The Center for Public Integrity

Days after terrorists brought down the World Trade Center towers, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that the air was safe to breathe, but that proved to be a dangerously optimistic assessment. Nearly two years later, EPA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) reported that the EPA “did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement,” as “air monitoring data was lacking for several pollutants of concern.” The OIG also discovered that the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) significantly revised EPA press releases “to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.” Samples showed asbestos levels between double and triple EPA’s danger limit, but CEQ edits defined the results as “slightly above” the limit.

EPA was instructed to clear all statements to the media through the National Security Council, giving National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s office final approval. While the EPA pointed to its recommendations that workers and volunteers on site take precautions such as using respirators, OIG said “EPA’s basic overriding message was that the public did not need to be concerned about airborne contaminants.” Former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman maintains that her assurances referred to lower Manhattan in general and not the Ground Zero site. Yet, first responders like Vinny Forras told CBS, “We were being told ‘Don’t worry about it.’” Forras is one of the nearly seven out of 10 World Trade Center responders who reported new or worsened lung problems, according to a 2006 study by Mount Sinai Hospital.

As a former border-state governor, President George W. Bush sought a systematic answer to America’s immigration problems, but found himself repeatedly stymied by the fallout from 9/11 and rifts within his own party. During the 2000 campaign, even The New York Times' usually critical editorial board said Bush “deserves credit for altering the tenor of his party's rhetoric on immigration.” Bush’s platform said he believed immigration “is not a problem to be solved, but the sign of a successful nation,” and his plan for comprehensive reform included both stepped up border security and a path to citizenship for the more than 12 million illegal immigrants residing in the United States. But by the time the administration began to lay out its plan for comprehensive immigration reform in 2004, Americans rattled by the events of 9/11 were focused largely on border security and enhanced enforcement. Meanwhile, conservative Republicans derided the “path to citizenship” proposals as an unfair amnesty for lawbreakers.

In the 1970s, when the federal government tightly regulated the oil market, federal policies encouraged construction of gasoline refineries. But deregulation in the first year of the Reagan administration allowed the oil industry and market forces to decide how many refineries were needed. As a result, the number of refineries and total capacity to produce gasoline in the United States peaked in 1981 with 324 refineries able to process 18.6 million barrels of crude oil per day. Today, with U.S. demand for oil more than 20 percent higher, refinery capacity is roughly 1.7 percent lower. Refineries operate near full capacity in the summer, leaving the nation’s fuel supply chain vulnerable to disruption, as in September 2008 when Hurricanes Gustav and Ike shut down most Gulf Coast refineries, and gasoline stations throughout the Southeast ran out of fuel.

Refining historically has been the low-profit segment of the oil business, so the industry has had little incentive to build. Some economists believe the Federal Trade Commission made things worse by forcing oil companies to divest themselves of refineries when they merged with other oil companies. The smaller companies that bought the refineries often did not have resources to expand them. And, during the past decade, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) required refineries to invest $50 billion, according to industry, to meet regulations for cleaner burning fuels. Over the same time period, neither the EPA nor Congress did anything to force the auto industry to make more energy-efficient vehicles, which would have helped curb pollution and lessen the squeeze on refineries — and on wallets at the gas pump.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) made expansive and inappropriate use of new authority to issue “national security letters,” compulsory requests for companies to supply consumer and financial information. The bureau had long used these letters to obtain information about agents of foreign powers; in 2001 the USA Patriot Act gave the FBI the power to issue them in investigations of international terrorism. In 2000, the FBI issued about 8,500; then, from 2003 to 2006, agents annually issued more than 30,000, and by 2006 more than half related to investigations of Americans. The letters asked information about telephone calls, e-mails, financial transactions, even library records – while forbidding their recipients from disclosing that they had received the request. Three separate recipients sued to overturn the gag order and, citing First Amendment rights, Judge Victor Marrero struck it down in 2004; the government is appealing. The Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General found that the bureau could not justify use of the letters in many cases and that the FBI often received information it was not authorized to obtain, yet catalogued and examined it along with the rest of the data provided. Other intelligence-gathering agencies, including the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, have made use of similar, but non-compulsory, letters. Such requests for personal information occasionally may advance counterterrorism investigations, but watchdog groups warn that American citizens have no legal recourse to fight back against a program with such little transparency. FBI officials stress that they have responded promptly to the inspector general’s concerns, and that the Bureau “conducted an extensive, nationwide internal review” of its use of national security letters and moved to ensure that all requests were first reviewed by an attorney and that staff were better trained on the issue.

Despite early promises of openness, the Bush administration has drawn widespread criticism for its stark lack of transparency. Rates of declassification under the Bush White House nosedived to a fraction of what was done under the Clinton administration, while new classification of documents reached a 15-year high. Open government watchdogs cite numerous examples of excessive secrecy, among them: an October 2001 memo by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reversed nearly 40 years of presumed openness under the Freedom of Information Act; an executive order allowed current and former presidents to delay the release of presidential papers indefinitely; widespread use of “Sensitive But Unclassified” markings prevented public release and interagency sharing of material; and the administration refused to share with Congress information pertaining to, among other areas, the Vice President’s National Energy Policy Development Group. The cost to taxpayers of securing government secrets reached a record $9.91 billion in 2007, according to the federal Information Security Oversight Office. Bush’s ex-White House press secretary Scott McClellan decried his former boss and the administration’s inner circle for being “the most secretive administration” in the history of Washington. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Bush administration officials have in the past argued that the 9/11 attacks and ensuing war on terrorism demanded greater information security and secrecy.

Follow-up:
During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama vowed to “turn the page on a growing empire of classified information and restore the balance we’ve lost between the necessarily secret and the necessity of openness in a democratic society.”

Despite the passage of new laws designed to protect them, whistleblowers have found themselves largely unprotected during the Bush administration. Six years ago, the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, also known as the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance act, was passed in response to the Enron and WorldCom scandals. Provisions in the law made it illegal for publicly-traded companies to retaliate against “any other office, employee, contractor, subcontractor, or agent” of a company for acting as a whistleblower. Despite these strong provisions, the Department of Labor has ruled in favor of whistleblowers who claimed to be retaliated against only 17 times out of 1,273 complaints that were filed between 2002 and September 2008. Of those, 841 cases were dismissed, many on the technicality that the whistleblowers work for subsidiaries of the companies, not the main companies themselves. The Labor Department has argued that the statute does not cover employees of those subsidiaries. Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, who together drafted the protections, counter that there is no basis for this reading of the law. It is not just corporate whistleblowers who are not receiving the protection they expect; federal whistleblowers also find themselves without cover. In June 2008 a coalition of 112 independent groups urged the Senate and House to pass a new bill increasing whistleblower protection for federal employees. This call came after only two of 53 whistleblowers who brought cases to the Merit System Protection Board during the first three months of 2008 were victorious.

The Bush administration has consistently drawn ire from the scientific community for its propensity to ignore, manipulate, and suppress science. From its earliest days, the administration demonstrated a lack of interest or, say critics, even disdain for science by allowing key scientific posts to go unfilled for over a year — including Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, National Institutes of Health director, and surgeon general. The FDA job took 20 months to fill, while the eventual surgeon general, Richard Carmona, ultimately accused the administration of political interference. In addition, a presidential science adviser was not chosen for nine months, and then was demoted in status from “assistant to the president” to “adviser.”

In the confusion that reigned on September 11, 2001, the U.S. military was never positioned to shoot down any of the hijacked planes and even sent fighters after one of the flights long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center. “The civilian and military defenders of the nation's airspace — FAA [the Federal Aviation Administration] and NORAD [the North American Aerospace Defense Command] — were unprepared for the attacks launched against them,” the 9/11 Commission concluded. “Given that lack of preparedness, they attempted and failed to improvise an effective homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge.” Despite statements by Bush administration officials that it was unimaginable that terrorists would use hijacked places as missiles to crash into planes, NORAD actually ran drills in preparation for that scenario – which proved ineffective. Confronted by an actual attack, Air Force officials “did not know where to go or what targets they were to intercept.” according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). “And once the shootdown order was given, it was not communicated to the pilots,” The 9/11 Commission had to dig to uncover the extent of the U.S. air defense system’s failure, including issuing subpoenas to both the FAA and NORAD to learn the truth, which was at odds with agency officials’ statements. Some Commission members reportedly urged a criminal investigation; instead, the matter was turned over to the inspectors general of the Transportation and Defense departments to determine whether to make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. The inspectors general found no evidence that officials were knowingly misleading.

The United States planned poorly for the post-invasion administration of Iraq, contributing to the rise of a broad insurgency and the loss of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The blame can be cast widely. An official Army history of the Iraq conflict found that "the Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better . . . planning and preparations. . . ." A RAND Corporation study concluded that the State Department’s “main postwar planning effort . . . raised many of the right questions. . . . Yet the Department of Defense largely ignored this project." Rand also found that much of the confusion between the State and Defense departments stemmed from poor direction from the National Security Council, which failed to mediate disputes between the departments. Others blame the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, which issued two orders that disbanded the Iraqi military and gutted the Iraqi government by banning members of the Ba'ath Party. Critics say those decisions, which took many U.S. civilian and military leaders by surprise, contributed to the rise in violence. Before Bremer replaced him as director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq, Lieutenant General Jay Garner drafted a postwar plan for Iraq, which he introduced with, “History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.”

As far back as the 1980s, studies warned that the collection of levees, walls, and floodgates that surrounded New Orleans might not withstand a storm as strong as Hurricane Katrina. Despite this, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers neglected to update a system that, in retrospect, appears to have been destined to fail. And so when Katrina hit in 2005, storm surges broke down the walls and flooded the city, causing a level of death and destruction that shocked the nation. “This is the first time that the Corps of Engineers has had to stand up and say, ‘We had a catastrophic failure in one of our projects,’” conceded then-corps chief Lieutenant General Carl Strock. As John McQuaid reported in City Adrift, the Center’s investigation into Hurricane Katrina, federal and state panels traced, respectively, 70 percent and 88 percent of the flooding to errors in design of the hurricane protection system. A federal panel, the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET), called the barriers “a system in name only.” Corps scientists knew in the 1980s that the New Orleans levees could not repel category 4 and 5 hurricanes. Robert Bea, who helped lead an investigation of the levee system by University of California at Berkeley engineers, told McQuaid that the Corps’s resistance to change slowed the adoption of new technology. After the storm, the Corps restored flood protection in New Orleans to its pre-Katrina levels, relying in some places on temporary fixes.