E-Mail This Article to a Friend The big questions Plus, remembering Rosa Parks

Barring an unexpected turn of events, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is expected to issue a report and possibly bring indictments by the end of this week as a result of his investigation into who blew the CIA cover of Valerie Plame, the wife of ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson, who exposed the Bush White House’s lies about Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear-weapons program.

Fitzgerald's probe has been a model of probity: no leaks, no premature revelations. That’s in marked contrast to the show run by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, whose investigation into President William Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky resembled religious persecution rather than a government inquiry.

Whatever the result of Fitzgerald’s efforts, we already know that the Bush White House was up to its eyeballs in efforts to discredit Wilson and hurt his wife. It’s been well established by now that both Karl Rove, President George Bush’s chief political aide, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, are central players in this sleazy drama.

 Then — just as you thought things couldn’t get any better (from a Bush-hater’s point of view) or worse (from the perspective of someone worried about the nation’s well-being) — came the news that Vice-President Cheney himself is emerging as a figure even more central to the escapade than either Rove or Libby.

 The nation is going to have to wait for Fitzgerald’s final action before we can grasp fully the significance of all this. Common sense nevertheless suggests that the trio is bound by the web of lies they told in the service of a president who lied to the nation in order to gain public approval for the invasion of Iraq.

Cheney’s link to the CIA leak came on Tuesday, the same day that the number of US military deaths in Iraq reached 2000.

The profile of those who have died so far: almost 96 percent are male; they are more or less evenly divided among ethnic and racial groups; average age, 26. Soldiers from National Guard and reserve units now account for one-third of the deaths.

Every state in the union has sacrificed lives, as have about 1400 cities and towns; Massachusetts has contributed 30 of its citizens to the gruesome tally.

Roadside bombs have replaced gunfire, mortar, and rockets as the principle cause of death. Of the 15,000 wounded and maimed, half will not be able to return to active service.

Just after the capture of Baghdad, American deaths were pacing at a rate of about one a day. Since the fighting in Fallujah, many months later, the death toll has held steady, with occasional spikes, at a rate of about 17 a week.

Almost 200 troops from allies supporting the United States have also died, about half of them British.

The best estimate that various Washington authorities can provide about Iraqi-civilian casualties is somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000.

The CIA leak is only the tip of the iceberg. The deaths in Iraq, and the lies that are at their root, are the real issue. The Washington establishment is finally waking up to that fact.

Last week Larry Wilkerson, a former army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s top aide, spoke of a well-orchestrated campaign led by what he called the "Cheney-Rumsfeld axis" to not only mislead the nation about Iraq, but also to hijack American foreign policy. To do so, he said, this cabal knowingly misled Congress, which is more than an affront to the nation. It is, according to several US statutes, a crime.

That the Plamegate leak is just a small and visible manifestation of a larger pattern of criminal behavior is also dawning on some in Congress. Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) and 39 other House members (including James McGovern of Worcester) have called for expanding Fitzgerald’s probe to determine whether the White House conspired to deceive Congress into granting the go-ahead for war in Iraq.

Such a move would have been unthinkable in Washington just a few weeks ago. And it is still too much to hope for that the Republican-controlled House would actually consider much-warranted impeachment proceedings against President Bush. But it’s time to ask these key questions, which were asked of President Richard Nixon during the series of collective scandals now known as Watergate: What did the President know? And when did he know it?

BEACON OF HOPE

Anyone who doubts that an individual can make a difference to the fate of a nation should consider the case of Rosa Parks, who died on Monday at the age of 92.

The date was December 1, 1955. The place: Montgomery, Alabama, which had briefly been the capital of the Confederacy and at mid century was home to 70,000 whites and 50,000 African-Americans. As with most of the South, Montgomery was ruled by Jim Crow, or racially segregated public accommodations, which extended to the city’s bus lines upon which African-Americans were especially dependent — restricted as they were to largely menial labor and not having sufficient means to own cars.

Mrs. Parks, then 42 years old, a bespectacled and quiet churchgoing woman who worked in a downtown department store as a seamstress, was riding a bus home during rush hour. When the bus became crowded and the driver called for "Niggers" to move to the back to make way for white riders, Mrs. Parks sat steadfast in her seat. Her feet hurt and she was tired. A member of the NAACP, she remembered the time 10 years earlier when she was thrown off a bus for refusing a similar order. It was time to make a stand, and she did so, in her own quiet and resolute way, by sitting tight.

That night, the woman who would not be moved launched a crusade that transformed the nation. Mrs. Parks was arrested and the local head of the NAACP, a Pullman porter named E.D. Nixon, sprang into action. Black citizens’ ensuing boycott of the Montgomery bus lines, which lasted more than a year, became the first mass movement of the civil-rights movement, which changed the nation’s complexion in every way.

The bus boycott brought the young Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the forefront of that movement. But it was the actions of ordinary people like Mrs. Parks that fostered the revolution. As one young black woman told a reporter at the time, "The Reverend King didn’t stir us up. We’ve been stirred up for a long time."

Mrs. Parks’s life was a testimony to the glory that this nation’s greatness ultimately rests in the lives of everyday people. Her willingness to defy brutal authority simply because she was too tired to submit to injustice any longer shines through the murk of these dark days; in life she was an example, a spark. In death, her memory is a beacon of hope.