Veterans for Common Sense

January 18, 2009 – There’s actually a lot that President-elect Barack Obama can learn from the troubled presidency of George W. Bush. Over the past eight years, I have interviewed President Bush for nearly 11 hours, spent hundreds of hours with his administration’s key players and reviewed thousands of pages of documents and notes. That produced four books, totaling 1,727 pages, that amount to a very long case study in presidential decision-making, and there are plenty of morals to the story. Presidents live in the unfinished business of their predecessors, and Bush casts a giant shadow on the Obama presidency with two incomplete wars and a monumental financial and economic crisis. Here are 10 lessons that Obama and his team should take away from the Bush experience.

1. Presidents set the tone. Don’t be passive or tolerate virulent divisions.

In the fall of 2002, Bush witnessed a startling face-off between National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in the White House Situation Room after Rumsfeld had briefed the National Security Council on the Iraq war plan. Rice wanted to hold on to a copy of the Pentagon briefing slides, code-named Polo Step. “You won’t be needing that,” Rumsfeld said, reaching across the table and snatching the Top Secret packet away from Rice — in front of the president. “I’ll let you two work it out,” Bush said, then turned and walked out. Rice had to send an aide to the Pentagon to get a bootlegged copy from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Bush should never have put up with Rumsfeld’s power play. Instead of a team of rivals, Bush wound up with a team of back-stabbers with long-running, poisonous disagreements about foreign policy fundamentals.

2. The president must insist that everyone speak out loud in front of the others, even — or especially — when there are vehement disagreements.

During the same critical period, Vice President Cheney was urging Secretary of State Colin Powell to consider seriously the possibility that Iraq might be connected to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Powell found the case worse than ridiculous and scornfully concluded that Cheney had what Powell termed a “fever.” (In private, Powell used to call the Pentagon policy shop run by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, who shared Cheney’s burning interest in supposed ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, a “Gestapo office.”)

Powell was right to conclude that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden did not work together. But Cheney and Powell did not have this crucial debate in front of the president — even though such a discussion might have undermined one key reason for war. Cheney provided private advice to the president, but he was rarely asked to argue with others and test his case. After the invasion, Cheney had a celebratory dinner with some aides and friends. “Colin always had major reservations about what we were trying to do,” Cheney told the group as they toasted Bush and laughed at Powell. This sort of derision undermined the administration’s unity of purpose — and suggests the nasty tone that can emerge when open debate is stifled by long-running feuds and personal hostility.

3. A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and concepts behind his policies.

The president should not micromanage, but understanding the ramifications of his positions cannot be outsourced to anyone.

For example, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq in 2004-07, concluded that President Bush lacked a basic grasp of what the Iraq war was about. Casey believed that Bush, who kept asking for enemy body counts, saw the war as a conventional battle, rather than the counterinsurgency campaign to win over the Iraqi population that it was. “We cannot kill our way to victory in Iraq,” Gen. David Petraeus said later. In May 2008, Bush insisted to me that he, of all people, knew all too well what the war was about.

4. Presidents need to draw people out and make sure that bad news makes it to the Oval Office.

On June 18, 2003, before real trouble had developed in Iraq, retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the first official to head the Iraqi reconstruction effort, warned Rumsfeld that disbanding the Iraqi army and purging too many former Baath Party loyalists had been “tragic” mistakes. But in an Oval Office meeting with Bush later that day, none of this came up, and Garner reported to a pleased president that, in 70 meetings with Iraqis, they had always said, “God bless Mr. George Bush.” Bush should have asked Garner whether he had any worries — perhaps even kicking Rumsfeld out of the Oval Office and saying something like, “Jay, you were there. I insist on the ground truth. Don’t hold anything back.”

Bush sometimes assumed that he knew his aides’ private views without asking them one-on-one. He made probably the most important decision of his presidency — whether to invade Iraq — without directly asking either Powell, Rumsfeld or Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet for their bottom-line recommendations. (Instead of consulting his own father, former president George H.W. Bush, who had gone to war in 1991 to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, the younger Bush told me that he had appealed to a “higher father” for strength.)

5. Presidents need to foster a culture of skepticism and doubt.

During a December 2003 interview with Bush, I read him a quote from his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, about the experience of receiving letters from family members of slain soldiers who had written that they hated him. “And don’t believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that, they don’t suffer any doubt,” Blair had said.

“Yeah,” Bush replied. “I haven’t suffered doubt.”

“Is that right?” I asked. “Not at all?”

“No,” he said.

Presidents and generals don’t have to live on doubt. But they should learn to love it. “You should not be the parrot on the secretary’s shoulder,” said Marine Gen. James Jones, Obama’s incoming national security adviser, to his old friend Gen. Peter Pace, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — a group Jones thought had been “systematically emasculated by Rumsfeld.” Doubt is not the enemy of good policy; it can help leaders evaluate alternatives, handle big decisions and later make course corrections if necessary.

6. Presidents get contradictory data, and they need a rigorous way to sort it out.

In 2004-06, the CIA was reporting that Iraq was getting more violent and less stable. By mid-2006, Bush’s own NSC deputy for Iraq, Meghan O’Sullivan, had a blunt assessment of conditions in Baghdad: “It’s hell, Mr. President.” But the Pentagon remained optimistic and reported that a strategy of drawing down U.S. troops and turning security over to the Iraqis would end in “self-reliance” in 2009. As best I could discover, the president never insisted that the contradiction between “hell” and “self-reliance” be resolved.

7. Presidents must tell the public the hard truth, even if that means delivering very bad news.

For years after the Iraq invasion, Bush consistently offered upbeat public assessments. That went well beyond the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner that he admitted last Monday had been a mistake. “Absolutely, we’re winning,” the president said during an October 2006 news conference. “We’re winning.” His confident remarks came during one of the lowest points of the war, at a time when anyone with a TV screen knew that the war was going badly. On Feb. 5, 2005, as he was moving up from his first-term role as Rice’s deputy to become national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley had offered a private, confidential assessment of the problems of Bush’s Iraq-dominated first term. “I give us a B-minus for policy development,” he said, “and a D-minus for policy execution.” The president later told me that he knew that the Iraq “strategy wasn’t working.” So how could the United States be winning a war with a failing strategy?

After 9/11, Bush spoke forthrightly about a war on terror that might last a generation and include other attacks on the U.S. homeland. That straight talk marked the period of Bush’s greatest leadership and highest popularity. A president is strong when he is the voice of realism.

8. Righteous motives are not enough for effective policy.

“I believe we have a duty to free people,” Bush told me in late 2003. I believe that he truly wanted to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. In preparing his second inaugural address in 2005, for example, Bush told his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, “The future of America and the security of America depends on the spread of liberty.” That got the idealistic Gerson so pumped that he set out to produce the foreign policy equivalent of Albert Einstein’s unified field theory of the universe — a 17-minute inaugural address in which the president said that his goal was nothing less than “the ending of tyranny in our world.”

But this high purpose often blinded Bush and his aides to the consequences of this mad dash to democracy. In 2005, for example, Bush and his war cabinet spent much of their time promoting free elections in Iraq — which wound up highlighting the isolation of the minority Sunnis and setting the stage for the raging sectarian violence of 2006.

9. Presidents must insist on strategic thinking.

Only the president (and perhaps the national security adviser) can prod a reactive bureaucracy to think about where the administration should be in one, two or four years. Then detailed, step-by-step tactical plans must be devised to try to get there. It’s easy for an administration to become consumed with putting out brush fires, which often requires presidential involvement. (Ask Obama how much time he’s been spending on the Gaza war.) But a president will probably be judged by the success of his long-range plans, not his daily crisis management.

For example, in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the quality of the planning for combat operations ranged from adequate to strong, but far too little attention was devoted to what might come after the fall of the Taliban and the Baath Party. Some critical strategic decisions — to disband the Iraqi army, force Baathists out of government and abolish an initial Iraqi government council — were made on the ground in Iraq, without the involvement of the NSC and the president.

Obama would do well to remember the example of a young Democratic president who was willing to make long-range plans. Bill Clinton began his presidency in 1993 after having promised to cut the federal deficit in half in four years. The initial plan looked shaky, and Clinton took a lot of heat for more than a year. But he and his team stuck to their basic strategy of cutting federal spending and raising taxes, which laid a major part of the foundation of the economic boom of the Clinton era. It was classic strategic planning, showing a willingness to pay a short-term price for the sort of long-term gains that go down in the history books.

10. The president should embrace transparency. Some version of the behind-the-scenes story of what happened in his White House will always make it out to the public — and everyone will be better off if that version is as accurate as possible.

On March 8, 2008, Hadley made an extraordinary remark about how difficult it has proven to understand the real way Bush made decisions. “He will talk with great authority and assertiveness,” Hadley said. ” ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ And he won’t mean it. Because he will not have gone through the considered process where he finally is prepared to say, ‘I’ve decided.’ And if you write all those things down and historians get them, [they] say, ‘Well, he decided on this day to do such and such.’ It’s not true. It’s not history. It’s a fact, but it’s a misleading fact.”

Presidents should beware of such “misleading facts.” They should run an internal, candid process of debate and discussion with key advisers that will make sense when it surfaces later. This sort of inside account will be told, at least in part, during the presidency. But the best obtainable version will emerge more slowly, over time, and become history.

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January 15, 2009 – Six days before the Bush administration’s term ends, a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge Wednesday that the White House found 14 million “missing” e-mails that for nearly two years were the subject of several lawsuits and congressional inquiries and widespread speculation that the documents were destroyed.

Helen Hong, an attorney in the Justice Department’s civil division, said the White House spent $10 million to locate the e-mails. She said the e-mails would be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration, along with 300 million of other documents in accordance with the Presidential Records Act, immediately after President George W. Bush leaves office next Tuesday.

Hong’s disclosure was made hours after U.S. District Court Judge Henry Kennedy granted an emergency order to an historical research group that directed Bush administration officials to immediately search all White House workstations “and to collect and preserve all e-mails sent or received between March 2003 and October 2005.”

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and George Washington University’s National Security Archive sued the Bush administration last year alleging the White House violated the Presidential Records Act by not archiving e-mails from 2003 to 2005.

Hong, who appeared at a hearing Wednesday before Magistrate Judge John Facciola, explained that independent contractors hired by the White House found the missing e-mails by looking through 60,000 disaster backup tapes.

In a court filing Thursday that calls for the dismissal of the lawsuit, the Justice Department maintains that the 14 million e-mails were never actually “missing,” rather the e-mails were simply unaccounted for due to a “flawed and limited” internal review by the Office of Administration in 2005. The documents were retrieved, the Justice Department claims, “through a three-phased email recovery process.”

Still, Facciola said in a four-page opinion issued Thursday that e-mail searches were limited to offices subject to Federal Records Act preservation guidelines, while offices that adhere to the Presidential Records Act, which include the National Security Council, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, were bypassed. Offices subject to the Federal Records Act include the Office of the Trade Representative, the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. 

In other words, e-mails, such as those sent and received by former White House political adviser Karl Rove, could still be unaccounted for.

The missing e-mail controversy first surfaced in January 2006 when Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the leak of Valerie Plame, said in a court filing following the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff I. Lewis Scooter Libby that he “learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.”

That document was filed during the discovery phase of the perjury and obstruction of justice trial against former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

On Feb. 6, 2006, the White House then turned over to Fitzgerald 250 pages of e-mails that it said it had “discovered.” The White House offered no official explanation concerning the circumstances regarding the sudden reappearance of the e-mails, nor comment on whether Fitzgerald’s allegations that the e-mails had not been automatically archived were true. At the time, a White House spokeswoman would only tell me that staffers had “discovered” the batch of documents during a search.

Nevertheless, on Thursday, the Justice Department offered up a highly technical explanation in its court filing Thursday on how the e-mails apparently fell into a virtual black hole during an internal review four years ago.

“The 2005 review attempted to identify the number of e-mail messages archived in .PST files by various Executive Office of the President (“EOP”) components for dates ranging between January 1, 2003 and August 10, 2005, and concluded that 702 component days between January 1, 2003 and August 10, 2005 had “low” message counts in the EOP email system, including 493 component days had zero message counts,” the DOJ’s court filing says.

“The [Office of the Chief Information Officer] discovered that the counting tool used for the 2005 review had a message count limit of 32,000 e-mail messages per day in a .PST file. But because large .PST files did contain more than 32,000 messages, the tool used for the 2005 review failed to “count” those messages and attribute them to components for specific days. Moreover, the 2005 review apparently relied on the name of the .PST file to allocate all of the individual e-mail messages contained within a file to the component named in the file.

“As a result of the technical limitations of the 2005 review, 14 million messages that existed in the EOP email system in 2005 were not counted in the 2005 review. Accordingly, the 2005 review presented inaccurate message counts, concluding that approximately 81 million messages existed in the EOP e-mail system in 2005 when, in fact, approximately 95 million e-mail messages were preserved in the EOP e-mail system. Those “14 million” messages were therefore never “missing,” but simply uncounted in the 2005 review.”
That explanation contradicts previous assertions by White House Chief Information Officer Theresa Payton who had claimed the administration “recycled” its computer back-up tapes and, as a result, the e-mails could not be recovered.

Previously, Payton and White House press secretary Dana Perino have blamed the loss of the e-mails on the administration’s transition from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.

Additionally, Payton said in a sworn affidavit in early 2008 that every three years the White House destroyed its hard drives “in order to run updated software, reduce ongoing maintenance, and enhance security assurance.”

“When workstations are at the end of their lifecycle and retired… under the refresh program, the hard drives are generally sent offsite to another government entity for physical destruction in accordance with Department of Defense guidelines,” states Payton’s sworn affidavit. Attempts to force the White House to try and recover “missing” e-mails would “yield marginal benefits at best, while imposing substantial burdens and disruptions.”

David Gewirtz, an expert on e-mail, and the author of the book Where Have All the Emails Gone? said he finds the contradictions between Payton’s testimony and the Justice Department’s response “quite curious.”

“It does seem odd that the [Office of the Chief Information Officer’s] “counting tool” had a 16-bit limit, but one important lesson is to never underestimate the possibility of software to be badly designed,” Gewirtz said. “Given that the messages apparently were stored in .PST files, the fidelity of the message data is clearly in question. I don’t think we’ll really know whether everything’s in order until every single message is deliberately and systematically exported from the rotting .PST files and imported into a solid, reliable, and well-designed archiving database management system.”

Meredith Fuchs, an attorney with George Washington University’s National Security Archives, also doubted the veracity of the administration’s claims.

“From the beginning, the White House has changed it’s story from ‘emails are missing’ to ‘23 million emails were found’ and back to ‘no emails are missing.’ The truth is, neither we nor the public knows what was going on, nor can we verify the White House’s efforts because they continue to conduct themselves under a veil of secrecy,” Fuchs said.

Anne Weismann, chief counsel of CREW, agreed. Weismann said she is troubled by the lack of transparency on the part of the Bush administration regarding the process apparently undertaken to recover e-mails and the disclosure by the administration five days before the end of Bush’s presidency that “missing” e-mails have suddenly been found.

“I think they are clearly manipulating the timing they are manipulating the facts,” Weismann said. “If they had done everything the law required them to do they would be transparent. And to date they have offered vague representations of counsel that they have met their obligations, which is not good enough. At the end of the day it still remains the case that [the White House] was told they had this massive problem and they did nothing. And that doesn’t change. They did it a little late in the game. It wasn’t until they were sued that they took action.”

Weismann added: “Even once a new administration takes office, CREW will continue seeking to hold the Bush administration accountable for its role in the disappearance of the 14 million emails.”

Hong’s claims that outside contractors were hired to recover the “missing’ e-mails was a concern CREW first raised last August.

It was then that CREW disclosed in a court filing that the administration hired an outside contractor to search individual computers for tens of thousands of missing e-mails that disappeared between 2003 and 2005.

But according to the group’s court filing, information technology experts hired to conduct the search apparently were told not to try and locate hundreds of thousands of e-mails from March 2003 to September 2003 that were missing, a crucial timeframe that encompasses the start of the Iraq war, and the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

“CREW has learned that the White House has now completed its analysis of the missing email problem and confirmed that email is missing for as many as 225 days,” according to CREW’s August 2008 statement on the matter. “In addition, the White House is about to begin selecting, or has already selected, a contractor to restore the missing email, although it is CREW’s understanding that the White House does not intend to use backup tapes predating October 2003.

“It has already been established that e-mails for the Office of the Vice President are missing for a critical week in September 2003, when the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity. Despite the obvious relevance of these new facts to the lawsuit, the White House has refused CREW’s request that is advise the Court of these events and bring transparency to the process.”

Senior administration officials disclosed Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity to several journalists in early summer 2003, leading to its publication in a July 14, 2003, article by right-wing columnist Robert Novak. However, it was not until September 2003 that a CIA complaint to the Justice Department sparked a criminal investigation into the identity of the leakers.

Hong, the Justice Department attorney, did not say in court Wednesday what timeframe is covered by the discovery of the 14 million e-mails. She only said that the White House had met its obligation as required under the Presidential Records Act in locating the electronic communications.

The 2005 internal investigation by officials in the Office of Administration concluded that e-mails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney between Sept. 30, 2003, and Oct. 6, 2003 were lost and unrecoverable. That was the week when the Justice Department launched an investigation into the Plame leak and set a deadline for Bush administration officials to turn over documents and e-mails containing any reference to Plame Wilson or her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. The timeframe also coincided with litigation surrounding the release of documents related to Cheney’s National Energy Task Force meetings.

Now, if pertinent e-mails White House related to the Plame leak are included in the 14 million that were recovered, they will not be available for the public to view for at least five years in accordance with Freedom of Information Act rules governing presidential records. That would certainly call into question the integrity of Fitzgerald’s probe.

Despite assurances by Hong that “missing” e-mails have been recovered, Gewirtz has advised the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama to treat White House computers left behind “like crime scene evidence.”

“What must happen is this: each computer your team finds in the White House and the [Executive Office of the President] must be treated as evidence,” Gewirtz wrote in an open letter to Obama in the magazine Outlook Power. “Each machine must be cataloged and then removed for forensic examination. Under no circumstances should anyone on your team boot up any of those machines or use them.”

January 14, 2009 – Murray invites Secretary-Designate Shinseki to visit Washington state veterans facilities

Calls for proactive approach to meeting long-term challenges, better care for women veterans, and warns against increased fees and co-pays for veterans

Listen Now:
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·         Senator Murray’s Opening Statement  

·         Senator Murray asks about changing the culture at the VA

·         Senator Murray asks about improving care for female veterans and invites Secretary-Designate Shinseki to visit VA facilities in Washington state

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) questioned Retired General Eric Shinseki, President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Veterans Affairs, about challenges facing the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  Senator Murray, a senior member of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee and an outspoken leader in fighting for veterans’ benefits and care, discussed changing the overall culture at the VA, improving care for women veterans, and working to make the VA a more proactive agency. Secretary-Designate Shinseki”s nomination is expected to be voted on by the full Senate as part of a package of Obama administration nominees on January 20th.

Changing the Culture
Senator Murray began her questioning of Secretary-Designate Shinseki by highlighting some of the major failures that the VA has attempted to downplay under the Bush administration and how he would work to change the culture at the VA. 

“Over the past 8 years, the VA has developed a track record and culture of downplaying some potentially embarrassing internal issues,” said Senator Murray. “Whether it’s budget shortfalls or inaccurate suicide data, and this has come at the expense of the veterans we’re serving.”

Senator Murray went on to ask Secretary-Designate Shinseki how he will go about building a VA that “focuses on providing for veterans needs rather than avoiding public relations disasters.” 
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Listen to Murray’s question on changing the culture at the VA and Secretary-Designate Shinseki’s response.

Women Veterans
Senator Murray also discussed improving care for women veterans.  Senator Murray is the author of legislation that would expand and improve health care services to women veterans, particularly women who have served our country in Iraq and Afghanistan.