Open Questions

With the question of who leaked Valerie Plame’s status as a CIA agent now resolved (answer: everyone in the Bush Administration), perhaps the Washington press corps would like to use up some of the energy they’ve built up to take these few remaining open issues:

• Who forged the Niger/Yellowcake documents, and why? Once considered a smoking gun, papers that claimed Iraq was attempting to buy nuclear fuel from Niger have been proven forgeries. Discrediting Joseph Wilson’s dispute of them was the impetus for outing Plame. But who actually created the documents and what their motivation was has never been explained.
• Who forged the Ratergate memos, and why? While a batch of memos that that finger President Bush as a deserter from his National Guard unit are now universally regarded as inventions, the person responsible for creating them and what their motivation was is still a mystery.
• Did George W. Bush go AWOL? Independent of the Rathergate memos, definitive evidence that President Bush fulfilled (or didn’t fulfill) his military commit has yet to be established.
• Did Bush use cocaine? As the President has only said that he could pass a government drug screen (leaving events pre-1975 unresolved), the question remains open.
• How many times has Bush been arrested, and for what? The President has been arrested at least a few times: He acknowledges two (for stealing a wreath and rowdiness) and he was arrested for a DUI in Maine. But the open question of further arrests — that may have disqualified him for service in the National Guard — remains.
• Who was on the Vice President’s energy taskforce? The Administration went to court to keep this information secret, but with gas prices (and oil-industry profits) at all-time highs, the question of who the former Big Oil CEO had in the room to formulate policy remains unanswered.

None of these questions need involve conspiracy theories: The goal is to discover answers, whatever they may be. But nobody has ever gotten to the bottom of any of them, and in the cases where specific individuals do know what happened, they have been allowed to leave the public record a list of evasions and non-answers.

It would be nice to know.

I’m sure I’ve missed some. If you have open questions about the Bush Administration, please post them below. And if there actually are answers to any of the above that I’ve missed, please post them, too.