"Articles of Impeachment"
This is an update of an article I wrote last March: "Whitegate?" An Enrongate Cover Story
News item: "Army Chief's Jet Use Questioned."
The Los Angeles Times reports "Army Secretary Thomas E. White and his wife flew to Colorado on an Army jet this month and closed on the sale of their Aspen house, according to Army officials and sources in Colorado."
This isn't the real story. This is the cover story. Not even close. The Bush Administration wants to quietly shuffle White off the stage, saying he showed "bad judgment" in using an Army jet for personal use.
News item: "Army Chief Rebuked for Keeping Ties to Enron."
The Los Angeles Times reported March 7, 2002: "[Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White] spent 11 years at Enron, accruing millions of dollars in company stock. Before joining the administration, he was vice chairman of Enron Energy Services, whose accounting practices have come under scrutiny."
That's another side issue. The real story is that White steered long-term contracts to Enron, and since Enron can't perform on the contracts, the taxpayers are out $millions.
A Judge Advocate General Officer at the Department of the Army responsible for energy contracts at military bases told my source that Army Secretary White renegotiated several such contracts. White gave contracts to Enron, including those at West Point and other New York State defense establishments.
White directed the Army to pay Enron in advance of service, and now Enron will never perform on those contracts. Taxpayers lost $millions when White handed $millions of taxpayer dollars to his former colleagues at Enron for nothing. Worst of all, Enron's bankruptcy created major logistical problems, undermining our national defense.
At the very least, we know one of the top defense officials we trust to keep us safe blundered horribly. Bush told us we could trust Army Secretary White to keep us safe. He was wrong. Now we are seeing the contours of a major scandal and the first signs of a cover up -- a credible cover story to glide White off the public stage.
Now, Salon.com reports: "Three months before he was nominated as secretary of the Army by President Bush, Thomas White faced what surely was the most difficult task in his 10-year career as an Enron executive: Helping hide the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses from Enron Energy Services, the retail division he had headed since 1998." See: Tom White played key role in covering up Enron losses.
This is a fairly simple story with many complex details. Here are the highlights:
Before becoming Secretary of the Army, Thomas White was not merely involved in shady deals for Enron. He actually seems to have designed and implemented the accounting gimmicks which misled investors, and left thousands of Enron employees out of work without their retirement funds or pensions.
Bush brought White into the administration to head the Army, not to help him play "fuzzy math." This is strange, because White could have helped Bush conceal the damage as our surplus returned to depths of deficits not seen since the last Bush wrecked the economy.
Side note: why does anyone think Republican economic policies are better than Democratic polices? We've had nine recessions over the past fifty years, and Republicans presided over all but one of them - the shortest and least serious.
Eisenhower. Nixon. Ford. Reagan. Bush and now Bush again all drove the economy into decline. Among Democrats, recession marred only Jimmy Carter's term. We just can't trust Republicans to do what's best for the economy.
Back to White. Seems we can't trust Republicans to do what's best for national security either. Since joining the Bush team, White fit right in, doing special favors for Enron at taxpayers' expense. Ominously, White's favoritism undermined our national security.
That's the real story. Bush's Army Secretary's apparent abuses and double-dealing, how it undermined national security, and Bush's own knowledge and responsibility in this largely unreported scandal.
Administration officials from Cheney and Bush on down are blocking serious investigations into the massive national security breakdowns which left us open to attack on 9/11. Failing that, they hope to keep the investigations secret. This is not acceptable.
As Bush pushes our armed forces toward war with Iraq, we must know if the Army can trust the man Bush appointed to lead it. We have to know if Army Secretary White is a crook who put his friends' and his own financial interests above our national security.
We have to break this code of secrecy and know if this was typical of the Bush Administration's national security priorities before September 11. We must have these answers before Bush and White lead us into war.
© Copyright 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 by MikeHersh.com
and identified authors. MikeHersh.com invites you to broadcast
any material at this site, provided you identify the source as
MikeHersh.com. All print, Internet, email and other summaries, excerpts
or other written reproductions must
include this blurb and a link to http://www.MikeHersh.com.
|
