[Mb-civic] Necessary truths - Scot Lehigh - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Necessary truths

By Scot Lehigh  |  September 13, 2005

WITH THE NATION dismayed by the laggardly, inept response to the 
devastation of New Orleans, there's an obvious need to identify all that 
went wrong.

That need is so obvious that the president himself last week promised to 
investigate, so obvious that the Republican congressional leadership 
postponed its latest spate of tax-cutting and announced a joint 
House-Senate inquiry.

Now, why does that look like an attempted whitewash? Could it be because 
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, according to spokesman Jim Manley, 
was only apprised of the Republican plans for a ''bipartisan" probe 20 
minutes before the announcement was made? Reid wants an independent 
panel like the 9/11 Commission -- and he's exactly right.

The nation needs real answers and real accountability, and without such 
an independent commission, there's no reason to expect either from this 
president or this Congress. After all, just yesterday, the president 
called his own anticipatory action ''extraordinary." Of course, that 
astounding self-celebration shouldn't come as a surprise from a 
president who also initially lauded the post-Katrina efforts of FEMA 
director Michael Brown (or ''Brownie," as Bush dubbed him in that 
special camaraderie he seems to feel for the incompetent).

When Brown's failings became so manifest that even Vice President Dick 
Cheney could spot them, Bush still couldn't bring himself to fire the 
resume-embellishing hack outright. Sent back to Washington, Brown 
finally resigned yesterday.

Even as the Bush team, from the president on down, rebuffs questions of 
accountability by accusing critics of playing ''the blame game," the 
administration is, according to The New York Times, following a strategy 
of asserting that the principal problem lay with local and state officials.

Nor has the president shown any real interest in past investigations of 
government failures. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming to 
establishing the 9/11 Commission.

Meanwhile, he's shown again and again that loyalty trumps competence. 
Last December the president anointed his own instant Iraq War-era 
heroes, bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on, among others, 
former CIA director George Tenet. Recall that in its July 2004 report, 
the Senate Intelligence Committee said that most major judgments in the 
October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's illicit weapons 
were ''either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying 
intelligence reporting." The person most responsible for that estimate 
was Tenet, whose performance is said to be criticized harshly in a new, 
classified CIA inspector general's report.

Nor has the Republican-led Congress been much better about oversight and 
accountability.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/13/necessary_truths/
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