WASHINGTON — Never, says the secretary of defense. Infinitely, says the solicitor general. And the question is: When do government officials lie to the American people?
The Bush administration’s attitude toward truth-telling covers a lot of territory. The White House wants to feed into the media’s maw every scrap of information that gives George W. Bush political advantage and/or glory. But this White House also clutches the cloak of secrecy more tightly than have other presidencies. Inevitably, schizophrenia emerges when Bush officials get put on the spot about governmental candor.
To calm an internal turf war at the Pentagon over control of public information policies and to stem damaging headlines, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pledged a few weeks ago never to lie to the American public. Like Jimmy Carter on the campaign trail, Rumsfeld has set a standard of which he will be constantly reminded.
For Washingtonians who remember the one sure way to tell when Lyndon Johnson was lying — when his lips were moving — a conflicting statement by Solicitor General Theodore Olson to the Supreme Court on Monday has the ring of perverse honesty.
It is "easy to imagine an infinite number of situations … where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out," the Justice Department’s senior trial lawyer said to the justices, who are weighing Jennifer Harbury’s claim that she had the right to the truth about the torture and murder of her Guatemalan revolutionary husband by CIA-financed Guatemalan forces in 1993.
Harbury, an American citizen and a lawyer, argued her own case to the court with skill and clarity. Whatever you think of her decision to marry a guerrilla commander during a gruesome foreign conflict that had elements of genocide, you have to admire the tenacity with which she has stood behind that decision for nearly a decade now.
She is suing former Clinton administration senior officials who put her off with claims they knew nothing about her husband’s fate — when that information was in fact available to them. Had Warren Christopher, Anthony Lake and others not lied to her, she might have been able to go into a U.S. court and get help for her husband, Harbury argued.
That reasoning is a stretch, as several justices indicated by their questioning. But the court’s decision should be made in the context of the broad arguments about governmental responsibility the Harbury case implicitly raises. The justices should lean toward the Rumsfeld doctrine more than the Olson hedge in fixing a balance of candor.
The Harbury case goes in a sense to the purpose of governance. Government employees, from junior staffers in Congress to Cabinet officers and Supreme Court justices, must balance three often conflicting responsibilities in deciding for whom they work: the American people, who pay their salaries; their own sense of history and integrity; and the politicians who put them in office. Increasingly under the pressures of modern campaigns and the media that drive those campaigns, the politicians come first, first and first.
Similar issues are raised in a recent book that shows American leaders and other officials systematically lying about what they knew and when they knew it as Turkish Armenians, German Jews, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnian Muslims, Rwandan Tutsis and other populations were slaughtered in genocides that official Washington did little or nothing to oppose, publicize or even acknowledge.
The title of Samantha Power’s "A Problem From Hell" is taken from Warren Christopher’s description of Bosnia at a time when the Clinton administration, like the Bush 41 team before it, desperately sought to avoid involvement there.
Repeatedly throughout the last century, American leaders vowed "Never Again," and then stood by when the next slaughter erupted. The same system that misled Jennifer Harbury about her husband’s fate provided presidents with arguments to justify U.S. inaction and prevarication on a national scale: They did not know, they did not fully appreciate, intervention would not make a difference, the murderers and victims were all difficult and probably equally evil people.
In debunking each of these arguments in case studies of Rwanda and the Balkans, Power ruefully concludes that the system did not fail, as she originally thought. It worked as intended — to prevent decision-makers and the public from having to know inconvenient truths that would trigger demands for intervention.
Public service does not require a commitment to the kind of duplicity and evasion that Olson’s argument sought to justify. The American people have shown an ability to handle hard truths and still make good decisions. That is one thing Sept. 11 did not change.
Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.
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