Breslin:

The one military center Bush avoids is Dover Air Force in Dover, Del., where they bring in the dead bodies from Iraq.

Bush pretends they do not exist. He has the base sealed from cameras and reporters.

He also pretends that the prison torture scandal does not exist. But in attempting to make the nation into a convention of Southern suckers, he revealed exactly how slow-thinking he is. For in omitting the prison torture scandals, he only made things wide open for a stool pigeon, an informer, a rat, to detonate the murder investigations and leave Bush without a shred of credibility. If he had any heart and honor, the least he could have done was mention that he was surprised and sickened and the thing was so much worse than the original snarls - “the actions of a few soldiers.”

If the White House thinks that talk of a rat, a witness turning, is only for police stations, they might look first at the history of their city. At 1:30 in the afternoon of March 20, 1973, Judge John Sirica opened his office door to give a message to his secretary, Mrs. Alease Holley. He saw one of his law clerks, Richard Azzaro, talking to James McCord. He was a defendant in the Watergate break-in case and was about to be sentenced by Sirica.

McCord had an envelope that he wanted to give to Sirica. The judge retreated into his office. He was an old scuffler, out of the back rooms of neighborhood stores and small fight clubs. You couldn’t get him to touch that envelope with a gun at his back. The White House could have had that envelope filled with hundreds and set him up, Sirica thought.

He had a probation officer take the envelope from McCord and deliver it to the courtroom. Sirica came out and read McCord’s letter. Which said that others were involved, and that people had threatened and committed perjury.

That letter went up to the president, Richard Nixon, and we had a new one. It was the power of a turncoat witness. Look out for them in Baghdad. This is an enormous national case these informers will be talking about.