The Truth About Bush

Larison doesn't want to bury the past:

...the main objections to the truth commission Sen. Leahy has been trying to organize are that it will be highly politicized and will be nothing more than a witch hunt. Of course, the use of the phrase “witch hunt” today implies a hunt in pursuit of something that does not exist, while we are fairly certain that there were criminals in the outgoing administration who have thus far escaped the appropriate sanctions of the law. The best argument that witnesses testifying against the idea of forming a commission seem to have had is that the abuses of power and crimes in question are not as numerous as they were under Pinochet and apartheid. Now that’s a claim to moral authority.

We have a situation where a president authorized illegal torture, disappeared many terror suspects, subverted the rule of law, suspended the First and Fourth Amendments secretly, wiretapped citizens secretly - and never copped to any of it. The idea that we should simply forget about this and move on without a serious accounting of what actually happened is as bizarre as it is disturbing. The truth, by the way, may well impugn members of Congress, including some leading Democrats, as well as other world leaders, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown among them. Why would we not want to know what was done in our name?