FBI Is With Stupid Also

FBI Is With Stupid Also

Christopher Byron says, "The Stupid Defense has been used from time to time since then, but the results have been spotty at best." (CHRISTOPHER BYRON, "H-P'S WITH STUPID," New York Post, October 2, 2006) At a trial for wrongful death against the Boston FBI office, the former Special Agent in Charge, Robert Greenleaf testified "It never entered my mind," that two of his informants were killing 19 civilians.
He said this even though the DEA, a District Attorney and the state police were investigating the informants. The court awarded $3.1 million to the mother of one murdered man.
--
Roy Bercaw, Editor
ENOUGH ROOM
Cambridge MA USA

H-P'S WITH STUPID
By CHRISTOPHER BYRON
New York Post
October 2, 2006
-- AT the dark heart of last week's congressional hearings on the Hewlett-Packard affair lurked an awful truth, and thanks to the investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, it has finally been dragged into the full glare of daylight for all to behold. The performance of the hearings' star witness - Hewlett Packard's recently ousted Chairwoman Patricia Dunn - makes it plain enough that a crisis now confronts us: America's leaders are simply running out of excuses.
Just as any American leader is expected to do these days, Ms. Dunn tried to wriggle out of responsibility for the corporate-spying scandal that has engulfed her company, adopting what we have all come to know as the Great American "I guess I'm just stupid" defense.
But Dunn's heart obviously wasn't in it, and the congressmen staring down at her in the amphitheater-like hearing room in the Rayburn building in Washington, D.C., certainly looked unimpressed as she sleepwalked through her 10 top reasons why, as chairwoman of an $87 billion company, she actually had no responsibility for the boardroom spying campaign she had launched.
To hear Dunn describe her job as nonexecutive chairwoman, she was really just a silly so-and-so who "coordinated" this and that for her colleagues like a kind of boardroom Perle Mesta. We'll turn to a more detailed review in a minute of Dunn's struggle to become Patricia Dunce, the genuinely stupid person she needs to be to stay out of prison for her role in the H-P affair, but the nation's capital was not the only place where bored audiences were sitting through a performance of "Excuses On Parade."
And wherever one looked, critics of America's Golden Age of Whining seemed to be coming to the same conclusion: Been there, done that, heard it all before. The excuses we heard last week seemed like little more than shuck-and-jive con jobs from actors who barely believed their own lines. In New York, former Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, running for state attorney general on the Republican ticket, seized upon the lamest excuse possible to fend off accusations that she and disgraced ex-New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik had discussed placing a listening device on her husband's boat to catch him in flagrante with a woman she suspected he was having an affair with.
When a tape recording of Pirro's discussions with Kerik surfaced last week, she defended herself by declaring that any such bugging would have been targeted only at her husband, so it was no one's business but her own. Retorted an editorial in her home-county newspaper, the Journal News, "Jeanine Pirro isn't just any scorned wife, outed on the afternoon news or on Jerry Springer. She was district attorney when she asked Kerik to wire her family boat to catch her husband with another woman."
As Pirro had her finger poised above the self-destruct button in New York, Patricia Dunn was putting on an even worse performance before Congress. Dunn's basic mistake was to have gone with the Stupid Defense in the first place. This strategy was field-tested by Sen. Ted Kennedy in the 1969 Chappaquiddick affair and it helped him beat the rap in the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne. Twenty years later, ex-Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford tried it to explain his behavior in the BCCI banking scandal, but it was really his advancing age and ill health that enabled him to avoid standing trial. The Stupid Defense has been used from time to time since then, but the results have been spotty at best.
It didn't work for actress Winona Ryder when she was caught on tape shoplifting designer clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. And it didn't work for ex-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger when he stuffed his pockets with top secret documents on his way out the door of the National Archives, then claimed he had done so "inadvertently." And it certainly didn't work for either of the two top men at Enron, former Chairman Kenneth Lay and sidekick Jeff Skilling, who both claimed they were as much in the dark as anyone else on Enron's true financial condition, even while they were frantically dumping their stock just before the company collapsed. For the Stupid Defense to work, a defendant really has to look and sound like a fool, and that isn't easy, even for Genovese crime family boss Vincent ("The Chin") Gigante, who spent years trying to convince prosecutors he was crazy by getting up every morning and shuffling around Manhattan in a bathrobe and slippers. Unfortunately, not only did Dunn show up for her grilling wearing a tailored business suit and an angry scowl, but she came across as more of a manipulative and blame-deflecting conniver than as a weak leader who was kept in the dark by those under her.
One of her worst moments came when a committee member, Republican Greg Walden of Oregon, backed her into a corner over a claim she had made in her written statement to the committee, then repeated in her oral presentation, that she had been assured by a private investigator hired to probe the board that the phone records of private citizens are legally available from public sources. "Are you serious?" exclaimed Rep. Walden. "You honestly believe it was that simple?" Walden's outburst followed a parade of Dunn's top aides, each of whom avoided testifying by asserting their right against self-incrimination.
The spectacle simply underscored how improbable it would have been for Dunn not to have developed concerns of her own about the legality of the operation in which she had become entangled. By far the most awkward moments involved Dunn's determination to take no responsibility for the fiasco, and to push the blame onto subordinates, some of whom hadn't been called as witnesses and thus weren't in attendance to hear her blame them. In so doing, she transformed herself into the one corporate personality whom employees fear and despise above all others: the power-abusing, dog-kicking boss - the sort of person for whom the Stupid Defense simply will not work, no matter what. So it's tough noogies for Patty Dunn, who has now publicly proclaimed herself stupid enough to believe it is legal to steal phone records, while revealing in the process that she's not smart enough to realize she'd never be believed, by anyone.
So I say, how about it, Patty: Can you spell, "I'm sorry?" It may not be enough to keep you out of the joint, but as Kyra Sedgwick says on "The Closer," a heartfelt confession is at least good for the soul. cbyron (at) nypost.com