Bush administration conflicts of interest

The Bangor Daily News should be commended for a recent editorial (“Rigged ABM tests,” Aug. 24) validating the Doonesbury cartoon strip’s contention that the announced success of the latest National Missile Defense System’s test of an antiballistic missile was a lie. The missiles in the test (both decoy and attacking missile) were rigged with beacon devices that guided the attacking missile to the decoy. Not only was the “kill” a fraud, the collision rendered the whole system incapable of discriminating between decoys and any additional missile targets.

The unconscionably expensive, wholly unsuccessful “Star Wars” missile-shield plan is the pet project of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush, and its continuation will drain billions from a federal budget that already has been rendered meaningless by Bush’s tax cut for the rich and by a politically diminished surplus (if the surplus disappears, then items unpalatable to Bush’s military-industrial administration can be denied on the grounds that the budget can’t accommodate them).

That the Bush administration, the Pentagon and defense contractors lied about the ABM tests can’t be a surprise to anyone. But the fact that the defense committees of the House and Senate and the mainstream press knew of the lie but said nothing public about it is much scarier than Rumsfeld’s imagined missile attacks from rogue countries.

Between the time he was President Gerald Ford’s secretary of defense and Bush’s current appointee, Rumsfeld spent some 20 years in the corporate world accumulating upward to $200 million in defense contractor stock, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Microsoft – stock that after eight months as defense secretary he has yet to divest as he promised he would do when confirmed by the Senate. But then, such gross conflicts of interest are common in the Bush administration: Presidential adviser Karl Rove, chief architect of much of Bush’s duplicitous political sleight of hand, owned $250 million of stock in drug companies while he was meeting with pharmaceutical lobbyists prior to the formation of Bush’s drug-industry friendly patents’ bill if rights.

Bush’s whole term of office has been marked by deception and outright lies: He reneged on his campaign promise to treat carbon dioxide emissions as pollutants; he invented a nonexistent energy crisis to boost wealth for Vice President Cheney and his fossil-fuel constituents; he championed a fake tax rebate that is no rebate at all but an advanced on new year’s tax bill, leaves out 33 million poor, and is a smoke screen for the windfall tax break for the rich; and most recently he read a masterfully ambiguous speech to the public on federally funded stem cell research that intentionally obscured the fact that the 60 steam cell colonies supposedly available for research are scattered all over the world, are largely owned by commercial biotech companies, and are likely to be unusable for human cell studies.

Bush’s ascendancy to the presidency was illegitimate, so Mainers should not be surprised that his administration conducts business with contempt for truth, fair play and public opinion. We need not, however, tolerate it or fear to speak the truth about it, be we members of Congress and the press or mere citizens.

Paul Newlin lives in Deer Isle.