Now that “Change” has come to the White House, the question that is on every American’s mind is what the Obama administration, the new Justice Department, will do about the abuses of the Bush years.
Senator Patrick Leahy, a six-term Democratic Senator, a former prosecutor and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and someone who would be intimately involved in any process subsequent to such decisions, has expressed his opinion—and his preference—in a TIME article, “The Case for a Truth Commission.”
In the article, Leahy sees parallels between the abuses of “more than 30 years ago” investigated by the the Church Committee and today’s:
The parallels with today are clear, and so are the lessons. Then, as in recent years, some were willing, in the name of security, to trade away the people’s rights as if they were written in sand, not stone. For much of this decade, we have read about and witnessed such abuses as the scandal at Abu Ghraib, the disclosure of torture memos and the revelations about the warrantless surveillance of Americans.
Then, Leahy asks the question: “So what is to be done about the abuses of the Bush years?”, and lists three options.
The first two:
Some say do nothing, and a few Senators even tried to make Attorney General Eric Holder promise in his confirmation hearings to launch no prosecutions for Bush-era lawbreaking. At the opposite end of the spectrum, others say that even if it takes many years and divides the country and distracts from the urgent priority of fixing the economy, we must prosecute Bush Administration officials to lay down a marker…
The third one, “a middle ground whose overarching goal is to find the truth: we need to get to the bottom of what happened–and why–to make sure it never happens again.”
Senator Leahy clearly prefers this third option and describes how this “middle ground” path should be followed:
…appoint a truth-finding panel…develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair-minded and without an ax to grind… find the truth…If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecution in order to get to the whole truth…
Finally, Leahy concludes:
Two years ago, I described the scandals of the Bush-Cheney-Gonzales Justice Department as the worst since Watergate. They were. We are still digging out from the debris. We need to get to the bottom of what went wrong after a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American law and values. The American people have a right to know what their government has done in their names.
Of course, we have the right to know what our government has done in our name.
But we also have the right to demand that justice be served when laws have been broken and when our Constitution has been violated, especially at the highest levels of our government.
However, I am afraid that I may have to reluctantly agree with Senator Leahy that we should take the middle road “to find the truth.”
I say this, not because I believe—as Senator Leahy does—that this approach will “make sure it never happens again,” because when justice is not served bad things will certainly happen again.
I say this because I am a realist and, sadly, this “middle ground” may be the best we can hope for in our present “political democracy.”
Image: Department of Justice
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.