Most of the revelations about the Bush Administration's firing of U.S Attorneys have highlighted three basic motivations that may have been behind the firings:

1. To slow down or interfere with prosecutions of Republicans (Carol Lam,Paul Charlton )
2. To pursue bogus prosecutions of Democrats (Iglesias, John McKay)
3. To install Bush/Rove cronies ( Bradley Schlozman, Timothy Griffin)

But there is another commonality that was noted repeatedly, at least on this site--when TPMM and their readers first poured over those DOJ document dumps, looking for clues.  Several people noticed that almost all the fired USA's were on the Native American Issues Subcommittee(NAIS).  Minnesota USA, Thomas Heffelfinger even said it was the only reason he could think of why he might have been targeted: 

"The only thing I can think of is my advocacy on behalf of Native American issues," Heffelfinger said.  

This connection was mentioned and puzzled over here , but I never saw any real argument made why the Bush administration would want to be rid of them for that.  The most plausible I read was that they might be afraid of other GOP connections to Abramoff that the FBI might not yet know about.

However, there have been two recent investigative reports about the incredible crime wave that is taking place on Indian Reservations,  which have made me think of another possible motive.  In July 2007 and again in July 2008, NPR ran reports about the fact that it is estimated that 1 in 3 women on reservations will be raped in their lifetimes, in part, because predators know that rape and other violent crimes often go uninvestigated and unpunished in Indian Country.  The reason for that is that the Major Crimes Act of 1885 of  forbids tribal courts from trying any crime more serious than a misdemeanor.  All felonies fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice to prosecute and they lack the resources and the will to handle the workload.

Still no motivation for the Bush Administration to fire those attorneys unless they just didn't want them asking for more resources.

But I just saw a PBS Expose based on a Denver Post investigative piece about crime on the reservation called Lawless Lands.  And there was one piece of information that really caught my eye. 

Congress has doubled the amount of money allocated to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for tribal police. But that increase - to $200 million this year - has been largely spent on patrol officers and chasing misdemeanor crimes. Federal investigators and prosecutors have also received sizable boosts in their budgets for work in Indian Country, but those increases have failed to produce a perceptible rise in the number of investigations or prosecutions from reservations. [emphases mine]

This is my rampant speculation, based on nothing more than the evidence above, but what if the Bush administration had taken some of the budget Congress had designated for Indian law Enforcement and had moved it to something Congress had specifically de-funded like, say, Total Information Awareness, a la Iran-Contra?

What do y'all think?  Is that totally farfetched?