Ambrose: The truth and the truth commission

ShareThis

So here's Patrick Leahy's great, grand idea -- let's establish a truth commission, dig up all the dirt we possibly can on the Bush administration and convert our marvelous tradition of cordial transitions of power to one of crucify the old regime.
The Democratic senator from Vermont wouldn't put it quite that way, of course, saying instead that we really need to find out why we went to war in Iraq, get the details on Guantanamo torture and figure out the extent to which George Bush's buddies politicized Justice Department prosecutions.
Establish a commission appointed by President Obama and leaders in Congress, give it the power to grant witnesses immunity from prosecution as it pursues these questions and we can thereby rise up from the gory past without a lot of political hullabaloo, say Leahy and supporters of a similar idea in the House.
Excuse me, but this proposal is political from its snout to its tail, a vicious, fraudulent, constitutionally dubious scheme that starts, it has been noted, by comparing the Bush years to the apartheid years in South Africa. That's where the name comes from -- a truth commission established in that country to draw confessions from former, sometimes murderous oppressors after Nelson Mandela came to power.
Some dangers as spelled out by Republican lawyers in a Washington Post article could be an infringement on separation of powers and the undoing of due process, an invitation for international courts to prosecute President Bush and even setting Barack Obama up as a war criminal.
As the authors note, Obama has already said OK to attacks in Afghanistan, and if a commission figures that those enemies should be understood as civilians suspected of criminal activity, then he could be criminally liable under international law.
There are other dangers, such as revealing classified information important to national security, and the whole thing would be redundant -- congressional Democrats have already studied all this stuff to death. If they think they didn't learn enough because Bush would not share some information they sought, all they need do is knock on the door of the new president and ask him, one Republican has been quoted as observing.
The truth about this truth commission is that it's an effort to set up Bush and others in his administration for even more virulent castigation than they've endured already, and that a next step could in fact be prosecution, even though the commission itself could not carry that out. What it would do is push us toward vengeance seeking even to the point of imprisonment against the losing party in elections.
That could obviously work both ways. Some Internet bloggers have been pointing out, for instance, how interesting it would have been in the Bush years for a commission to find out the extent to which laxity in the Clinton administration paved the way for the attacks on 9/11 among many other matters, some of them with legal overtones.
And how about getting at some interesting facts about Leahy himself, described by Jay Nordlinger in a National Review article a few years ago as "the meanest, most partisan, most ruthless Democrat in the Senate" in the opinion of Republican senators?
This man who is forever portraying himself as a saint in senator's clothing was once forced to resign from the Senate Intelligence Committee because of a couple of instances of leaking important classified information. Some bloggers theorize those leaks could have gotten people killed. I don't pretend to know, but maybe a truth commission could find out if the Republicans ever return to power and that's how we are henceforth going to conduct politics in America.

(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)

COLUMN