Editorial: Incompetence redux

Tuesday, March 6, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.

In a congressional hearing on Monday, veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan said that lost medical records and a seeming indifference on the part of medical staff added insult to injury at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

One soldier told members of a House subcommittee that less than a week after being admitted with a traumatic brain injury and the loss of an eye, he was given a map of the hospital's 113-acre campus and told to find his own way to outpatient quarters.

Accounts of a Walter Reed outpatient building's crumbling, moldy, mice-infested walls were detailed two weeks ago in stories by The Washington Post. In the past week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been talking tough and promising to hold accountable anyone who allowed the deterioration at Walter Reed to persist.

Walter Reed's commander, Army Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, was relieved of his command on Thursday, and Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker was named Weightman's successor on Friday - the same day that Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey resigned. Before the week ended, Army officials also had promised to add more than 100 personnel this month to bolster Walter Reed's oversight of outpatient care.

It was the kind of swift, decisive action that needed to be taken. It is sad to say, but competence and, just as importantly, accountability have been woefully absent during the first six years of Bush's administration. From the failure to respond with urgency in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to the president dragging his feet in replacing Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary - about three years late by our reckoning - the Bush administration's typical response to a catastrophe has been to deny that one exists. All the while, the White House typically impugns the motives of those pointing out administration errors, and it takes action only after a public flogging.

If the steps taken last week at Walter Reed had been taken as soon as reports surfaced in 2003, wounded soldiers likely would not have been testifying before a House committee Monday. It is no surprise that the federal government was able to respond quickly last week. That is how government is supposed to work. The surprise is that it actually occurred on Bush's watch.