Alan Grayson, Whistleblower attorney, is running for the U.S. Congress in 2008. He is running for office in Florida’s 8th Congressional District.



http://www.graysonforcongress.com/

Here is another link that is about Grayson's fight against fraud adn corruption:

http://www.burkhardworks.com/GRAYSON/DM/WARPROFITEERS.pdf

By ANDREA JAMES
The Seattle Post Intelligencer
updated 3:49 a.m. PT, Fri., Nov. 16, 2007

Within its bowels, The Boeing Co. holds volumes of proprietary information deemed so valuable that the company has entire teams dedicated to making sure that private information stays private. One such team, dubbed "enterprise" investigators, has permission to read the private e-mails of employees, follow them and collect video footage or photos of them. Investigators can also secretly watch employee computer screens in real time and reproduce every keystroke a worker makes, the Seattle P-I has learned.

For years, Boeing workers have held suspicions about being surveilled, according to a long history of P-I contact with sources, but at least three people familiar with investigation tactics have recently confirmed them.

One company source said some employees have raised internal inquiries about whether their rights were violated. Sometimes, instead of going to court over a grievance on an investigation, Boeing and the employee reach a financial settlement. The settlement almost always requires people involved to sign non-disclosure agreements, the source said.

Boeing desires to keep investigation details under wraps.

"We will not discuss specifics of internal investigations with the media," it said in a written response to P-I questions. "Issues that necessitate investigation in order to protect the company's interests and those of its employees and other stakeholders are handled consistent with all applicable laws."

But the tactics used by Washington's largest employer raise questions about where an employee's rights begin and the employer's end, and how much leeway any corporation has in investigating an employee if it suspects wrongdoing.

A recent case at another large company highlighted that investigations can go too far. In 2006, a scandal erupted at Hewlett-Packard after the company investigated leaks from its board of directors.

The company was ordered to pay $14.5 million and to bring its internal investigations into compliance with laws in California, the company's home state.

The investigation included reviews of internal e-mails and instant messages, the physical surveillance of a board member and at least one journalist, and the illegal use of deception to obtain telephone records of employees and journalists.

For its part, Boeing says that it has multiple internal organizations that provide checks and balances "to ensure these investigations are conducted properly and in accordance with established company and legal guidelines. We do not comment on individual cases or specific investigation activities."

An employee is tailed

Recently, a Boeing investigator told a Puget Sound-area employee that he was followed off company property to a lunch spot, that investigators had footage of him "coming and going" and that investigators had accessed his personal Gmail account.

The primary reason for the 2007 investigation, the employee said, was Boeing's suspicion that he had spoken with a member of the media. The employee learned the details of the investigation during a three-hour meeting, in which investigators laid out some of their findings. He has since been fired.

That particular investigation was connected with a July article in the P-I that brought to light Boeing's struggles complying with a 2002 corporate reform law and cited unnamed sources and internal company documents.

"I wasn't surprised, but more just disappointed in them, that instead of looking at the problems, instead of investigating that, they investigated the people that were complaining and got rid of them," said the employee, who had been an auditor in the company's Office of Internal Governance and asked that he not be named.

"It's not quite indentured servitude, because you can quit, but when you look at the mortgages and car payments, especially in Seattle, you're not exactly free," said the surveilled former employee.

Experts say that tailing employees -- though surprising -- is usually legal, and that corporations have many options at their disposal to monitor employees. An investigator can do most things short of breaking into someone's home.

For example, under Washington's stalking law, licensed private investigators "acting within the capacity of his or her license" are allowed to repeatedly follow a person. Boeing's internal investigators are exempt under state law from having to obtain a private investigator license, but contracted investigators must hold licenses.

"It's worse than you can possibly imagine," said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the federation of Public Interest Research Groups.

"Employees should understand that the law generally gives employers broad authority to conduct surveillance, whether through e-mail, video cameras or other forms of tracking, including off the job in many cases."

The law grants companies the right to protect themselves from employees who break the law, such as by embezzling money or using the company warehouse to run a drug-smuggling ring.

The problem, Mierzwinski said, is when companies use the surveillance tactics available to them to root out whistle-blowers.

"We need greater whistle-blower protections," he said. But, "if you're using the company's resources and you think it's protected because you're using Hotmail, think again."

Privacy laws ask whether a reasonable person would be outraged by a particular act; reasonableness is an oft-cited concept in law, explained Bill Covington, a University of Washington professor on technology law and public policy. Washington is a "will-to-work" state, meaning employees can be fired without reason, he added.

"We cannot write laws that cover every circumstance," he said. "A jury can apply a community standard of what they deem to be fair and right. There are just too many other situations."

Unfortunately, the public itself does not know what it wants, he said.

"I don't think we have made up our mind which way we want to go with these particular laws," Covington said. "You are having a classic clash between business ... and privacy groups."

You are being watched

So when does privacy begin? When an employee steps across the threshold into his or her own home, experts say.

"The only thing your boss can't do is listen to personal telephone calls; that's covered by wiretapping laws," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J.

Companies following workers typically do so to check on the legitimacy of workers' compensation claims. A company needs to know if a worker who claims injury is actually mowing his lawn, Maltby said. It is "completely inappropriate" to trail employees to see if they are talking to reporters, he added -- but it is legal.

As one expert at the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, just as the average Joe could trail his neighbor if he wanted to, companies are allowed to trail employees.

"I can't harass the person, but there's nothing that prevents me from just following him," said Doug Klunder, privacy project director at the ACLU of Washington.

Klunder said that reading private e-mails is "highly questionable." Companies should be able to know that employees are checking e-mail, but should not be able to view the contents of the e-mails.

"We certainly don't believe that an employer should be able to read private e-mail content just because it's accessed on a work computer," he said.

However, "it's a tricky area because there aren't a lot of legal protections in Washington and in most states where we have employment-at-will. There are some privacy rights of employees, but they are limited relative to the employer."

When Boeing employees sign on to the company network, a screen pops up to tell them that "to the extent permitted by law, system use and information may be monitored, recorded or disclosed and that using the system constitutes user consent to do so," according to Boeing.

Rights for whistle-blowers

If a corporate investigation discovers employee wrongdoing that merits discipline or dismissal, workers have little recourse, experts say. Whistle-blowers, on the other hand, are afforded more protection, but only if an investigation is deemed retaliatory.

"There are no employee rights. Employees have little negotiating power," said Bill Mateja, former point man for President Bush's Corporate Fraud Task Force, formed in 2002. "Only if they're in the position of whistle-blower do they have a little more oomph."

Whistle-blower cases can be dismissed for many reasons -- the employee might not have understood the law, or the employer's retaliation is not severe enough to merit fault, "or it can be that the investigation cannot prove that the adverse action was taken for the reason that was complained about," said David Mahlum, assistant regional administrator for Region 10 of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That agency investigates whistle-blower complaints.

Robert Ellis Smith, a lawyer and the publisher of Privacy Journal, a monthly newsletter, called whistle-blower protections the "wild card" in employee protections.

"Protections against electronic surveillance are virtually non-existent in the workplace," Smith said. "The one wild card for this is federal protections for whistle-blowers. Aside from that, the privacy laws are quite weak."

---------------------------------------------------------------------

P-I reporter Andrea James can be reached at 206-448-8124 or andreajames@seattlepi.com.

From PAMA.org (Professional Aviation Maintenance Association)

November 09, 2007
FAA Hasn't Tracked Fraudulently Certified Airplane Mechanics

(CNSNews.com) - About 1,000 poorly trained or even untrained airplane mechanics have not been accounted for by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and could be working for the nation's airlines.
Further, investigators do not know yet whether the mechanics who worked on a plane, which crashed and killed 20 people in 2005, were among those mechanics who were poorly trained or untrained.
The federal government has confirmed that it is investigating the FAA's tracking of airline mechanics that obtained fraudulent certification from St. George Aviation, a Florida company whose owner was convicted on federal charges for issuing fraudulent licenses in the late 1990s.

Though the FAA was tasked with retesting at least 1,800 mechanics who obtained phony certificates from the company, fewer than half of those were retested. Also, the agency does not know where any of the mechanics who graduated from St. George are working now, FAA spokeswoman Allison Duquette told Cybercast News Service.
The federal agency charged with aviation safety responded to 12 written questions more than three weeks after Cybercast News Service submitted its inquiry. The questions had to be reviewed by counsel, Duquette said.

"The FAA does not have data on where St. George alumni are working," Duquette said in a written statement.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) referred the matter for investigation to the Department of Transportation (DOT). An Oct. 23 letter from OSC disclosure unit attorney Karen P. Gorman said there was "substantial likelihood that serious safety concerns persist in the management and operation of maintenance programs at FAA."
Gorman said the DOT had 60 days to conduct the investigation and report back to the OSC.


At least 1,000 unqualified mechanics could still be employed at airlines, said Gabriel Bruno, the former FAA director of flight standards, who exposed agency lapses first to the DOT's Office of Inspector General, then to the OSC.

"These people are working for major air carriers," Bruno told Cybercast News Service, referring to the certificate holders from St. George. "The FAA didn't do enough to retrieve these people. They just want to bury it."

The former FAA manager-turned-whistleblower specifically asked the Office of Special Counsel - which already verified his past claims of poor FAA oversight - to probe whether mechanics with certification from St. George had worked on a flight that crashed in late 2005.
After a Chalk's International Airlines seaplane took off from Miami in December 2005 heading to the Bahamas, the right wing fell off, sending two crewmen and 18 passengers to their death. The reason for the crash was poor maintenance and lack of government oversight, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
The NTSB report did not address where the mechanics in charge of the maintenance of this aircraft were trained.


Rajan Nair, general manager for Chalk's, could not confirm if any of his mechanics were certified at St. George. But he told Cybercast News Service that the man who worked on the wing as part of the airframe for the specific plane that crashed had been with the company more than three decades, and thus would not have received certification in the late 1990s.

St. George fiasco
Federal prosecutors determined that at least 1,800 mechanics received false certification from St. George Aviation near Orlando between October 1995 and January 1999.

At the trial of company owner Anthony R. St. George and examiner George E.

Allen, employees and mechanics reportedly testified the certification tests that were supposed to take up to eight hours took only a few minutes.

In some cases the company provided answers to test-takers, and in others issued certificates when major portions of the test weren't even taken.

St. George and Allen were convicted in May 1999 of fraud and conspiracy.

That August, they were sentenced to a combined 40 months in prison.
The special counsel's letter to Bruno last month, confirming the investigation would proceed, said, "You disclosed that these mechanics are now employed with major airlines; their reexamination status is questionable and FAA has not taken sufficient steps to ensure they are actually qualified for the position they hold."
"You also alleged that neither the DOT nor the FAA has established a system to check the certification or reexamination status of mechanics who may have been involved in the maintenance of an aircraft when a crash occurs because of a mechanical problem," the OSC letter to Bruno continued.

Thus far, 717 mechanics out of more than 1,800 have been retested, Duquette said. Of those, 64 percent passed the written and oral exams and 36 percent failed.

The FAA began a retesting program shortly after the discovery of the certification fraud, but agency management abruptly stopped the program in spring 2001 after only 130 mechanics took the test, federal investigators found.

The inspector general's and then the OSC's probe began after Bruno brought the FAA's actions to their attention. In June 2005, the OSC repeated the Department of Transportation's call for the FAA to reinstate testing.

"Nothing could be more central to the nation's overall security and well-being of our citizenry than aviation safety of which the aviation mechanics and inspectors form a critical link," U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch said in a June 2005 statement. "Thanks to the efforts of whistleblowers, a problem was identified and is being corrected."

The FAA disputes the findings of investigators that the testing was ever stopped.

"The FAA did not cancel the retesting program, the FAA did postpone the retesting program in 2004 to re-evaluate the program," Duquette said. "The program was re-evaluated and continued in the spring of 2005."

Yet Bruno said the agency never restarted the testing in an adequate way.

Airline mechanics must normally pass three components before they are certified, Bruno said: a written exam, an oral exam, and a practical or hands-on exam. But since the retesting has started, Bruno said, the retesting is still missing the hands-on component.
The FAA doesn't dispute that.

"FAA felt administration of a written and oral exam was an adequate form of reexamination for the purpose of establishing qualifications to hold their certificates," Duquette said.

"The FAA did not feel it was necessary to hold the mechanic to a proficient knowledge on all aspects of the practical exam when the airmen were only dealing with a particular area," Duquette added.
No 'cross reference'

Bruno thinks it is unfortunate that the NTSB did not cross-reference any of the mechanics who worked on the Chalk's International Airlines flight that crashed in December 2005, when the wing fell off, with the list of those mechanics who obtained phony certificates from St. George.

In a June 29 letter, Bruno asked Special Counsel Bloch to explore if there was a connection.

"My disclosures to you of the St. George Aviation criminal activity and resultant multitude of fraudulently issued mechanic certificates, that the FAA allowed to remain active in the aviation industry, is directly relevant to an investigation into faulty aircraft maintenance and inadequate FAA oversight," Bruno wrote in the letter to Bloch.

The letter points out that the NTSB did not report on any interviews with Chalk's.

"The NTSB did not report if any of those mechanics held certificates fraudulently obtained from St. George's criminal enterprise. This shortcoming raises questions as to whether Chalk's was relying on unqualified mechanics to recognize and repair deficiencies of its aging aircraft," the letter said.

An NTSB spokesman simply deferred to the report on the crash, which didn't address where mechanics were trained.
The name St. George Aviation doesn't ring a bell for Nair, general manager for Chalk's airlines, but he said he couldn't know for certain if any of the St. George alumni worked for his company.

"I could not even go back that far and figure out where they came from,"
Nair told Cybercast News Service. "We make sure they have a genuine license.

We do a drug check. We do a background check, the normal things that the FAA requires us to do, both on the pilots and the mechanics."
As was the case with the staff who worked on the wing of the doomed plane, Nair said most of his mechanics have a lot of experience.
"Most of our mechanics at Chalk's have been with us a very, very long time,"

Nair said. "Some of my lead mechanics have been here 18, 20, 25 years. My director of maintenance was here at least 18 years. My chief shop manager was here in a total excess of 30 years. I really don't know if we had any youngsters that came along in the late 90s."
Duquette said that the FAA works hard to affirm planes are safe.
"The FAA is confident in the quality of the maintenance work performed on U.S. commercial airplanes and that qualified mechanics are performing that work," she said.

Meanwhile, the Air Transport Association, an industry group that represents the commercial airlines industry, said in a statement for this story:
"Airlines work collaboratively with FAA to ensure full compliance with all safety-related directives. We currently have the safest air transportation system in the world, and that is not by accident."
However, Bruno thinks this is just one instance of larger problems with FAA dropping the ball.

"It's scary," he said. "I know FAA inspectors who would rather drive their car than get in an airplane."

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/viewstory.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200711/NAT200
71106a.html

11-12-07
This was sent to me this morning by someone, regarding posts on my blog. I put it here for all to ponder. It is a pretty pathetic mess we find ourselves in, particularly for federal employees who are experiencing their workplace turning into an indefinable Hell.
VM
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Whistleblowers Win Support
By Tom Shoop | Friday, November 02, 2007 | 11:33 AM
The Center for Investigative Reporting and Salon have teamed up on a new report arguing that "federal whistleblowers almost never receive legal protection after they take action."
Among the alleged reprisals detailed:

· Joseph D. Whitson Jr. was a civilian chemist in the Air Force who spoke out about superiors falsifying drug test results. His desk was moved to a room in the basement and his job duties stripped.
· Vernie Gee Sr. was an agricultural inspector who sounded the alarm about tainted meat in the U.S. food supply and inspectors taking bribes from slaughterhouses. Gee was beaten up by a plant worker during an inspection -- and then reprimanded by superiors for fighting.
· George Randall Taylor, a chief of police at a Navy base in Bermuda, exposed coverups of rapes on the base. He was then forced into a psychiatric hospital.
· Before Teresa Chambers was fired from the Park Police, she found used condoms on her car, and someone pepper-sprayed her office door.
Of course, the report also notes that recent whistleblower cases "included one in which an employee sought protection after reporting missing candy bars at a government commissary. In another case, a worker complained about colleagues using a drinking fountain as a spittoon. One government worker was discovered by investigators to have fabricated his entire complaint. Most such cases, however, are weeded out of the system."
My favorite part, though, was the video highlighting the efforts of one of the pioneers of whistleblower protection legislation: Sen. Richard M. Nixon.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments

This is not news to anyone who has worked for the government. It is widely accepted that doing the right thing has to be its own reward, because there is no other. And no good deed goes unpunished.

Something to think about...

Our rapidly growing roles of whistleblowers and reporters of corruption are not happening in a vacuum, without cause or reason.

I pass along this piece to you as "food for thought."

http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/59/19222


The Worst President in History?
By Sean Wilentz
Rolling Stone
Friday 21 April 2006
One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush.

(Illustration by Robert Grossman)

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty - and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton - a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole - a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon.

Instead, more than half of those polled - and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating - reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled - nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success - flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt - about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.


How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties - Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush - have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures - an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.


The Credibility Gap
No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.

The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age - a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 - a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton - a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."

Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections - but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff - a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition - represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.


Bush at War

Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well - including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor - much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.

The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.

Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.

No other president - Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War - faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies - including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill - suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."

All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq - an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered - the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy - yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops - accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."

When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.


Bush at Home

Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.

The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts - a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever - with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush - sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" - insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing - a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states - including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds - have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws - a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe - has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.

The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions - over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more - have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."

Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science - dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."

The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them - much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.

Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.


Presidential Misconduct

Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law - most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.

Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers - HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger - left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.

The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush
administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon - a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison - investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.

History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.

By contrast, the Bush administration - in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" - threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases - using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.

Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law - that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.

The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" - a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.


Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.

The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious - much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents - Harry Truman was one - who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
-------