1. Wolfowitz's memo to Douglas Feith prior to launching the Iraq War. Wolfowitz did not ask Feith whether an al-Qaeda connection to Saddam had been found. (We already knew about the group in the NW of Iraq, NOT connected to Saddam). What Wolfowitz said in the memo is that Feith had failed to find evidence of Saddam's al-Qaeda connection, i.e., that he had not found the evidence to support what Wolfowitz already "knew." He was instructed to do a better job of getting that evidence, not to provide an assessment of whether that connection existed.
Remember the "Downing Street Memo", the British document that said that the US was trying to make the evidence fit the case for a war that had already been decided? Remember Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's denials? Q.e.d.
2. Email from White House to Justice Department on firing attorneys. Read by Sen. Dianne Feinstein at the Gonzales hearing, the memo detailed a strategy -- fire them, do it in such a way that no one in particular was responsible, and be prepared for flak. Isn't this, uh, exactly what happened? No one knows who put the names on the list, the key people did not even know there WAS a list(!), and Gonzales claimed (initially) he was hardly involved.
Kudos for (newly-elected) Sen. Whitehouse (RI), who showed the permitted contacts from the White House to Justice in the Clinton administration was limited to about 3-4 people on each side; whereas, with Bush, the rules were changed to allow more than 400 people from the White House to communicate directly with the Justice Department.
If you want to have "no one" responsible here's what you do: Rove "mentions" someone, just mentions the name. The understanding is if Rove mentions it, it means to can him, but it is never said.
And why did they do all this, KNOWING there would be problems? Because they want to harass Democrats for the next election, they tried in this election, but not enough of the attorneys were moving on it quickly enough to impact the '06 elections, and they lost.
3. Cheney's outing of Valerie Plame, that emerged from sworn testimony in the Libby trial. I have detailed this in this space several times.(e.g., "Madam Speaker: Impeaching Cheney is No Longer a Choice"). It is irrelevant whether he had the right to declassify her status and, if so, whether he followed procedure. Valerie Plame ran a counterproliferation project. Cheney's outing of her compromised that project. By so doing, he provided aid-and-comfort to enemies of the United States.
4. Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch . The administration knowingly lied about their circumstances of death and injury. They likely thought that praising their heroism would prevent them (in Tillman's case, his family) from revealing the truth. That worked with Tommy Franks, George Tenet, and Paul Bremer---give them the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, and they will not rock the boat.
They did not bargain that the bulk of the American people, as opposed to their Beltway buddies, have integrity, a word not even in their lexicon. They valued truth above all else, even when forcing the truth reduced the heroism of their stories. In my book, it enhanced it. When you think of the extraordinary integrity of the Tillmans and the Lynches, and the utter contempt with which Bush, Rove et al. have treated the American people as a whole -- lying, cheating, misleading, bullying -- it is an understatement to observe how much better the American people are than their so-called leaders.
It is now all unraveling. Too bad we could not stop it from raveling in the first place.
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