February 3, 2004

Gavyn Davies for president.

Alas, he does not appear on any ballot. The former chief of the BBC hasn't the barest qualification, that of being born a United States citizen. He merely possesses a presidential quality lacking in our homegrown occupant of the White House: the honor and integrity to accept responsibility for abject failure.

Davies resigned as BBC chairman after an inquiry into the British news organization's reporting on Tony Blair's flawed dossier about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The investigation by Lord Hutton effectively absolved the Blair government of inflating intelligence. It blamed the BBC for erroneous reporting.

Davies resigned immediately. He said the head of an organization that depends on public trust must take "personal responsibility for ensuring the highest standards of accuracy and impartiality." He suggested, as have others, that not all aspects of the Hutton report were fair or balanced.

Nonetheless, Davies was compelled to say what men of honor say in these trying situations. "I have been brought up to believe that you cannot choose your own referee and that the referee's decision is final."

This is how a fallen media titan differs from the president of the United States. The president of the United States fully intends to choose his own referee. And his own playing field. And his own rules of engagement.

President George W. Bush used his State of the Union Address to raise anew the specter of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." Now he's been forced, belatedly, to decide on appointing his own commission to find out why not a single unconventional weapon has been found.

The commission is to be organized by Bush's White House. It is to be officially established by Bush's executive order, to be written by Bush's aides. The panel would not report to the people until after Election Day. Bush's timetable.

Its mandate would not be limited to examining the question at hand - why the intelligence about Iraqi weapons was wrong and whether the president or others in his administration manipulated what hedged information they did have in order to present Iraq as a dire threat. Instead, the White House envisions this panel ranging far afield to Libya, Pakistan, North Korea and back into the 1990s. That is, before Bush took office.

The commission would thus divert attention from the Iraq imbroglio and from the essential question of why Bush sent American men and women to die for a threat that didn't exist.

And so it seems the White House learned from the 9/11 commission. It first opposed creating a panel to look into the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. Then it bowed reluctantly to public pressure, but insisted the inquiry expire in May, before the heat of the presidential campaign.

The administration then stalled and obstructed the panel's work. The White House contends, even now, that those few commission representatives who've been allowed a restricted look at the president's daily intelligence briefings - briefings that in the summer of 2001 were warning of an impending, catastrophic attack - shouldn't be permitted to take their own notes to share them with their fellow commissioners. The panel may be forced to subpoena its own work.

It cannot realistically do so without more time and has asked for it. The White House so far says no, as does House speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), a loyal presidential protector in Congress.

Sens. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat, yesterday introduced legislation extending the 9/11 commission's life until January 2005, after the Nov. 2 election. That would remove the panel's findings from the distorting lens of a presidential campaign and so give the White House what it desires. It could give the victims' families what they were promised - a full and fair account of how and why their loved ones died.

Is there sufficient honor in our politics to honor these dead? Or to consider, soberly and without gamesmanship, the enormity of the debacle that is Iraq? It is obvious there is not. The voices of the dead are not heard in those chambers where political strategy is set.