A single scandalous fish in a river full of crimes. [View All]

The other day I was speaking with someone about this latest raft of Bush Administration scandals, specifically the attorney firings, when I had an unusual realization. I mentioned in passing something about the "day-to-day pattern of criminal behavior" those brigands in the White House are exercising.

"What do you mean?" said my friend.

And that's when I realized that even at this advanced date, few people have seen what I saw. Though many of us have been reading about the crimes of the White House in the murky (but better and more honestly reported) depths of the alternative media, few people have actually seen what I mean by a day-to-day pattern of criminal behavior.

Those attorney firings? They're not concealing a single crime, or a few crimes. Those firings are designed to cover up a criminal assault upon our nation the likes of which I have never seen before nor ever studied about, though I spent the better part of a decade researching government-sanctioned crimes in the field of Indian Affairs. I'm talking about crimes committed every single day, some large, some small, all of them affronts to our national dignity and a disgrace to our country's name.

About this time of year on the Potomac River, the shad run through Washington, DC to spawn--millions of 'em, so many that you can simply dip a net in the water and pull out a handful of six-inch long appetizers. Similarly, the transgressions of the Bush Administration run so thick and so deep that future historians will be able to look at no single act of this Presidency without considering that act part of an enormous school of criminal deeds, all swimming in dark formation in the muddy water they intentionally left churned.

So remember this when I tell you this little story: it's but one story among a myriad, only a few dozen of which I have seen myself. It's a crime which will never be prosecuted, probably never even acknowledged, first because there are so many bigger fish to fry, second dipping your net in the waters of the Bush Administration will always yield a criminal fish--but probably not a single one of the fish I watched swim by.

You've allowed my my flowery introduction, so I'll skip most of the actual story's exposition and start with this. In 2002, Senator Tim Johnson was re-elected in South Dakota by the slimmest of margins over the GOP's best boy, John Thune. By all accounts, the winning votes came from a larger-than-normal turnout in the state's Indian reservations, particularly among the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The Oglalas have a long and troubled history with the federal government, from well before Wounded Knee and the more recent FBI-condoned murders of AIM activists in the 1970s. But Johnson's reelection--and the inability of the Republicans to steal that election anyway, though they certainly tried--drew the attention of the White House itself.

The following spring, when the President's budget proposal came out, the displeasure of the White House was readily apparent. It was my job to track the funding proposed by the White House for the Oglala Sioux, and the result was nothing short of disaster: COPS funding was proposed to be cut to the bone, which would severely affect the tribe's law enforcement (and in fact the tribe ran out of law enforcement money that year, and anarchy nearly reigned officially); the Indian Health Service killed several programs upon which the Oglalas relied; educational funding for tribes was cut as were school construction funds, which ensured that Oglala children could continue to go to school in one-half of their dilapidated building, the other half having been shut down due to asbestos and water damage.

Most of these swipes were broad and (I happen to think) aimed at punishing American Indians in general for daring to vote, but one in particular was aimed square at the heart of the Oglalas: the Bush Administration proposed to cut funding for the Mni Wiconi project from the previous year's amount of roughly $30 million to about $13 million, of which only $6 million was to be for actual development. The Mni Wiconi project is a pipeline designed to pipe drinking water from the Missouri River to the various reservations which used to comprise the Great Sioux Nation along South Dakota's southern border.

Did I mention that today, in the Twenty-first Century, most of the Oglalas don't have access to clean running water?

I'll spare you the sob story about how this project was supposed to be completed a decade ago, or how the project was expanded to include non-Indian grazing interests further up the line (and how that part of it is now complete).

Here's the important part: six million dollars wouldn't be enough to keep the blueprints for future work dry, because it still rains in parts of South Dakota where the Indians don't live.

My role in getting that funding back was small but somewhat significant. My job was to track down the justification for cutting the funding. The official justification can be found here (.pdf file), page GP-46 of the FY 04 Bureau of Reclamation Budget Justification:



Which is further not explained on page GP-7:



There is yet another page here, with all kinds of nice graphs, which also explains nothing, but which also refers to another document which also explains nothing specific about why the Mni Wiconi funding was cut.

So how, exactly, does this PART thing work?, I asked. Well, that's where the fun began. You see, nobody could tell me, exactly. When I asked to see the paperwork behind the assessment, nobody had it, or knew where it could be had. At one point, an exasperated Department of the Interior official (no, I can't remember whom now) suggested I talk to J. Steven Griles, who pled guilty the other day to obstruction of justice over his relationship with Jack Abramoff.

It turns out that PART was bullshit, the whole time, and it's one of the many avenues of corruption that Rep. Waxman is trying to seal off. According to Waxman, pencil-pushers at the OMB had far too much power--subjective power--to give negative assessments without any real justification, just like in the case of Mni Wiconi.

One of those pencil-pushers at OMB was David Safavian, later convicted on four felony counts for his relationship with Jack Abramoff.

See, the thing here is that Jack Abramoff wouldn't lift a dirty fingernail to screw over the Oglala Sioux--they don't have enough money to steal. This hit job was personal, and political. And yet the same names keep popping up... almost like the job went through the same people, but from a different source....

But I'm getting ahead of myself. When I found myself being blocked by bureaucratic red tape and vacuous explanations at every turn, I did what every mediocre researcher is supposed to do when he smells a rat in the Bush Administration: I told my bosses what I found, and I moved on to the next day's crimes. And I kept moving on for another year or two before I couldn't stand it anymore and cracked up.

One of the last things I remember about the incident, besides Tim Johnson's heroic work to restore funding for the project that year (which he successfully did--one more reason why he's a great guy), was one attorney saying to another, "we should report this to the Department of Justice."

I'll bet they did. And I'll bet nothing happened. I just looked and find that the new US Attorney for the District of South Dakota is a fellow named Marty Jackley, who replaced Kent Mullins in 2006, who replaced Michelle Tapken in 2005, who replaced James McMahon in 2005. The last three appointees had the approval of now-Senator John Thune, who rebounded from his defeat in 2002 to defeat Tom Daschle in 2004. McMahon resigned shortly after Thune won.

I don't know if James McMahon is on the firings list.

Is it a crime? It should be. Ethically, it certainly is a rotten thing--to those of us who saw it it was an obvious hit job, followed up by an obvious snow job. If it's not a crime yet I'll bet it would be if someone had the balls to start asking questions, whereupon these vultures would lie about it under oath. But I saw things like that every single fucking day from the first day these gangsters stole the office.

All I saw was what they were doing to the Indians. I only heard stories about how they were raping the environment, robbing the treasury, getting contractors fat at the DOD, selling off the airwaves, holding back the IRS, and on, and on, and on....

Like I said, one small fish in the net. Look quick, because I'm sick of fish, and I'm throwing it back.

But there are millions more where that one came from.