Bushfire

Poor George Bush. The beginning of his presidency was marred by a host of stories about his business dealings, and how he seemed to get a good deal through individuals who were either friends/associates of his father or were just people looking to buy some political influence by helping the son of the president.

One of the best known of such deals was the one where Bush II bought the Texas Rangers, got the city of Arlington to pay for the building of a stadium which the Rangers would eventually get for almost free and even got the state of Texas to condemn the land around the stadium so it could be commercially developed.

In another instance that Bush got a sweetheart deal, George Soros who was part of the deal later told a journalist, "We were buying political influence. That was it." (Read Shrub by Molly Ivins for the full dope on Bush's business.)

What got added to this, hopefully to Bush's embarrassment, were lots of questions of deals that Vice-President Dick Cheney was involved in, including one that got President Bush to revoke sanctions on Azerbaijan, a country with whom Cheney's firm would have loved to have commercial deals with, given how Cheney (when still with Halliburton) lobbied with Congress to repeal the aid embargo against Azerbaijan.

All this, thankfully for Bush, came to a halt with 9/11 and the "war on terror" that followed. Of late, this too is unravelling rapidly, with the 9/11 commission saying there was no evidence of a link between the Al Qaida and Saddam Hussein, or of Iraqi involvement in 9/11.

Coming as it does after the news of the sadism at Abu Ghraib and the possibility that the two presidents (Bush and Blair) had sexed up intelligence and other information to justify the occupation of Iraq, Bush appears in deep trouble.

Well, here's a book that sort of tops up, indeed overflows, the president's cup of woes. Written by a former counsel to President Richard Nixon, the book convincingly presents a picture of a presidential set up that's "worse than Watergate", in the sense that the overall goal is to make sure no one knows just what's happening in the White House, reminding everyone of that infamous Nixonism, "I don't give a shit what happens, I want you all to stonewall it."

The stonewalling, John Dean tells us, is not a new Bush trait, but goes back to his campaign days, indeed even to his days as governor of Texas where, despite all the moves, over the years, to make the system more transparent by making presidential and other top officials' papers public, Bush arranged for his gubernatorial papers to be placed on 60 large pallets, shrink-wrapped in heavy plastic, and shipped off to his father's presidential library at Texas University, instead of sending them to the Texas State Library.

Indeed, when Bush entered the White House, the delimitation period on the Reagan official papers had lapsed (Bush Senior was vice-president to Reagan), Bush kept asking for one extension after another, and finally refused to release some of the documents.

This trait lived on in the Bush administration's dealings ever since. Only nine days into office, Bush created a National Energy Policy Development Group headed by Cheney.

Given Bush's close links with Big Oil, it was natural people suspected back-door wheeling and dealing, and so two Congressmen wrote to the General Accounting Office, the investigative and auditing arm of the Congress, a body that's something like our CAG, only a lot more pro-active.

Well, the GAO asked for information about the composition of the group and its activities, and it was told that it was trying "to intrude into the heart of Executive deliberations, including deliberations among the President, the Vice President which the law protects to ensure the candor in Executive deliberation necessary to effective government".

This, Dean says, was a gross exaggeration of what the GAO asked for, and the body then made it very clear that all it wanted to know was who the members of the group were. With the battle dragging on, the GAO was finally forced to file a suit, the first since it was formed, to ask for the information.

Indeed, the Bush administration, says the author, tried its best to stall the 9/11 investigations. The Washington Post reports a meeting Bush and Cheney had with Senate majority leader Tom Daschle where Bush wanted the probe to be limited to the House and Senate intelligence committees whose proceedings are generally kept secret.

The White House even refused to permit either Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell to testify on maters relating to pre-9/11 counter-terrorism activities. Bush even refused to let Tom Ridge, the new director of homeland security, to appear before the Congress, telling reporters, "I'm not going to let Congress erode the power of the Executive Branch."

Dean's book also contains interesting details that debunk the myth of the slightly vacuous good-guy president, and relates how Bush can, and did, play dirty, by only partially releasing documents to make Clinton look bad in the Marc Rich pardon case, or even by blowing the CIA identity of the wife of a former US ambassador who'd sort of nailed Bush's insinuations (in his State of the Union address) of Saddam having acquired uranium in Niger "" the ex-Ambassador wrote that he'd travelled to Niger on the request of the CIA, and found no evidence of this.

WORSE THAN WATERGATE

John W Dean
Little, Brown and Company
Price: Rs 645
Pages: 253