I have great respect for Fitzgerald, especially given the job he's done in my adopted home state of Illinois. But I still think this whole thing will come to nothing much in the end. I just don't have enough faith in the system and my fellow citizens any more.

(By the way, thank you for the thoughtful piece of writing. That's one of the many reasons I check in with Salon several times every day.)

Your article on the Plame scandal is very inciteful. I hope that Fizgerald will indict those who are guilty of bringing us to war on false info. We owe the soldiers in Iraq who are fighting and those soldiers who have lost their lives, all 2000 of them. This is treason sure and simple.

I find it remarkable that after 5 years of treason, ineptitude and shear stupidity, Bush's numbers are as high as 38%.

I sometimes feel like I am living in the Last Days of the Roman Empire. We have a President who fabricates a reason for war (surely, war against Saudi Arabia would have made more sense, given the demographics of the sept. 11 terrorists). Then he proceeds to pull defeat from the jaws of victory by going without any visible post-conflict plan.

We have a guy that spends money like the budget was one collossal drinking binge. A guy that thinks FEMA is a good place for political cronies. A guy who routinely ignores that separation of Church and State thing. I guy that undermines public education to pander to drooling extremists. A guy that will allow global warming to sweep the South away in one big hurricane to prevent any small risk to his fossil fuel producing golf buddies.

I would say we get the government we deserve, but it has been well established that two elections that put "W" in office did not measure up to third world standards, in terms of safeguards against fraud.

It's about the 2,000 Americans who have died in a deeply dishonest war.

Joan, it's also about more than 16,000 Iraqi citizens (latest conservative estimate as of Oct. 25) - and an estimated 20,000 Iraqi soldiers who were just following orders - that were killed.

I would expect a Salon editor to always include those when talking about the human cost of the war.

Kudos to Joan Walsh on the real meaning of the Plame scandal. But please, Joan, it is parochial and heartless to repeatedly cite the 2000 Americans who've died in Iraq, while remaining profoundly mute on the number of Iraqis -- perhaps more than fifty times the number of American casualities -- who've also lost their lives as a result of our Bush-Cheney cabal. But even that is not enough honesty. For that you must include the shameful and exorbitant number of innocent lives, on all sides of this conflict, forever and cruelly shattered as a result of this pointless war.

It's premature to investigate Bush/Cheney for what we all know by now to have been a pack of lies (of Orwellian proportions) as opposed to valid causes for war. Why is it pointless? Because last time I checked the war was still going on! Salon is excited about indicting someone for starting the war, when what we should be doing is stopping it first. Will Salon come out against the war? I doubt it.

Finally, I've found the link between Bush's "war on terror" and the war in Iraq. The Bush administration believes strongly in "extraordinary rendition" � sending people who are suspected of being threats to our national security to countries who practice torture � for interrogation. Well, W's own father called the outing of an undercover CIA operative "an act of treason," certainly a threat to our national security. And since it now seems obvious that Rove and Libby were involved, and have not been completely forthright in their testimony to the Grand Jury... perhaps we should send them to Pakistan for further "interrogation." Unless, of course, these uber-Christians don't believe in the Golden Rule: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You.

Always lost in the brief background paragraphs afforded this story is the fact that Joe Wilson is more than simply a "former ambassador" to a small African country.

Joe Wilson was the last American diplomat to face Saddam Hussien at the onset of the Gulf War. He protected Americans at the Baghdad embassy by refusing to hand them over. He mocked Saddam by meeting him with a rope around his own neck, daring Saddam to screw with him, and by extension, the United States. If anyone deserves to have a opinion about Saddam, it's Joe Wilson.

One would think from most news reports that Mr. Wilson was nothing more than a stay-at-home Dad, waiting for his wife to find him something to do. Even main stream talk shows don't go out of their way to refute the lie that Joe Wilson himself is a liar.

Yes - the deeper meaning, the underlying cause, surrounds the depths to which the White House would sink to sell a war that they knew would not be available to them on it's own merits. Saddest of all to me is that they have pursued a scorched earth campaign to destroy protected national security assets like Valarie Plame and her CIA front company in the name of all things, national security.

Bravo on your article. Half the country has known for a long time that we were duped into this war. What's amazing to me is how long it's taking for the other half to wake up. How many other disasters do we have to endure before everyone sees that this administration has done nothing but weaken us -- diplomatically, economically and morally? Why are we fighting cabals abroad when we've got one of our own at home? It's time for those of us who truly have moral values to stand up and take back the title of "patriot." What Bush, Cheney and their cronies have done is so un-American it makes my skin crawl.

--Angela Wilson Gyetvan

P.S. Deriding Wilson as an out-of-work nobody whose wife got him the gig? Geez Louise, what does that make Mike Brown? And how do you explain that to the folks in New Orleans?