The Scandal Sheet

Don't just read it and weep -- pin it on your wall, fax it to Nancy Pelosi. A dozen reasons to throw the bums out of Washington.

By Mark Follman and Tracy Clark-Flory

Read more: George W. Bush, Impeachment, Terrorism, Iraq, Ethics, CIA, Opinion, Al Qaeda, Mark Follman, 2006 Elections, Hurricane Katrina, Tracy Clark-Flory

Nov. 6, 2006 | Tuesday brings the most anticipated midterm elections in a long time. For that, President Bush and Republican-led Washington deserve much, if not all of the credit. The president's public approval rating, at around 37 percent for the last month, is sunk in the sludge. America's current view of Congress is equally dark. Two out of every three citizens are worried that, under the current regime, their country is headed farther out to sea.

The catastrophe in Iraq is a primary reason, of course. But America's creeping sense of insecurity also flows from the relentless cascade of Washington scandals, only the latest of which was the revelation of a GOP congressman's predatory sexual advances on underage boys.

After Bush was reelected, we pulled together a litany of Republican wrongdoing in our first installment of the Scandal Sheet -- a kind of worst-hits collection from Bush's first four-year tour. By no means did it cover everything, but it was plenty long and ugly. Perhaps we were overly optimistic and even a bit delusional, then, to think that Bush's narrow victory in November 2004 might leave him with a humbler, more sober view of his mandate. That we might see, at last, some letup from the blatant distortions of truth, the fear-mongering, the influence peddling, the incompetence and malfeasance -- the utter lack of accountability and remorse for how badly things had gone.

And yet. Since the start of 2005, Bush and Co. have presided over an astonishing list of further transgressions. For some of the biggest, the word "scandal" does not do justice. Although they are already known the world over, we're including some of them here anyway (and you're free to come up with your own expletive label for them): the horror and national shame that followed Hurricane Katrina, the loss of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in an arrogantly run war, and the further abuses of power in the "war on terror" -- whereby Bush, from secret CIA prisons to military tribunals to spying on Americans, has made a bigger burn pile of the Constitution than of any amount of chopped cedar in Crawford, Texas.

Not that the Democrats, even if they win big on Tuesday, can necessarily be counted on to ride in and save the day. Much has already been made of what they might do if they take control of one or both chambers of Congress. Such rhetorical weapons as "more oversight" and "hearings" and "subpoenas" have been brandished, at least on the campaign stage. But will the party distinguished for its chronic timidity under Bush really be ready to rumble?

For starters, a Democratic majority will have, well, Iraq to deal with -- a critical and daunting problem that will demand enormous attention and resources. Nancy Pelosi, the presumed House speaker, appeared to acknowledge this in October when she yanked the prospect of impeachment hearings off the table, saying, "We don't have time for that." Other Democrats have signaled a mild appetite for confrontation by pointing to the next presidential election. "The '08 contest for the White House will be the major moderating influence," Rep. Pete Stark of California told the New York Times recently. "I don't think we're going to run out and impeach Rumsfeld and Bush, although a lot of my constituents would like to."

One thing is certain: Should an emboldened Democratic majority decide to take Bush and his coterie of loyalists head-on, they'll have no shortage of material to work with.

Here we've gathered many, though certainly not all, of the presidential and Republican evils that have sprung up or come further to light during the last two years. Once again, these items are not arranged chronologically, or in terms of moral or historical weight. We'll get to torture and the war and illegal spying -- but upfront we want to alert you to some of the lesser-known or overlooked or now forgotten scandals. Lost track of all the Bush administration's trumped-up terror busts? Forgotten how the White House coerced government scientists to fudge the facts? Aware of the federal judges Bush nominated who violated ethics law?

Read on for the damning details. Perhaps Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues should, too.

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Science: An Inconvenient Truth

The scandal: The clear and present dangers of global warming haven't just met with a cold shoulder at the White House -- Bush officials have ordered a freeze on the facts. The White House kept a grip on scientists at federal agencies, limiting their contact with the media and issuing reminders to "stay on message" in interviews, according to government e-mails obtained by Salon this year through a Freedom of Information Act request. Employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have said that administration officials "chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether." The White House also blocked publication of research by NOAA scientists linking global warming with escalating hurricanes, according to a September 2006 article in the journal Nature.

The problem: An overwhelming majority of scientists, scholars -- and heck, even some policymakers -- believe that when it comes to safeguarding the planet's future, we should seek truth, not truthiness.

The outcome: In September, a group of 14 senators raised the problem with the inspectors general of NASA and the U.S. Commerce Department (which oversees NOAA), who have since launched formal investigations into the alleged coercion.

Further reading: "Climate-controlled White House"; "Brownout at the EPA"; "The Know-nothings"; "Does George Bush Even Know What Science Is?"

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Trumped-up Terror Busts

The scandal: It wasn't just the "Lackawanna Six" who got the Kafka treatment after 9/11. In February 2006 director of national intelligence John Negroponte warned Congress about "a network of Islamic extremists" in Lodi, Calif. Two men there were charged -- Umer Hayat, an ice cream truck driver, and his son, Hamid -- but the cases, riddled with faulty intelligence and coerced testimony, crumbled in court. FBI agents had pushed the two men into separate accounts about a training camp in Pakistan, but the confessions didn't square. "You can hear the agents literally dictate to [Hayat] what it is that they thought he was involved in," James Weddick, a 35-year FBI veteran who reviewed the interrogation tapes, told "Frontline" this fall. "And then he mimics back to them what he thinks that they want to hear."

Then there was the highly publicized bust by the feds in Miami this summer: A group calling itself the "Seas of David" stupidly dreamed out loud of blowing up the Sears Tower -- but lacked weapons, means of transportation and the al-Qaida "uniforms" they hoped to purchase from a terrorist-cum-FBI operative. FBI deputy director John Pistole admitted the group was "aspirational" rather than "operational." And then there were the three Arab-Americans locked up this year for the menacing act of buying a bunch of cheap cellphones at Wal-Mart.

The problem: You may be starting to sense a pattern here -- has the Bush administration been exploiting fear of terrorism as a political weapon? (Is the pope Catholic?)

The outcome: In the Lodi case, Hamid Hayat was convicted for attending a training camp and lying to the FBI, though the FBI never did any follow-up investigation in Pakistan; the defense has filed an appeal. Umer Hayat's case led to a mistrial. The seven "Seas of David" members await trial in March. Due to lack of evidence, terrorism charges against the cellphone buyers were swapped out for conspiracy and money-laundering charges -- which were later tossed out by a federal judge.

Further reading: "Real Threat or Fake Terror?"; "Is the U.K. Better Than the U.S. at Stopping Terror?"; "Be Very Afraid"

Next page: Pentagon lies, secret CIA prisons, a boom in global terrorism and more