On trusting the instincts of captains and majors

When President Bush began making senior appointments at the Pentagon after his inauguration in 2001, I distinctly recall several conversations with officers on the Secretary of the Air Force's personal staff where they expressed concern that Bush putting so many people from corporate America -- especially defense corporations -- into key positions would create conflicts of interest. Bush appointed the Secretary of the Air Force from Northrop Grumman, the Secretary of the Army from Enron, and the Secretary of the Navy from General Dynamics. It's clear from this Washington Post article that the instincts of these captains and majors were correct. The article details email messages between Air Force Secretary James G. Roche and his staff about the controversial Air Force effort to lease Boeing 767 aerial refueling tankers. The messages were released by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has been a staunch opponent of the Boeing tanker lease. Read the article for the details of the issue itself, but here are some key excerpts that certainly suggest that the Roche put Boeing's needs ahead of the needs of the Air Force:

Air Force Secretary James G. Roche asked a lobbyist for Boeing Co. to use the company's Washington contacts to "quash" a deputy undersecretary of defense and make him "pay an appropriate price" for objecting to the Air Force's decision to lease Boeing 767 tanker aircraft....

Roche also pressured independent military cost analysts who questioned the high price of the lease, described other internal Pentagon critics as "animals," and ridiculed executives at European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. (EADS) and its Airbus division, the consortium that offered a competing plan, the e-mails show. He told his top public relations aide to "blow . . . away" the EADS chairman for raising questions about the Air Force decision to work with Boeing.

At one point in the three-year Air Force campaign for the lease, Roche e-mailed a friend at Raytheon Co., "Privately between us: Go Boeing!"

It's no wonder that Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), senior committee Democrat Carl M. Levin (Mich.), and McCain called the tanker lease "the most significant" case of corruption since the "Ill Wind" bribery and fraud cases of the 1990s. The "top public relations aide" referred to in the article is almost certainly Bill Bodie the sycophantic and only vaguely competent aide Roche brought with him from Northrop Grumman whom Roche put over the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Public Affairs, where I worked at the time. This entire situation is yet another manifestation of the Bush administration's overly cozy relationship with big business, which, in everything from environmental policy to health care policy to the war in Iraq, has done nothing but sacrifice the interests of the American people in favor of corporate profits.