One of the first things the Bush administration did when it was elected in 2004 was move loyalists into positions where unreliable Secretary's had previously ruled. The two main victims were Colin Powell and Ashcroft.

Both Powell and Ashcroft had been good soldiers in public, but in private both had resisted - Ashcroft more than Powell. It's odd to say this, given how much Liberals and Progressives hated the man, but Ashcroft actually had moral qualms about torture and about breaking the fourth amendment.

In particular there were two things Ashcroft balked on. Torture and the NSA wiretapping program. When his chief deputy James Comey refused to ok the NSA wiretapping program the administration actually went to Ashcroft, in hospital, to try and get him to overturn it.

As Newsweek wrote:

On one day in the spring of 2004, White House chief of staff Andy Card and the then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made a bedside visit to John Ashcroft, attorney general at the time, who was stricken with a rare and painful pancreatic disease, to try—without success—to get him to reverse his deputy, Acting Attorney General James Comey, who was balking at the warrantless eavesdropping. Miffed that Comey, a straitlaced, by-the-book former U.S. attorney from New York, was not a "team player" on this and other issues, President George W. Bush dubbed him with a derisive nickname, "Cuomo," after Mario Cuomo, the New York governor who vacillated over running for president in the 1980s. (The White House denies this; Comey declined to comment.)...

...But in March 2004, White House chief of staff Card and White House Counsel Gonzales visited Ashcroft, the seriously ill attorney general, to try to get him to overrule Comey, who was officially acting as A.G. while Ashcroft was incapacitated. Ashcroft refused, and a battle over what to do broke out in the Justice Department and at the White House. Finally, sometime in the summer of 2004, a compromise was reached, with Comey onboard: according to an account in The New York Times, Justice and the NSA refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether "probable cause" existed to start monitoring someone's conversations.

Of course, the final buckle is probably still unconstitutional. Nonetheless Ashcroft had shown he just wasn't a team player.

The other thing that Ashcroft had problems with was torture. He wouldn't let his FBI agents cooperate with torture at Guantanmo and indeed FBI issues with torture eventually leaked to the press (mostly, I suspect, because Guantanmo interrogators liked to pretend to belong to the FBI and the FBI was aghast that they might wind up getting the blame for torture.)

In memos over a two-year period that ended in August, FBI agents and officials also said that they witnessed the use of growling dogs at Guantanamo Bay to intimidate detainees -- contrary to previous statements by senior Defense Department officials -- and that one detainee was wrapped in an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud music in an apparent attempt to soften his resistance to interrogation.

In addition, several agents contended that military interrogators impersonated FBI agents, suggesting that the ruse was aimed in part at avoiding blame for any subsequent public allegations of abuse, according to memos between FBI officials....

...The documents also make it clear that some personnel at Guantanamo Bay believed they were relying on authority from senior officials in Washington to conduct aggressive interrogations. One FBI agent wrote a memo referring to a presidential order that approved interrogation methods "beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice," although White House and FBI officials said yesterday that such an order does not exist...

...An overall theme of the documents is a chasm between the interrogation techniques followed by the FBI and the more aggressive tactics used by some military interrogators. "We know what's permissible for FBI agents but are less sure what is permissible for military interrogators," one FBI official said in a lengthy e-mail on May 22, 2004.

In another e-mail, dated Dec. 5, 2003, an agent complained about military tactics, including the alleged use of FBI impersonators. "These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and . . . have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee," the agent wrote. "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will be not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators."

None of this is meant to make out that Ashcroft was a hero. But he did protect his own Department's institutional interests against them. In State, Colin Powell had done the same thing. And over at the CIA, Tennet, despite being rather weak willed, and buckling in significant ways, had proved unwilling to purge the CIA of anyone who might be considered disloyal (meaning, either leaking information to the press, or unwilling to provide analysis that matched the pre-determined needs of the administration - like "yes, there are definitely WMD in Iraq!").

So all three were replaced - Tenet later than the other two, by Porter Goss, but for the same reason - to purge the department of all who dared to oppose the administration.

To a large extent this purge has continued, with the only department that has succesfully resisted to any extent being Justice. Despite the perception that Rice and Cheney/Rumsfeld don't get along (correct, in large part) Rice has in fact purged State of those who were willing to buck the administration's will - the difference being only that Rice is loyal to Bush, and not Cheney. However for most purposes (including the current crisis in the Middle East) that does not mean a great deal - Bush is online with the messianic "never negotiate, blow them all up" hard line of the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal and Rice will not buck Bush.

The damage that has been done to these three departments (and Defense) is not insignificant, and will take a fair bit of work to undo. Even as the response of the Bush administration was to purge, so a smart Democratic administration will turn around and get rid of most of the ideologues brought in by this administration, and turn mostly to those who resigned or were thrown out because they had qualms about:

a) using the Constitution for toilet paper (Justice); or,
b) losing a war in Iraq by underestimating what it took (Defense and State), or;
c) cooking intelligence (CIA); or
d) torturing people (Defense and Justice).

What has happened over the last few years has been unfortunate. But what it has done is forced people to make stark moral decisions - to decide if they are willing to go along to get along, or if shredding the constitution, torturing and destroying the US's military and diplomatic position is more than they are willing to be accomplices to.

Those who have shown that the Constitution and the US's interests come before their self interest are exactly the people who should be running these departments.

And the Bush regime has very methodically shown the world who they are - and who the people are who are willing to flush their ethics and the US's interests down the toilet if that's what it takes to get ahead.

This is not a small silver lining. It is the hard core, the cadre, that is need to turn the country around - men and women who have proven, at personal cost, that they put the Constitution first - not themselves.