Tone at the Top

As most of you know, while based in London, I focused on anticorruption compliance work.  In helping companies craft anticorruption policies and procedures, we often discuss the essentials behind a good program.  For example, you should regularly have training sessions for your employees, so they understand what types of payments are illegal.  You should periodically audit your company's records, to make sure that there aren't any suspicious payments.  And you should set an appropriate "tone at the top."

"Tone at the top" refers to the message that top-level officers and board directors are conveying.  After all, there's no point in instituting an anticorruption policy if your CEO winks at your sales agents and tells them to "do whatever it takes" to secure a contract with a government official.

I've been thinking about how "tone at the top" applies to governments.  Specifically, I just finished reading The Dark Side by Jane Meyer, which examines how the U.S. government handled suspected terrorists after 9/11.

One of the things that struck me was how the message from the top administration trickled down to lower levels:

"At the same time, the [former CIA] operative said, the pressure from the White House, and in particular from Vice President Cheney, was intense.  Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were over at the CIA so often, a special reading room was set aside for them.  "They were pushing us: Get information! Do NOT let us get hit again!"  In Cheney's single-minded focus, he searched the CIA's archives to see what worked in the past.  He was particularly impressed with the Vietnam War-era Phoenix Program.  Critics, including military historians, have described it as a program of state-sanctioned torture and murder."

Later, Meyer discusses the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo:

Dave Becker, who was chief of the "Interrogation Control Element" in Guantanamo until December 2002, also claimed that the problem began at the top.  His shifting of blame was, of course, self-serving.  But when asked later by investigators with the Department of Defense why he let Qahtani be humiliated and abused, Becker pointed upward in the chain of command.  "Many of the aggressive interrogation techniques," he claimed, were "a direct result of the pressure we felt from Washington to obtain intelligence and the lack of policy guidance being issued from Washington."

There are numerous other examples scattered through the book where individuals explained that they engaged in certain behaviors because of the message that was coming from the White House.  As Meyer points out, to a certain degree, the explanations may be self-serving.  But, it does make me wonder how things would have played out if a different message was coming down from the top (e.g., "We need information, but we also need you to be cognizant of the Geneva Conventions and the importance of treating detainees humanely.")

And, to take it one step further, I wonder if the message would have been different if the administration's top officials had a different background.  As pointed out:

"In a war that would rely as much on exploiting legal loopholes as it did on bullets and bombs, there were few law degrees among the top officials.  Neither the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, nor the National Security Adviser was a lawyer.  In contrast, during the Clinton Administration, all of these posts were held by lawyers, with the exception of the Vice President, and even he had attended law school briefly."

So, had there been more lawyers in the administration's top tier, would the government's response have been more curtailed, and more cognizant of our international obligations in handling detainees?