THE WALL OF THE FALLEN LEGION

The following article called

The Fallen Legion is interesting beyond belief. I have often wondered about the people serving in this Bush Administration and thought: HOW CAN THEY ALL BE CORRUPT? Upon reading this article, I now realize, many good people have been either fired or resigned because they couldn't take what the neocons were dishing out... WHY? you might ask... well simply because they have a conscience (CONTRARY TO CON-SCIENCE WHICH THE NEOCONS HAVE PERFECTED) and could no longer keep a lid on the corruption and lies. They are the brave WHISTLEBLOWERS
and deserve great praise. What I can't understand is, with all these people showing the world what really is going on behind the IRON BUSH/NEOCON CURTAIN... why are they STILL IN POWER? ThinkingBlue

PS: Click on the pictures and links for a pop-out page of interest on each candidate for the WALL OF THE FALLEN LEGION



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PRELUDE TO:
The Fallen Legion

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 efore 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 itnessed 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.

Ann Wright: A career diplomat in the Foreign Service and a colonel in
the Army Reserves resigned on the day the U.S. 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 twenty year span, he tendered his letter of resignation from his post as Political Counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece 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
intelligence] 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 Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz. Then, wrote the Houston Chronicle, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld "took the unusual step of announcing that Gen. Eric Shinseki
would be leaving when his term as Army chief of staff end." 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: "While 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 U.S. 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 President 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Army and stated:
"I love the army and I was sorry to leave it. But I saw no possibility of
fundamentally positive reform and reorganization 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 that 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 had spoken with Novotny said he had privately
expressed frustration over the administration's decision to soften the
U.S. 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 (RSA), 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. Quit, 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." Oppegrad: Fired, January 20,
2001. Spaddaro: Resigned, October 1, 2003.

Teresa Chambers: After speaking with reporters and congressional
staffers about budget problems in her organization, the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 [U.S. 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 U.S. 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 twelve 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 U.S. 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 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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[NOTE: If you know of others, or are one of the "fallen legion"
yourself, please send the information (and whatever supporting material
you would care to supply) to fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com with the subject
heading: "fallen legion" to add another name to the "wall." This is a
subject TomDispatch would like to return to in the future.]

[Special thanks to Rebecca Solnit for providing the idea for this
piece, and so "commissioning" it.]

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.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=28817

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POSTSCRIPT: A Piss Is Not A Leak
When Washington Post executive editor Len Downie was asked by Howie Kurtz on CNN's "Reliable Sources" Sunday about legal investigations into reporters who protect confidential sources, Downie said he was troubled by this, because those sources often are the public's only way to learn the truth about bad things their government is up to, and those sources are often risking their jobs by revealing them.

Yes, what Downie described is a leak. But there is also something else, which is also called a leak, but using the same word for both is deceptive and dangerous.

When government officials or campaign operatives go off the record to a reporter in order to smear someone, spread disinformation, lie about an opponent, stab someone in the back while wearing the cloak of anonymity, kindle a propanganda brush fire, slander critics. psych out enemies, and throw red herrings in an investigator's path, they are engaging in the dark arts of psy ops.

rom Caligula to Machiavelli, from the Congo to the Gulag, deception has always been a handmaiden to power. But in our First Amendment democracy, where journalists protect sources, political liars have figured out how to game the system. Lee Atwater not only knew how to assassinate; he knew that reporters would dutifully wipe his fingerprints off the weapon. Cheney, Chalabi, Rove, Libby et al are his heirs. They're so good at it that a Bob Woodward can think a lie is a casually tossed off piece of gossip, rather than an Oscar-worthy performance in a government-wide defamation campaign. Leaker-liars know how to work the media food chain, using Fleet Street tabloids and wingnut blogs to start contagions that infect more credible sources, which use the meta-guise of covering the rumor, the "phenomenon," rather than truth-squadding the underlying charge. They know how to orchestrate multiple and equally duplicitous confirming sources. They know they can cause true whistle-blowers horrendous damage -- ruinous legal fees, destroyed reputations, jail time -- while secure in the knowledge that their reporter-enablers will nobly decline to blow the whistle on them.

These officials aren't leaking to reporters. They're pissing on the public. Western journalists had no difficulty labeling Cold War propaganda as disinformation. Why are they so willing now to let power speak untruth to them? Maybe it's time for a massive source-burning in Washington. If no one from now on were aloud to speak off the record or on background, it's conceivable that the useful information the public might sacrifice would be far outweighed by the poisons we'd purge from the body politic.

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For whom the bell tolls a poem
No man is an island) by John Donne
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
These famous words by John Donne were not originally written as a poem -
the passage is taken from the 1624 Meditation 17, from Devotions Upon
Emergent Occasions and is prose.

The words of the original passage Click Here

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