No Truth No Consequences
No Truth, No Consequences by Katie Hickox If Congress wants to discourage testifiers from lying, maybe it should ask them to tell the truth Before politicians take office, they ar sworn in....
...After four questions—three of which were essentially unanswered— Wyden was left little choice but to move on to the next witness...
...CARTER: . . . I am not sure of the definition of "medicinal" so I can't answer that question...
...Perhaps the best way to reverse this trend is through constant and forceful reminders to government officials that they have a higher duty than to protect themselves or their superiors...
...That psychological signal obviously won't alter the behavior of the determined or inveterate fibber...
...WYDEN: How long is it going to take to produce a medicinal form of Taxol from the tissue culture...
...Imagin being asked to answer questions that will im plicate your boss, your friends, or worse your own leadership and integrity...
...But Carter dodged even Wyden's simplest questions, which was odd because she had been a key player on the issue...
...It also serves a symbolic function: a weighty reminder of one's obligation to the truth...
...Before witnesses testify i court, they pledge honesty...
...Deleted from the submitted papers was information about $1 billion worth of trucks sold to Saddam for military use, as well as the names of other departments, including Defense and State, that had approved the sales...
...But it wasn't until the lies of Vietnam and Watergate were exposed that Members became aware of its extent...
...Legislators found themselves struggling fruitlessly to obtain accurate body counts from the defensive military and, from the even more defensive Oval Office, the truth about Rosemary Woods' 18-minute tape gap and the players behind the Saturday Night Massacre...
...it's in impelling testifiers not to dodge in the first place...
...WYDEN: What is the likelihood of finding an alternative supply [of Taxol] from ornamental shrubs...
...But lawyers agree that a perjury case an only be proven in court if the witness had been sworn in: Having stated the oath for the record, witnesses accused of lying cannot later claim they were unaware of a legal duty to tell the truth...
...WYDEN: [W]hen do you believe that service [of nursery-grown yews] could come on line as a viable source of Taxol...
...There is no limit, it often seems, to th venues in which Americans lean on the oath th steer their consciences to honesty—with onl glaring exception: the hearing rooms of th United States Congress, where only a handfu of the thousands of witnesses interviewed eac year are required to take an oath before testify ing...
...They beefed up their ability to expose the lies, but they neglected to also demand that bureaucrats tell the truth...
...They were much more careful about preparing their testimony...
...So why not compel the executive to be open and honest in the first place...
...Unfortunately, when government officials hedge, Congress isn't always so well positioned or motivated to call their bluff...
...Mary Carter, weaved her way through a series of questions posed by Rep...
...The Navy conveniently failed to tell Congress, however, that independent examiners reviewing the evidence believed the explosion was more likely to have been an accident...
...I've had people who were witnesses before our subcommittee tell me that it did make a difference to them knowing they were going under oath," says an aide in Synar's energy and environment subcommittee, another committee that requires the oath...
...As judges have long understood, many people will rise to that ethical challenge...
...But would it really work...
...Not only might the oath change the minds of witnesses once they take the stand, but it could even affect their work before they get there—making them think twice about how they do their jobs...
...More often, though, it's one lonely member, the panel chair, who sits through the entire subcommittee hearing...
...Observe how one Agricultural Research Service official, Dr...
...What bureaucrat wants to wind up as a cautionary tale on the Federal Page of The Washington Post...
...Of course, lying to Congress, oath or no ath, is still a punishable offense, one that can arry a $5,000 fine and up to five years in wison...
...Pick up your morning paper and you'll see why this is more than an itsy-bitsy problem Congressional inquiries of bureaucrats, agen cy heads, and others are the linchpin of in vestigations from unraveling Iran-contra unearthing the health risks of breast implant to exposing the illegal' dumping of nuclea waste...
...Ron Wyden during a 1991 committee hearing that probed a series of exclusive agreements between the federal government and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Company...
...I think sometimes with all the television cameras and the sound bite questions that people ask, people often forget where they are," notes John Grabow, a former assistant legal counsel for the Senate who now teaches law at Georgetown...
...If you step up to the mike and honestly explain that the station's prospective payoffs can't possibly justify the massive investment being made, those congressmen are going to cut NASA's budget and you and your buddies might wind up out of a job...
...You are imagining the current state affairs on Capitol Hill...
...That fear apparently motivated the Navy to use evidence selectively and distort facts to Congress during its investigation of the 1989 explosion aboard the USS Iowa that killed 47 sailors...
...Of course, requiring the oath won't mean an end to fibbing...
...The average senator sits on six committees and subcommittees and reps take on as many as 11 panel assignments, leaving them barely enough time to show up at the hearings, let alone conduct lengthy cross-examinations or background searches...
...Hearing aids Hire more police...
...Lie detectors No doubt, some who appear before Congress are struggling with their consciences more than others...
...The drug company had been granted exclusive access to rare, publicly owned yew trees to develop the anti-cancer drug Taxol...
...Impressing the urgency of honesty on witnesses could also allow Congress to reduce its costly oversight of the executive branch...
...Wyden was examining, among other things, whether the federal government had been overly generous to the drug company...
...Of course, it's thanks to the effectiveness c certain congressional hearings that the publi low knows about some of the costliest and nost ethically disturbing government and privatesector scandals of the decade...
...Under congressional rules, any member holding a hearing is free to require an oath, but only a few representatives bother...
...Katie Hickox is a reporter for States News Service...
...And while t obviously won't ender the lie ob,olete in the Rayurn building, it night help reverse an incentive system that has made lying o Congress one of Washington's more endurng traditions...
...No Truth, No Consequences by Katie Hickox If Congress wants to discourage testifiers from lying, maybe it should ask them to tell the truth Before politicians take office, they ar sworn in...
...Say you're a NASA bureaucrat testifying about the space station...
...A HUD official who knows he may soon be facing a committee under oath just might think twice about signing off on that housing contract slated for his boss' buddy...
...For those witnesses who are unaware of the federal statutes banning lying to Congress, the simple act of uttering the oath is likely to conjure up images of a jail door slamming shut behind them...
...For the bureaucrat, there are plenty of good reasons to keep Congress at arm's length with a vague, unrevealing response—and the best of them is money...
...And on Capitol Hill, they are also the most common: Testifiers with something to hide often dance around the truth simply by selectively presenting information...
...Yet it's not simply as a legal deterrent that the act of swearing in makes sense...
...it's expected...
...Higl school students filling out college application must attest to their truthfulness...
...Unfortunately, in term of private interest, the incentive to lie i those hearings can be equally gargantuan Imagine the klieg lights glaring in your fac as, say, the hard-nosed Henry B. Gonzale leans forward and starts to grill you...
...A sole subcommittee of the House Government Operations Committee, for example, is assigned to cover seven agencies and a federal department...
...New citizen must swear their allegiance to the flag...
...WYDEN: Let me direct this to you, Mr...
...Gonzales, Mike Synar, and Senators Howard Metzenbaum and John Glenn—will occasionally latch onto an issue and stick around long enough to grill a witness or two (especially if the TV cameras are rolling...
...But it will at least send a potent message to those who take the stand...
...Giving somebody the oath really impresses upon them the seriousness of the forum and their responses...
...NO imagine knowing that if you fudge the trut forget the facts, or even tell a whopper of lie, not much will happen to you if you'r caught...
...CARTER: I am not familiar with that work at all...
...Why should he burden rest with them...
...Some state won't even let you drive unless you first tak an oath...
...In terms of public interest, the nee for honesty in these inquiries is about a enormous as it gets...
...Yet the lesson Congress learned from those scandals was only half right...
...The original, now discredited, testimony presented to Congress by Navy officials stated that sailor Clayton Hartwig purposely set off the explosion in an attempt to kill everyone aboard the ship...
...But the abence of the oath has made getting to the botom of those scandals far more strenuous than t should have been, and far more expensive to axpayers...
...One recent survey showed that 63 percent of the American public has little or no confidence that government officials talk straight...
...The blackest of all lies, however, and the toughest to catch, as Alfred Lord Tennyson once said, are those that are half true...
...Congress' inability to play truth police isn't what you'd call a new problem...
...But the oath's advantage is not just to help in prosecuting artful dodgers...
...John Dingell...
...Better to respond to questions—any questions— with sunny yet vague reports of the space station's stellar progress and promise...
...And at a baser level, evasion is used simply to prevent public scandal or embarrassment...
...One of them is Michigan Rep...
...Of course, some conscientious legislators— like Reps...
...It's not that we'll ever outgrow the need for an oversight body like the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), but if Congress had greater confidence in OMB's forthrightness, the mammoth CBO wouldn't need its current 226 employees and $27 million budget...
...CARTER: I am not qualified to answer that question...
...Today, rou're supporting t vast bureaucray of congressional staffers whose job it is to ick through the esponses of a paade of witnesses, ulling the truth rom the white ies and the black nes...
...No 10 committees could know everything that's going on down there," says one aide with the Environment and Energy subcommittee, "particularly if it's an agency that's doing something that it doesn't want Congress to know about...
...It took a further investigation by both the House Armed Services Committee and the General Accounting Office to bring that crucial piece of data to light...
...Of the two types of fibs floated before congressional committees—the Lie by Omission and the Outright Lie—the latter is perhaps less common, not only because few people like lying outright, but because those lies are often easier to smoke out...
...It just had a lot more weight and significance to them...
...So the oath makes fiscal and ethical sense in theory...
...Government lying these days—from Vietnam to Iran-contra—isn't just widespread...
...In June 1990, for instance, when a House Government Operations subcommittee requested documents from the Commerce Department detailing administration dealings with Iraq prior to the Gulf war, Commerce officials— who were not under oath—doctored the data before handing the documents over...
...By turning up the heat on witnesses over several months of follow-up hearings, Dingell's subcommittee discovered, for instance, that former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Anne Burford had withheld key documents (which they suspected would show the EPA cut sweetheart deals with clean-up contractors) from several congressional subcommittees during the Superfund investigations in the early eighties...
...Congress' three oversight agencies already cost taxpayers about $500 million...
...Still, with buildings full of auditors, Congress can only skim the surface: They're responsible for overseeing 3 million federal workers in 13 agencies...
...The oath also adds a moral heft to testimony by poignantly reminding bureaucrats that whatever allegiance they feel towards their superiors or their agencies, and whatever fear of retribution haunts them, they must consider a higher loyalty—to their country and their consciences...
...Still, that fact hasn't kept some from taking their chances...
...But for the average congressional witness struggling with his conscience, the oath's simple but powerful message might occasionally be a pivotal one—just the nudge he needs to do the right thing...
...Askng congressional estifiers to swear o tell the truth reluires no new taff, takes virtuilly no time, and oesn't cost a ime...
...Fortunately, we have a lab to test it out—the few congressional committees that both require sworn testimony and aggressively investigate...
...Deaver was later convicted of perjury...
...Overbay...
...And no reminder is more effective than the six words: "I swear to tell the truth...
...His Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee has a history of insistence on truth, no matter how powerful the witness called before it—a stance that sends a clear message to testifiers...
...Yews are the only known source of Taxol...
...Only after a further painstaking investigation did Congress become aware that it had been snookered...
...Today there are nearly 32,000 Hill staffers who, as part of the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Technology Assessment, and various congressional oversight committees, keep an eye on the executive branch...
...A few years later, Dingell's committee nabbed former Reagan aide Michael Deaver for knowingly lying to Congress about his lobbying activities after leaving government...
Vol. 24 • November 1992 • No. 11
