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THE COMPASSION OF GEORGE W. BUSH ^{A B}

We take a brief break from our more routine blogging to highlight George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism. Nothing he does exudes more compassion that how he deals with matters of life and death. So, we shall examine four aspects of his policy/statements that exhibit his compassionate conservatism - the Iraq invasion/war, 9/11, the 9/11 aftermath and his treatment of the death penalty while he was Governor of Texas. 

I. THE IRAQ WAR (2003-2004)

Bush on 3/25/04:

Last night I [David Corn] was at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association Dinner.
...
And the tradition is that the president has to be funny; he has to provide us with an amusing speech that pokes fun at himself and his political foes.
...
There were funny bits about Skull and Bones, his mother, and Dick Cheney. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."
The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again... [bold text is eRiposte emphasis]

EVIDENCE OF COMPASSION:
Just to show I have a sense of humor I should add a few points...These are merely some reference points that would allow us to appreciate Bush's jokes and compassion better...

In search of "WMDs" in Iraq, among other things:

II. 9/11/2001 (2001)

Bush in Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" about bin Laden and Al Qaeda before 9/11:

[Link]
But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling.

[Link]
I didn’t feel a sense of urgency about al Qaeda. It was not my focus; it was not the focus of my team.

EVIDENCE OF COMPASSION:

Do I need to point out what happened after this phase where he "didn't feel a sense of urgency" because of his compassion?

III. Aftermath of 9/11/2001 (2001)

Daily Kos

The story about the dangerous air and water problems in post-9/11 Manhattan is still unfolding, and Newsweek has published more troubling info in a web exclusive.
But first, lets take a look back...
One week after the WTC towers fell, Christie Whitman (then Chief of the EPA) declared that the air and water in New York were safe, and residents were urged to return to their homes and jobs in Manhattan. Two years later, Nikki Tinsley (the EPA's Inspector General) told NBC News that the EPA press release that sent New Yorkers back to those homes and offices "was surely not telling all of the truth."
From NBC News

CHANGED PRESS RELEASES
So what happened? Tinsley's report charges, in the crucial days after 9/11, the White House changed EPA press releases to "add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."
*Sept. 13: The EPA draft release -- never released to the public -- said: EPA "testing terrorized sites for environmental hazards." The White House changed that to EPA "reassures public about environmental hazards."
*Sept. 16: The EPA draft said: "Recent samples of dust ... on Water Street show higher levels of asbestos."
The White House version: "New samples confirm ... ambient air quality meets OSHA [government] standards" ... and "is not a cause for public concern."
And the White House left out entirely the warning "that air samples raise concerns for cleanup workers and office workers near Water St."

Now it turns out that the dust from the WTC attacks was even more toxic than researchers initially realized, and that a wide range of health problems have developed because of exposure to it.
John Graham is a carpenter with emergency medical technician training, and he was only a few blocks from the World Trade Center when the first plane hit. He immediately went down to Ground Zero, and his unique combination of carpentry and medical skills made him an asset there for more than nine months, where he continued to help in spite of his own mounting health problems.
John Graham was rarely ill before 9/11.
From Newsweek

Now Graham carries a bag full of medications around with him each day. He takes 17 different drugs for ailments ranging from asthma to chronic infections, and sees his doctor so often that he's had to ask the receptionist to call and remind him of upcoming appointments so he can keep track.
---snip---
Doctors and researchers now believe that Graham is one of tens of thousands who suffer debilitating health problems stemming from their exposure to contaminants in the air around the World Trade Center site--and it's not just rescue and recovery workers who are affected. A report published this month in the journal "Environmental Health Perspectives" found that pregnant women who were inside the Twin Towers or within a 10-block radius at the time of the attacks showed a two-fold increase in the incidence of smaller-than-average infants compared to pregnant women in a demographically similar population who weren't in Manhattan on September 11.

...tens of thousands who suffer debilitating health problems...
The new health report is frightening on its own, but when combined with the fact that the Bush Administration outright lied to get people back into an environment that hadn't yet been proven safe...
What does the mind do when it has already been reeling? Reverse direction?

Graham did not use a respirator when he started work at the site, though he wore a mask later. Still, he says, he believed the air was safe after the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman declared it so a week after the attacks (a statement she has since been widely criticized for making). "The government lied to us," he says. "They said the air was clean."
---snip---
"This was a life-changing event medically for people who were caught in the dust cloud--and probably tens of thousands were caught in that cloud," says Dr. Michael D Weiden, a medical officer for the Fire Department of New York who has treated hundreds of firefighters--many of whom suffer permanent disabilities. "There are hundreds who are no longer able to work," he says.

More heroes that were misled and ultimately betrayed by BushCo.
The article goes on to describe efforts to help these people, including the "Remember 9/11 Health Act," sponsored by New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney in March. Additionally, proposed state legislation would "shift the burden of proof from the rescue workers to the compensation board..."
These are good things, but still leave the fundamental problem unaddressed. The current administration told the EPA to lie to New Yorkers, putting them in danger and subsequently causing tens of thousands of people to develop "debilitating illnesses."

It's not clear how many of those who were exposed to the contaminated air around Ground Zero have yet to come forward for treatment, but there is widespread agreement within the medical community that the number who are suffering lingering health problems from the September 11 attacks is greater than initially anticipated. Weiden, who treats the New York firefighters, says there's still "a large unmet need" and warns: "Some--or many--of those caught in the cloud will be in crisis if they don't understand what's going on.".
"It's much more serious than we initially realized," says Landrigan, the principal author of the study. "It took awhile to realize just how toxic this dust was."
It could take even longer still--Landrigan says the first related cancer cases may not appear for at least a decade--to realize just how serious the consequences will be for the thousands like Graham who were exposed to the dust.

EVIDENCE OF COMPASSION:

Do I need to reiterate what happened to the thousands of people in New York who were falsely compassionately told things were fine health-wise?

IV. The Death Penalty (BEFORE 2001)

Bush on the death penalty and his rulings in Texas:

[Link]
I don't believe my role is to replace the verdict of a jury with my own," he wrote in his autobiography, A Charge to Keep (1999), "unless there are new facts or evidence of which a jury was unaware, or evidence that the trial was somehow unfair."
...
All governors claim that they agonize over death penalty decisions. During his time in office Bush made numerous statements to this effect, among them "I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully" and "Each case is major, because each case is life or death." In his autobiography he wrote, "I review every death penalty case thoroughly" and added, referring to his legal staff, "For every death penalty case, they brief me thoroughly, review the arguments made by the prosecution and the defense, raise any doubts or problems or questions." Bush always maintained that this review provided what he called a "fail-safe" method for ensuring due process and certainty of guilt. Asked about the governor's handling of capital cases, Johnny Sutton, Governor Bush's adviser on criminal-justice policy, told The New York Times in May of 2000, "This is probably the most important thing we do in state government."

[Click this Link for a lot more choice Bush quotes]

EVIDENCE OF COMPASSION:

Link

...During Bush's six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed in Texas—a record unmatched by any other governor in modern American history. [eRiposte emphasis] Each time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his legal counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on the morning of the day scheduled for the execution, and was then briefed on those facts by his counsel; based on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all cases but one. The first fifty-seven of these summaries were prepared by Gonzales, a Harvard-educated lawyer who went on to become the Texas secretary of state and a justice on the Texas supreme court. He is now the White House counsel.
Gonzales never intended his summaries to be made public. Almost all are marked CONFIDENTIAL and state, "The privileges claimed include, but are not limited to, claims of Attorney-Client Privilege, Attorney Work-Product Privilege, and the Internal Memorandum exception to the Texas Public Information Act." I obtained the summaries and related documents, which have never been published, after the Texas attorney general ruled that they were not exempt from the disclosure requirements of the Public Information Act.
Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant's personal background, and a condensed legal history. Although the summaries rarely make a recommendation for or against execution, many have a clear prosecutorial bias, and all seem to assume that if an appeals court rejected one or another of a defendant's claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim. This assumption ignores one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes.
A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence. [eRiposte emphasis]
The case of Terry Washington was typical. Gonzales devoted nearly a third of his three-page report on Washington to the gruesome details of the crime. He informed Bush that the victim, Beatrice Huling, was a twenty-nine-year-old restaurant manager, and wrote, "An autopsy determined she suffered 85 stab wounds, seven of which were fatal, and was eviscerated." But the summary refers only fleetingly to the central issue in Washington's clemency appeal—his limited mental capacity, which was never disputed by the State of Texas—and presents it as part of a discussion of "conflicting information" about the condemned man's childhood. (The page containing this discussion is missing from the copy of the summary signed by Bush, raising the possibility that he never actually saw it before authorizing Washington's execution.) Most important, Gonzales failed to mention that Washington's mental limitations, and the fact that he and his ten siblings were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts, were never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence. (Washington did not testify at his trial or his sentencing.)
...
Gonzales's execution summaries belie these assurances of thorough and judicious review. The memoranda seem attuned to a radically different posture, assumed by Bush from the earliest days of his administration—one in which he sought to minimize his sense of legal and moral responsibility for executions. [eRiposte emphasis] Bush repeatedly cited a Texas statute that says a governor may do nothing more than grant a thirty-day reprieve to an inmate unless the Board of Pardons and Paroles has recommended a broader grant of clemency. Admittedly, the governor's clemency authority is far more limited in Texas than in, for example, Illinois, where Governor George Ryan unilaterally commuted the death sentences of 167 men and women last January, shortly before leaving office. Nevertheless, Bush's failure to intervene was governed as much by personal choice as by legal limitation. Had Bush wanted to commute a sentence or otherwise prevent an execution, he unquestionably could have done so. Members of the BPP are appointed by the governor to six-year rotating terms. By the end of his governorship Bush had appointed all eighteen members. If he or Gonzales had had any serious doubts about a particular case, even on the morning of a scheduled execution, Bush could easily have prevailed on the board to reconsider the matter—to conduct an investigation, hold hearings, interview witnesses, or do whatever else was necessary to resolve those doubts.
...
At the outset of his administration Governor Bush presented a standard for clemency that all but ensured that few if any death sentences would be seriously examined. "In every case," he wrote in A Charge to Keep, "I would ask: Is there any doubt about this individual's guilt or innocence? And, have the courts had ample opportunity to review all the legal issues in this case?" This is an extraordinarily narrow notion of clemency review: it seems to leave little, if any, room to consider mental illness or incompetence, childhood physical or sexual abuse, remorse, rehabilitation, racial discrimination in jury selection, the competence of the legal defense, or disparities in sentences between co-defendants or among defendants convicted of similar crimes. Neither compassion nor "mercy," which the Supreme Court as far back as 1855 saw as central to the very idea of clemency, is acknowledged as being of any account.
The record suggests that what Bush described in his autobiography as "a fair hearing and full access to the courts" meant in reality nothing more than that a case had received some sort of legal attention at all state and federal levels. [eRiposte emphasis] In the case of Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas in more than a hundred years, Bush wrote to at least two constituents that he had refused to grant a reprieve precisely because "the courts, including the United States Supreme Court," had "reviewed the legal issues in this case" and denied all appeals. But clemency is a political act, not a judicial one. By eliminating "legal issues" from executive consideration, Bush in effect refused to address what were often the condemned person's strongest claims. Indeed, the fact that courts have rejected a defendant's legal claims arguably places an added burden on a governor—as the conscience of the state and the literal court of last resort—to conduct a scrupulous review. This is especially true in Texas, where more than a third of executions in the United States since 1976 have occurred; where half of all capital cases are overturned on appeal because of errors during trial; where seven innocent men have been freed from death row, including one under Bush; where, according to The Dallas Morning News, nearly a quarter of the condemned were represented by attorneys who had been disciplined for professional misconduct; and where 30 percent of those executed under Bush between his inauguration in 1995 and June 11, 2000, according to the Chicago Tribune, were represented by attorneys who presented no mitigating evidence or only one witness during the sentencing phase of the trial. [eRiposte emphasis] Given this environment, Gonzales's neglect of mitigating evidence in the clemency-review process is highly problematic.
But the real problem with citing thorough court review as a standard for denying clemency is that none of the 152 executions Bush approved would have landed on his desk had the cases not already passed through all the courts. To assert—as Bush did—that defendants have "full access to the courts" does not establish any sort of guideline for ensuring due process; it merely describes the judicial process.
Although Terry Washington's guilt was never seriously disputed, in at least two other capital cases profound doubts about guilt were raised by the defense but virtually ignored by Gonzales. [eRiposte emphasis] In the case of David Wayne Stoker, for example, Gonzales devoted just eighteen sentences to the extraordinarily complex circumstances of the crime, leaving out essentially all the mitigating evidence and failing to address a multitude of questions about both the evidence against Stoker and his due-process rights. Ronnie Thompson, a key state witness, initially told the police, and then the court, that Stoker had confessed to a 1986 murder. But following Stoker's conviction Thompson recanted, explaining that he'd lied in court because the prosecutor had threatened to bring a perjury charge against him if he didn't stick to his original account. Bush should have been told that. During Stoker's trial, in 1987, Thompson's wife, Debbie, left him to move in with Carey Todd, the prosecution's chief witness; she got a piece of the Crime Stoppers reward that Todd received for naming Stoker. Gonzales failed to mention that drug and weapons charges against Todd were dropped the very day he testified against Stoker; and that Todd thus had an apparent motive for setting him up. Gonzales also failed to mention that a state investigator, a police officer, and Todd all lied in court about what Todd received for his testimony; that the jury wasn't told about Todd's possible motive for framing Stoker; and that James Grigson, a psychiatrist who testified that Stoker was a sociopath who would "absolutely" be violent again (thereby making him eligible for a death sentence), had never even examined Stoker. Grigson, whose expert testimony has helped send dozens of men to death row, earning him the nickname Dr. Death, had been expelled from the American Psychiatric Association two years before the Stoker case was reviewed by Gonzales and Bush, because his testimony had repeatedly been found to be unethical. Another expert medical witness against Stoker, Ralph Erdmann, had relinquished his medical license in 1994 after pleading no contest to seven felonies tied to falsified evidence and botched autopsies. A special prosecutor's investigation of Erdmann concluded that he falsified evidence in at least thirty cases, and that if "the prosecution theory was that death was caused by a Martian death ray then that was what Dr. Erdmann reported." All this information was in the public record, yet Gonzales mentioned none of it in his memorandum to Bush.
Stephen Latimer, who represented Stoker in his clemency appeal, told me recently that he received a call from Gonzales's office about a week to ten days before the execution, advising him that there would be no reprieve. The timing is significant, because Gonzales's execution summary is dated June 16, 1997, the day of Stoker's execution. If that decision had been made a week or more before Bush even read the summary, it is fair to ask whether Bush was actually in the loop or—as many suspected—had simply made clear to both Gonzales and the BPP that he wasn't interested in commutations. [eRiposte emphasis]
The handling of Stoker's clemency appeal was not unusual. Consider the case of Billy Conn Gardner, whose death-penalty case was plagued by issues of incompetent counsel, dubious witness testimony, and unheard mitigating evidence.
Gonzales's report to Bush gave no sense of these circumstances. It matter-of-factly described the robbery of a high school cafeteria in Dallas, during which Gardner, wearing a stocking to obscure his face, allegedly shot and fatally wounded Thelma Row, sixty-four, a cafeteria worker. Also in the cafeteria at the time was Paula Sanders, a co-worker who had told her husband, Melvin, that several thousand dollars in daily cafeteria receipts were processed in a back room at the school. Melvin, who drove the getaway car, claimed that he had persuaded Gardner to participate.
Paula, who knew Gardner, said that she could provide no description of the assailant, because her back was turned. Before Row died, however, she had been able to describe a man with a "bony face ... and a two-inch goatee." Gonzales didn't tell Bush that the state was unable to produce a single witness who recalled ever seeing Gardner with a goatee, or that two witnesses to the shooting—Carolyn Sims and the school custodian, Lester Matthews—described a man with reddish-blond hair, whereas Gardner's hair was black. Matthews nevertheless positively identified Gardner as the killer, and Gonzales accepted this testimony at face value—although Matthews didn't know Gardner, admitted to having seen the killer for only three or four seconds, and didn't actually identify him until his third police interview, three months after the crime. Also missing from Gonzales's memo were the facts that only after prosecutors threatened to bring other charges against Melvin Sanders did he finger Gardner as the murderer, and that in exchange for this testimony Sanders received complete immunity from prosecution for the murder and probation for pending forgery and firearms charges. The state also agreed not to prosecute Paula Sanders.
Gonzales told Bush in his summary that Paula "testified that she was unaware of the robbery plans"; but he neglected to mention that she had received several phone calls only minutes before the robbery and shooting, and that according to Carolyn Sims (whose name is absent from Gonzales's report), she appeared "nervous and upset" after taking these calls. Sims was not deposed until years after the trial, during Gardner's habeas corpus appeal. More important, Gardner's lawyer never interviewed Paula Sanders and met with Gardner only once before jury selection, for fifteen minutes, raising an obvious suggestion of ineffective counsel—which Gonzales also dismissed with no discussion.
The case is a disconcerting tangle of speculation and uncertainty. What Gonzales should have made clear to Bush during the clemency review is that the case involved many unanswered and troubling questions. Gardner was put to death on February 16, 1995.
...

See more on Bush's compassion on the death penalty here.

A *Also file under: Compassionate Conservative, the Bearable Lightness of Being A

B This is satire folks (factual, but still satire).