The Bureaucracy Strikes Back: Fallen Legion 3

There just seems to be no end to the politicization of *everything* with the Bush administration.

Here are more disturbing examples documented by Nick Turse of the TomDispatch.

In the first installment of this series, I offered 42 names to begin what now seems an endless - and ever-growing - list of top officials as well as beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who quit their government posts in protest or were ridiculed, defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arm tactics, cronyism, and disastrous policies. In the second installment, I added what turned out to be a modest 175 further casualties to the rolls of “the Fallen.” With this latest installment, TomDispatch’s tally of the battling bureaucracy’s casualties stands at approximately 243 - and rising (so please continue to send your suggestions of deserving legionnaires to: fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com).

Despite this toll, now into the hundreds and counting, it seems that we’ve barely scratched the surface. In fact, since the last installment, other commentators have increased our knowledge of these folks by digging into what Tom Engelhardt has aptly called the Bush administration’s “war with the bureaucracy” - a battle between the Bush administration and the career civil servants (sometimes even Bush’s own appointees), who constitute “the only significant check-and-balance in our system since September 11, 2001.”

In one such effort, Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr., and Evan Thomas, writing for Newsweek chronicled a Palace Revolt - a secret war waged not by black-ops troops in the wilds of Waziristan, but behind closed doors in Washington where “loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees fought a quiet battle to rein in the President’s power in the war on terror.” They profiled a number of the unlikely rebels, including:

Read the list here