Op_Ed,

by MWC Editor At Large Tom Engelhardt

Casualties of the Bush Administration

As the American toll in Iraq climbs toward 2,000 dead and 15,000 wounded, and the horror of those shortened or constricted lives continues to sink deep into American communities, various memorials to the fallen -- American soldiers, journalists, contractors, and sometimes Iraqis as well -- have sprung to life. Arrays of combat boots; labyrinths and candlelit displays for the dead; actual walls and "walls" on-line; newspaper "walls" as well as walls of words; not to speak of websites with ever-growing military and civilian casualty counts. The American Friends Service Committee, for example, has an exhibit, "Eyes Wide Open," that has long traveled the country, featuring "a pair of boots honoring each U.S. military casualty, a field of shoes and a Wall of Remembrance to memorialize the Iraqis killed in the conflict, and a multimedia display exploring the history, cost and consequences of the war." The exhibit began with just over 500 combat boots and now features almost 2,000.

Informal memorials and citizens' efforts are part of the growing movement against George Bush's Iraq War. Walls of every sort are being built. In Asheville, North Carolina, for example, as part of a "peace park," townspeople have been building their own Iraq Wall with each "sponsored" stone representing one American who has died there. Planned also is "a memorial to the Iraqi dead, presently estimated at over 100,000." Sometimes these projects are very personal, even individual, ranging from spontaneous displays of candles on beaches to, in the case of one reader who wrote in to Tomdispatch, a garden/labyrinth of the American dead built in her own backyard.

These "walls," each with its own character, all influenced by architect Maya Lin's Vietnam Wall in Washington (which movingly reflected a grim American disaster and defeat), are signs of a growing sense that this war is a horror and a dishonor to which the honorable have fallen (a sense backed strongly by the latest opinion polls).

But 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. In the next few weeks (as in the last few), we seem certain to see the dishonor of this administration spread around widely. In addition to the Iraq situation, ever devolving into further chaos and anarchy, there was, of course, the recent catastrophic failure of FEMA; then the squalid fall of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as "the Hammer" got hammered. There is the ongoing fiasco of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's sale of family stock in a "blind trust" just before its price plummeted. He's now under investigation for possible violations of insider trading laws and the SEC has just subpoenaed his "personal records and documents." Soon, it seems, there will be dishonor to go around as the expected Fitzgerald indictments in the Plame case come down. (Caught in the crosshairs of Plame case scandal is the New York Times, a paper tied in knots and at war with itself, which managed to loose both former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's famed op-ed on Saddam's nonexistent Niger yellowcake and Judith Miller, the near-neocon journalist whose reporting helped bring us to the edge of the Iraq War. To catch up on this aspect of things, make sure to read Jay Rosen's remarkable recent columns at his PressThink blog.)

With all this in mind, it seems a worthwhile endeavor to remind the world of those who opposed an administration whose actions, in the end, are likely to make the no-bid Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s look like a tempest in... well, a teapot in the no-bid Halliburton era. Bernard Weiner of the Crisis Papers blog has already written a kind of verbal "wall" to honor those -- mainly journalists and bloggers of every sort -- who fought to hold the line against this administration in media bad times and are here to watch the process of rollback happen. At Tomdispatch, we had another idea. Below Nick Turse has created the beginnings of a "wall" to quite a different legion of the fallen; in this case, the governmental casualties of Bush administration follies, those 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, or simply be pushed off the cliff by cronies of this administration. Here are the first 42 names of those we thought might be put on such a wall (and brief descriptions of their fates). Tom

The Fallen Legion
Casualties of the Bush Administration
By Nick Turse

In late August 2005, after twenty years of service in the field of military procurement, Bunnatine ("Bunny") Greenhouse, the top official at the U.S. 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 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 listing 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 thirty 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 the 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: A 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, respectively, 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.