Beginning of the End
Army Secretary Tom White played a key role in hiding Enron's scams
by Tamara Baker

April 29, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- Don't be surprised if George W. Bush and his fellow chickenhawk minders to invade Iraq any day now.

Yes, I know that everyone in the Pentagon is telling him not to.

I know that most of his daddy's advisors are telling him not to.

His own Mideast envoy, Anthony Zinni, is most emphatically telling him not to.

And even many of the GOP Senators and Congressmen are joining Democrats like Daschle telling him not to, subtly and not-so-subtly -- and at least one of them wants to hold Senate hearings on the subject (see Salon).

That doesn't matter. The Bushies have a big problem that's about to explode all over America's newsroom, and the only way they can keep it from leading the newscasts in the coming days is by starting a full-scale war.

I'm talking about the Tom White problem.

As revealed in Salon today, Tom White not only led an Enron division that was up to its ears in crooked accounting, he actively connived at it himself -- and worked hard to conceal it from the outside world, right up until his old buddy George W. Bush tapped him to become Secretary of the very Army that he so badly wants to privatize -- using Enron techniques!

Up until now, White had managed to use a variant on the GOP's favorite defense, the Too-Stupid-To-Be-Crooked Gambit, also known as the Sergeant Schultz Defense ("I know nothing! I see nothing!"). This is the strategy that saved not only Ronald Reagan over Iran-Contra, but also George "Out of the Loop" Bush the First in both Iran-Contra and Iraqgate.

But it won't work this time, because Salon has the goods on White. Here's a small taste of them:

In one February 2001 e-mail, as panic about EES's mounting losses
began to spread among White's employees, an EES employee reported
to ESS chairman Lou Pai and to White that the division was losing
more than $3 million a month on other contracts signed because of
rising wholesale energy costs.

"Close a bigger deal to hide the loss," White responded in the
e-mail.

White's word choice is illuminating, because at that point, EES's
primary concern became how to "hide" growing losses behind new
contracts that, through a questionable use of an accounting
loophole, allowed it to claim profits that were wildly
speculative in order to give the appearance that the company was
actually making money. That false image, of course, would be
shattered in the fall, when Enron became the country's biggest
bankruptcy ever and 4,500 employees lost their jobs.

There's more, much more, but that should suffice as a smoking gun.

Now I begin to understand another thing that had been puzzling me recently:

Bush's decision to withhold any and all pardon records made by any president or resident of the White House. Don't be surprised if we see a sudden pardon issued to Tom White, using the rationale that we need him to stay on as Army Secretary to fight the sudden war that Bush is about to start in Iraq.

Any day now, I reckon.