Truth or prosecutions?

Senator Patrick Leahy has proposed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the Bush administration, similar to the one Bishop Desmond Tutu led in South Africa that was so successful in healing the country's wounds after apartheid. The idea behind such a T&R Commission is to get at the truth, not to prosecute.

It makes the assumption that, in order to move forward, it is essential to establish the truth of what happened and that the truth will be more forthcoming if individuals know that they will not be held criminally liable for their testimony. Otherwise, everybody takes the 5th amendment, and we don't get the truth.

It's a trade-off: truth in exchange for no prosecutions, but there's a near universal consensus that it worked to heal the South African nation and move it forward into the future.

It would be a trade-off for us too. Would healing the nation's bushwhacked trauma be better accomplished by bringing the villains to court or be simply establishing for all to see what they actually did, along with some understanding of why, of what they thought they had to do?

President Obama keeps emphasizing he wants to look to the future rather than focusing on the past. It's not clear whether he would actively oppose investigations or a truth commission or whether he just prefers not to have it be the focus of his administration with all else there is to do. I suspect it was also part of his goal of bipartisan cooperation, knowing that any investigation of either type will be bitterly opposed by Republicans. So, let Congress set it up and leave him out of it.

Now a group of liberal activists has released a statement calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor

We urge Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a non-partisan independent Special Counsel to immediately commence a prosecutorial investigation into the most serious alleged crimes of former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the attorneys formerly employed by the Department of Justice whose memos sought to justify torture, and other former top officials of the Bush Administration.

Our laws, and treaties that under Article VI of our Constitution are the supreme law of the land, require the prosecution of crimes that strong evidence suggests these individuals have committed. Both the former president and the former vice president have confessed to authorizing a torture procedure that is illegal under our law and treaty obligations. The former president has confessed to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. . . .

Among the 40 signers are: Center for Constitutional Rights, National Lawyers Guild, American Freedom Action Fund, Voters for Peace, Progressive Democrats of America, The Progressive. These may be fine activist groups, but they are not the mainstream liberal and progressive organizations that are widely known.

As much as I would like to see Karl Rove and Dick Cheney go to jail and George Bush be publicly humiliated by a trial, nevertheless, my better judgment leads me to support the idea that establishing the truth of what happened and setting our government back on track, is more important than criminal prosecution of individuals.

If it were a matter of graft or fraud, I'd say prosecute. But no one has suggested that the top administrations officials did it for personal gain. Of course they violated the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. But it was a matter of judgment and of misplaced priorities, not personal gain. So I finally come down on the side of getting the truth.

Besides, there's the practical matter that it is very difficult to get a conviction of this kind against a public official who will say what he did was necessary to protect the nation in a time of war. And, going the route of criminal prosecution will close off any hope of getting "true confessions" without getting a conviction anyway.

Ralph