a little peace for a while." Oppegard:
Fired, January 20, 2001. Spadaro: Resigned,
October 1, 2003.
Teresa
Chambers: After speaking with reporters and
congressional staffers about budget problems in
her organization, the US Park Police Chief was
placed on administrative leave. Then, according to
CNN, just "two and half hours after her attorneys
filed a demand for immediate reinstatement through
the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent
agency that ensures federal employees are
protected from management abuses", Chambers was
fired. "The American people should be afraid of
this kind of silencing of professionals in any
field," said Chambers. "We should be very
concerned as American citizens that people who are
experts in their field either can't speak up, or,
as we're seeing now in the parks service, won't
speak up." Fired, July 2004.
Martha Hahn: The state director for
the Bureau of Land Management, "responsible for 12
million acres in Idaho, almost one-quarter of the
state" for seven years, Hahn found her authority
drastically curtailed after the Bush
administration took office. She watched as the
administration blocked public comment on mining
initiatives and opened up previously protected
areas to environmental degradation. After she
locked horns with cattle interests over grazing
rights, she received a letter stating she was
being transferred from her beloved Rocky Mountain
West to "a previously nonexistent job in New York
City". "It's been a shock," she said. "I'm going
through mental anguish right now. I felt like I
was at the prime of my career." Hahn was told to
accept the involuntary reassignment or resign.
Resigned, March 6, 2002.
Andrew
Eller: Eller "spent many of his 17 years with
the US Fish and Wildlife Service protecting the
[Florida] panther. But when his research didn't
jibe with a huge airport project slated for the
cat's habitat - and Eller refused to play along -
he was given the boot," wrote the Tucson Weekly.
"I was fired three days after President Bush was
re-elected," said Eller. "It was obviously
reprisal for holding different views than [US Fish
and Wildlife Service] management on whether or not
the panther was in jeopardy, and pointing out that
they were using flawed science to support their
view." Fired, November 2004.
Mike Dombeck: The chief of the
Forest Service resigned after a 23-year government
career. In his resignation letter, the
pro-conservation Dombeck stated, "It was made
clear in no uncertain terms that the [Bush]
administration wants to take the Forest Service in
another direction ..." Resigned, March 27,
2001.
James Furnish: A
political conservative, evangelical Christian, and
Republican who voted for George W Bush in 2000 as
well as the former Deputy Chief of the US Forest
Service (who spent 30 years, across 8 presidential
administrations working for that agency), Furnish
resigned in 2002 due to policy differences with
the Bush administration. "I just viewed [the
administration's] actions as being regressive,"
said Furnish. In acting according to his
conscience, instead of waiting a year longer to
maximize retirement benefits, Furnish lost out on
about $10,000 a year for the rest of his life.
Resigned, 2002.
Mike Parker:
In early 2002, Parker, the director of the Army
Corps of Engineers testified before Congress that
Bush-mandated budget cuts would have a "negative
impact" on the Corps. He also admitted to holding
no "warm and fuzzy" feelings toward the Bush
administration. "Soon after," reported the
Christian Science Monitor, "he was given 30
minutes to resign or be fired." In the wake of the
devastation caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita,
Parker's clashes with Mitch Daniels, former
director of the Office of Management and Budget,
can be seen as prophetic. Parker remembered one
such incident in which he brought Daniels, the
Bush administration's budget guru, a piece of
steel from a Mississippi canal lock that "was
completely corroded and falling apart because of a
lack of funding," and said, "Mitch, it doesn't
matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it
falls down because it disintegrates - either way
it's the same effect, and if we let it fall down,
we have only ourselves to blame." He recalled of
the incident, "It made no impact on him
whatsoever." Resigned, March 6, 2002.
Sylvia K Lowrance: A top
Environmental Protection Agency official who
served the agency for over 20 years, including as
assistant administrator of its Office of
Enforcement and Compliance Assurance for the first
18 months of the Bush administration, Lowrance
retired, stating, "We will see more resignations
in the future as the administration fails to
enforce environmental laws." She said, "This
Administration has pulled cases and put
investigations on ice. They sent every signal they
can to staff to back off." Retired, August
2002.
Bruce Boler: An EPA
scientist who resigned from his post because, he
said, "Wetlands are often referred to as nature's
kidneys. Most self-respecting scientists will tell
you that, and yet [private] developers and
officials [at the Army Corps of Engineers] wanted
me to support their position that wetlands are,
literally, a pollution source." Resigned,
October 23, 2003.
Eric
Schaeffer: After 12 years of service,
including the last five as Director of the Office
of Regulatory Enforcement, at the Environmental
Protection Agency, Schaeffer submitted a letter of
resignation over the Bush administration's
non-enforcement of the Clean Air Act. He later
explained:
In a matter of weeks, the Bush
administration was able to undo the
environmental progress we had worked years to
secure. Millions of tons of unnecessary
pollution continue to pour from these power
plants each year as a result. Adding insult to
injury, the White House sought to slash the
EPA's enforcement budget, making it harder for
us to pursue cases we'd already launched against
other polluters that had run afoul of the law,
from auto manufacturers to refineries, large
industrial hog feedlots, and paper companies. It
became clear that Bush had little regard for the
environment - and even less for enforcing the
laws that protect it. So last spring, after 12
years at the agency, I resigned, stating my
reasons in a very public letter to Administrator
[Christine Todd] Whitman.
Resigned,
February 27, 2002.
Bruce
Buckheit: A 30-year veteran of government
service, Buckheit retired in frustration over Bush
administration efforts to weaken environmental
regulations. When asked by NBC reporter Stone
Phillips, "What's the biggest enforcement
challenge right now when it comes to air
pollution?," the former Senior Counsel with the
Environmental Enforcement Section of the US
Department of Justice, and then Director of EPA's
Air Enforcement Division, was unequivocal: "The
Bush Administration." He went on to note that
"this administration has decided to put the
economic interests of the coal fired power plants
ahead of the public interests in reducing air
pollution." Resigned, November 2003.
Rich Biondi: A 32-year EPA
employee, Biondi retired from his post as
Associate Director of the Air Enforcement Division
of the Environmental Protection Agency. He stated,
"We weren't given the latitude we had been, and
the Bush administration was interfering more and
more with the ability to get the job done. There
were indications things were going to be reviewed
a lot more carefully, and we needed a lot more
justification to bring lawsuits." Retired,
December 2004.
Martin E Sullivan,
Richard S Lanier and Gary Vikan: Three members
of the White House Cultural Property Advisory
Committee, they all resigned from their posts to
protest the looting of Baghdad's National Museum
of Antiquities. In his letter of resignation,
Sullivan, the Committee's chairman, wrote, "The
tragedy was not prevented, due to our nation's
inaction," while Lanier castigated "the
administration's total lack of sensitivity and
forethought regarding the Iraq invasion and the
loss of cultural treasures". Resigned, April
14, 2003.
In the wake of Hurricane
Katrina, eyes began to focus on FEMA (the Federal
Emergency Management Agency) and the political
appointees running it. What had happened to the
professionals who once staffed FEMA? In 2004,
Pleasant Mann, a 17-year FEMA veteran who heads
the agency's government employee union told
Indyweek:
Since last year, so many people have
left who had developed most of our basic
programs. A lot of the institutional knowledge
is gone. Everyone who was able to retire has
left, and then a lot of people have moved to
other agencies.
Disillusionment with
the current state of affairs at FEMA was cited as
the major cause for the mass defections. In fact,
a February 2004 survey by the American Federation
of Government Employees found that 80% of a sample
of remaining employees said FEMA had become "a
poorer agency" since being shifted into the
Bush-created Department of Homeland Security. What
happened to FEMA has happened, in ways large and
small, to many other federal agencies. In an
article by Amanda Griscom in Grist magazine, Jeff
Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees
for Environmental Responsibility, made reference
to the "unusually high" rate of replacement of
scientists in government agencies during the Bush
administration. "If the scientist gives the
inconvenient answer they commit career suicide,"
he said.
However defined, the casualties
of the Bush administration are legion. The numbers
of government careers wrecked, disrupted,
adversely affected, or tossed into turmoil as a
result of this administration's wars, budgets,
policies, and programs is impossible to determine.
Although every administration leaves bodies strewn
in its wake, none in recent memory has come close
to the Bush administration in producing so many
public statements of resignation, dissatisfaction,
or anger over treatment or policies. The
aforementioned list of casualties includes among
the best known of those who have resigned or left
the administration under pressure (although not
necessarily those who have suffered most from
their acts). Perhaps no one knows exactly how many
government workers, at all levels, have fallen in
the face of the Bush administration. Those
mentioned above are just a few of the highest
profile members of this as yet uncounted legion,
just a few of the names we know.
Nick Turse works in the
Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University
and as the Associate Editor and Research Director
at TomDispatch.com. He writes 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.
