verbena-19

Tomgram: Nick Turse on Guerrilla Warfare in Washington

How many times in recent years have you read some version of this story?

State Department bureaus concerned with arms control and international security -- and nothing is ostensibly more important to the Bush administration -- have recently been "reorganized" to "better deal with 21st-century threats." This reorganization was done in secret (a typical administration thumbprint); evidently in violation of long-standing management and personnel practices (another telltale fingerprint); by a panel of political appointees (yet another, from the heck-of-a-job-Brownie crew); the result, predictably, has been chaos. "An exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters" has occurred and their replacements are (yet another Bush fingerprint) "political operatives," guaranteed to cause more chaos. Left behind are an angry group of State Department officials -- a number of whom talked to Warren P. Strobel, a superb Knight Ridder reporter! -- thus stoking further the fires fuelling the major domestic foe of this administration, the federal bureaucracy.

Many of the left-behinds and their colleagues will now be leaking embarrassing material to enterprising reporters like so many sieves, just as their outraged peers at the CIA, the NSA, the Justice Department, FEMA, and so many other purged and mangled agencies and departments of the federal government have been doing. Some of them, as is the case here, will even be publicly protesting. The State Department experts who were shown the door "frequently clashed" with John Bolton -- call this the fifth "fingerprint" in this particular case -- at present our recess-appointee UN ambassador, when he was Cheney's man in the State Department; and -- prepare yourself for a shock -- the work of the panel of purgers was "overseen by Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer who was detailed to the State Department as senior adviser" to none other than former Undersecretary of State John Bolton. Need I say more? You probably didn't even have to read all the way to the end of this one to know the story, did you?

This administration is always after power and control; and, in their pursuit, sacrificing governance is never a problem, hardly even a consideration. Our unfettered commander-in-chief presidency desires only to be ever less fettered -- with its own hand-picked operatives ever more in positions of command in the Washington bureaucracy. It need not be capable of actually governing.

Thanks to Nick Turse, Tomdispatch has been regularly following these bureaucratic wars of the Bush administration and attempting to honor those officials who have fallen (or been pushed off one cliff or another) in attempting either to oppose this administration or simply to fulfill their duties honorably as they saw them.

What follows, then, is the third installment in an unending series we've been calling the Fallen Legion, meant to commemorate such figures. But the truth is: There's no way of keeping up. As Strobel's piece indicates, news of continuing casualties from the bitter guerrilla war being waged in the corridors of Washington continues to pour forth. Another Fallen Legion installment already lurks in the wings and further installments are undoubtedly being created as you read. We only wish that someone would take Nick Turse's pieces and turn them into an on-line Wall of Honor (perhaps to be matched by a Wall of Shame filled with appointed Bush administration cronies and "political operatives"). Tom


The Bureaucracy Strikes Back
Fallen Legion 3
By Nick Turse

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 11:33 PM