It was a perfect storm of a week for the White House as the tidal wave of righteous indignation over the treatment of wounded troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan swept over Washington.

An administration known for being on message and marching in lockstep watched with horror as the wheels fell off the wagon as House and Senate committees now controlled by Democrats held televised hearings into the mess at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

The only news event that took even a bit of attention away from the hospital scandal was even worse news for the White House. A jury in the nation's capital found Vice President Dick Cheney's hatchet man Scooter Libby guilty on four of five counts of lying to a grand jury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Valerie Plame leak case.

If there was even a vestige of doubt left in anyone's mind that the Bush administration did its best, or worst, to manipulate the intelligence and the news to make its case for invading Iraq four years ago, the Libby trial testimony and the verdict wiped it away.

The Bush administration and its allies wrapped themselves in the flag and accused anyone who challenged them of not supporting our soldiers. They used our troops as human shields for their broken policy, but they failed miserably when it came to taking care of those same troops, and their hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Heads already have rolled as the Army and Defense Department scrambled to get out in front of the wave of anger over failures of leadership at Walter Reed. More heads will roll in the wake of the congressional hearings, and as it becomes clear that the problems extend far beyond Walter Reed and the Army and into the far corners of the Veterans Administration, as my McClatchy Newspapers colleague Chris Adams has been reporting since the middle of 2004.

Americans were mad as hell and they buried their representatives in Congress and columnists and editorial writers in e-mail messages and letters demanding that this and other problems in doing the right thing for our wounded troops and veterans be fixed and fixed now.

Tucked among the flood of angry e-mails were some from the wounded themselves, quietly pleading for help.

One Army private first class was medically retired after he received traumatic brain injuries in two explosions in Iraq, and he's suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He wrote that he was judged 40 percent disabled and sent home to support his wife and two children on $700 a month.

He has, he wrote, been waiting five months to get enrolled at the nearest Veterans Administration hospital for further treatment.

"It is a shame that a man goes to war for his nation, and when he comes home he has to go to war to get his benefits and is treated like a criminal," the former soldier wrote. "You know what his crime is: He got wounded fighting for his country."

Unable to work and nearing bankruptcy, the soldier said he was "suicidal."

The Surgeon General of the Army, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, was the commander at Walter Reed for three years. With his appointment as the top medical officer, he now lives across the street from the infamous Building 18 at Walter Reed, where wounded soldiers lived in rooms blackened with mold and infested with rats and insects.

Kiley told the congressional hearing that he'd never visited that building and it wasn't his job to do inspections. Although the online magazine Salon first blew the whistle on Walter Reed some two years ago, he said he first learned of problems with outpatient soldiers there when he read about them in The Washington Post last month.

The representatives also heard that maintenance and repairs at Walter Reed had been farmed out to a private firm under a $120 million contract. The contractor replaced 300 government workers with 50 of its own maintenance workers.

They call it "privatization," and under the leadership of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, it became the answer to all questions and all problems.

Privatization has ballooned to the point where the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq have been supplemented with an additional 125,000 contractors - at least 25,000 of them armed security guards. This army of contractors eats up billions of dollars of the defense budget annually.

Whether privatization in Iraq works as it's worked at Walter Reed is very much in question.

The money men at the Pentagon, headed by Assistant Secretary of Defense David Chu, obsess over the human costs of war and the fallout of all those wounded and disabled who must be cared for, along with military veterans and retirees.

Those "entitlements" eat up money that they think should be spent instead on new technology, more expensive weapons systems needed and unneeded, and the defense contracting firms that are reliable contributors to political campaigns.

They're right to call these benefits entitlements. Our troops and the veterans of our wars ARE entitled. They're entitled to the best medical care. They're entitled to their disability pensions. They're entitled to all a grateful nation can provide for them, or for their survivors.

Those who'd cheat them of their entitlements are entitled to fair hearings and, depending on the results, fast dismissals from their government or military jobs. Any future medical care of those failed bureaucrats and politicians should be performed at Walter Reed Hospital's Building 18, before the whitewash is slapped on and the roach motels are put out.