White House attempts to cover up racism and corruption

On Sept. 15, President Bush had to finally admit something he’s been trying to avoid since the day he came into office. Speaking of the Gulf region in his nationwide address, he said, “As all of us saw on television, there’s also some deep, persistent poverty in this region …. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination.”

This acquiescence by the Bush administration was an attempt to quell the outrage being expressed around the world to the government’s handling of the hurricane crisis. Bush, however, still did not address the racist treatment of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Just four days before, he responded to accusations that the slow response to the hurricane was tinged with racism by saying, “The storm didn’t discriminate and neither will the recovery effort. The rescue efforts were comprehensive.”

That the Bush administration would pretend that racism doesn’t exist is no surprise. Last month, the Bush administration urged Lawrence Greenfield, head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, to resign after he refused to delete information on a press release that confirmed that Blacks and Latin@s faced racist profiling at the hands of the police.

The bureau had completed a study, based on 80,000 interviews, which deduced that when Black, Latin@ and white drivers were pulled over by the cops, white drivers were searched 3.5 percent of the time, Black drivers 10.2 percent of the time and Latin@s 11.4 percent of the time. In addition, the report found that police were more likely to issue tickets to Latin@ drivers and arrest, search and use force against Black drivers.

Greenfield refused to comply when his supervisors crossed out this information on the draft of a press release about the report. After being threatened with termination—six months before his scheduled retirement—he accepted a demotion under his right as a senior federal official. No press release was ever issued on the report, and it was quietly posted to the bureau’s website.

Yet racism isn’t the only thing the Bush administration has tried to cover up through the firing of officials. Bunnatine Greenhouse, the top contract procurement officer for the Army Corps of Engin eers, was forced out of her job on Aug. 27 after denouncing the signing of a no-bid contract with a Halliburton subsidiary for oil field repair work in Iraq this past June. Greenhouse told Congress that the oil contract “was the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career.”

It is more than ironic that in the immediate days following Hurricane Katrina, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root was awarded a no-bid contract for reconstruction in the Gulf area.