Evil at the Top: Decent Folk inside the Bush Regime Speak ou

Evil at the Top: Decent Folk inside the Bush Regime Speak out

By Cheryl Seal

http://cherylsealreports.bravehost.com/evilatthetop.html

What I've believed - even HAD to believe to keep hope - in five years of the Bush Regime is that most of the people working in places like FEMA, EPA, etc. were decent people who knew right from wrong. It was just their incompetent, greedy, Bush-appointed chiefs and middle managers who were truly evil. Evil? Yes, indeed, if one defines evil as doing something wrong even when you know it is wrong and that it will likely seriously harm others. The media until recently has been an accomplice in Bush-generated evil, by promoting the illusion that wrong is right (the Iraq war, for ex.) and making it impossible for whistleblowers to have a safe forum - even though providing a safe forum for whistleblowers is supposed to be one of the media's prime responsibilities to the people.

Now the "common man and woman" within the Bush government are beginning to speak out and be heard. A laudable example is Leo Bosner, a FEMA employee and union leader whose warnings about Michael Brown's inadequacy for the job of FEMA head went unheeded back in 2004. Bosner and other conscientious workers inside FEMA have been frustrated and fearful of possible post-disaster failure since shortly after 9/11 when the Bush administration "reconfigured" FEMA and other agencies to fit in with Bush's grandiose, but ultimately phony "Homeland Security" scheme. The only thing the Department of Homeland Security has managed to achieve in its four-year existence is the trampling of civil rights and routine posting of multi-colored "alerts" based largely on flawed or outdated "intelligence" or Bush's need for a fear-based media diversion.

In a glaring show of how pathetically inadequate the media has been, shortly after Katrina, the Washington Post FINALLY ran a story decrying the lack of training, experience and relevant background of most of FEMA's top Bush-appointed officials. The top three FEMA chiefs landed their jobs solely because of their work on the Bush 2000 campaign. A whopping 5 out of 8 top FEMA officials have NO crisis management experience at all.

How very thoughtful of the Post to let us know AFTER the fact. But then, the Post has been the nation's number one source of phony Bush-promoting, Bush-justifying CIA-style rumor and spin disguised as "news" since 2000.

Probably the most reprehensible thing about the FEMA chiefs and their bosses in the White House is that now that their inadequacy is revealed, they are trying to do the classic corporate thing: blame all the "underlings" - in this case, the local and state agencies in the disaster zone who were left holding the disaster bag.

Three days before Katrina struck, Bosner and other dedicated and experienced FEMA employees desperately tried to get Brown and his cronies to sound an alarm and to act. They were ignored.

"We told these fellows that there was a killer hurricane heading right toward New Orleans," said Bosner. "We had done our job, but they didn't do theirs."

Where was the Bush administration's "preemptive strike" philosophy when the nation was threatened by an attack far worse than 9/11 (Katrina's trashed 90 THOUSAND square miles)? Where was the famous "Let's roll!" mentality then?

Not to worry. The Bush corporate headquarters PR office will cook up a similar buzzword-filled response to the Katrina disaster, one that paints itself as somehow heroically struggling to "learn from experience" (while at the same time placing a 100%-inexperienced Karl Rove in charge of reconstruction) while it smears and undermines - and most likely terminates - competent folk like Bosner.

For more on Leo Bosner's courageous demand for FEMA chief accountability, see

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/17/katrina.response/index.html