A fascinating listing of bush casualties in this country, the sacrificing of truth, honest and good governance on the altar of greed and lust for power.

In late August 2005, after 20 years of service in the field of military procurement, Bunnatine (”Bunny”) Greenhouse, the top official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in charge of awarding government contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, was demoted. For years, Greenhouse received stellar evaluations from superiors—until she raised objections about secret, no-bid contracts awarded to Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR)—a subsidiary of Halliburton, the mega-corporation Vice President Dick Cheney once presided over. After telling Congress that one Halliburton deal was “was the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career,” she was reassigned from “the elite Senior Executive Service… to a lesser job in the civil works division of the corps.”

When Greenhouse was busted down, she became just another of the casualties of the Bush administration—not the countless (or rather uncounted) Iraqis, or the ever-growing list of American troops, killed, maimed or mutilated in the administration’s war of convenience—but the seemingly endless and ever-growing list of beleaguered administrators, managers and career civil servants who quit their posts in protest or were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arming. Often, this has been due to revulsion at the president’s policies—from the invasion of Iraq and negotiations with North Korea to the flattening of FEMA and the slashing of environmental standards—which these women and men found to be beyond the pale.

And then there’s the truth, gone down the drain in an effort to pump up bush as a leader who cares about his soldiers. An entirely scripted and rehearsed Q&A session designed to make it look good but in fact anything but a reflection of reality. Thanks to Kos for this one.

“OK, so let’s just walk through this,” Barber [Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense] said. “Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?”

“Captain Smith,” Kennedy said.

“Captain. Smith?

You take the mike and you hand it to whom?” she asked.

“Captain Kennedy,” the soldier replied.

And so it went.

“If the question comes up about partnering — how often do we train with the Iraqi military — who does he go to?” Barber asked.

“That’s going to go to Captain Pratt,” one of the soldiers said.

“And then if we’re going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit — the hometown — and how they’re handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?” she asked