He reportedly brought his idea for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the White House Tuesday, talking with President Obama’s new White House Counsel Greg Craig about the proposal. “I went over some of the parameters of it and they were well aware at the White House of what I’m talking about,” Leahy told The Huffington Post. “And we just agreed to talk further.”

Major legal advocacy groups today chimed in with their support for a truth commission, too, including The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School and Human Rights First, both stacked with prominent Democratic lawyers who supported Obama for the presidency.

So is it likely to happen?

Maybe.  As I reported earlier, prosecutions are looking less and less likely, especially as the statute of limitations on many of the Bush administration’s most egregious crimes, including the torture, humiliation and abuse of prisoners, rapidly runs out.

But a bipartisan, independent, investigatory commission, along the lines of the 9/11 or Church commission — or even South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — can be a pretty watered-down alternative; they don’t usually lead to criminal prosecutions, even if they’re warranted. On MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” Tuesday night, George Washington Law professor Jonathan Turley called the idea “shameful,” saying it would ultimately protect war criminals from accountability.

That may be true.  But as Scott Horton pointed out when proposing a similar idea in Harper’s back in November, it would offer one real advantage for President Obama: major political cover.

Writing about the case of Rasul v. Myers, in which four British former Gitmo detainees are suing for allegedly being tortured and denied their religious rights while imprisoned by US authorities — the Times bravely writes that “Part of the process of undoing that ugly legacy [of detainee abuse] is making clear that detainees have the right to sue if they were tortured or otherwise abused.”

Doing that could change everything. Imagine if hundreds of even thousands of victims around the world sued the US government for damages. How much do you get for being tortured? for indefinite detention? for religious abuse and humiliation? Canada paid Maher Arar — the Canadian sent to Syria to be tortured — $11 million in compensation. Will the US be liable for many billions?

So far, there have been surprisingly few civil cases brought against the US by torture victims, in part because suing is costly, the outcome is uncertain and appeals can go on for years. The Rasul case was made possible by the pro bono representation of the Washington law firm Baach Robinson & Lewis, working with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and hoping to establish exactly the precedent the Times is advocating for now.

The DC Circuit, instructed to reconsider its ruling in light of Boumediene v. Bush, which made clear that detainees imprisoned by the US in Cuba do have rights under the US Constitution, could now decide that US officials are not immune from lawsuits brought by torture victims, because the right not to be tortured has long been well established in both US and international law. It could also decide that the 750 or so men who’ve been held at Gitmo are indeed “persons” protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, something the court oddly denied before. And there are thousands of others held by US authorities abroad whose rights under the US Constitution have yet to be decided.

All this could — and perhaps should — open the door to a flood of lawsuits by alleged victims of torture, physical and psychological abuse and religious deprivation, as I’ve explained before. As in the Arar case, there are strong arguments for why victims of torture at the hands of the US government deserve a remedy.

But should torture victims really have to pay a lawyer to take their case to court and wait years for a result? And is the US willing to pay billions of dollars in damages?

The better approach might be one suggested to me by Carolyn Patty Blum, a consultant for the International Center for Transitional Justice: have an investigatory commission set up both to investigate what crimes were committed and compensate their victims. That’s a common role for Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that have been created or considered around the world, and while it wouldn’t and shouldn’t preclude prosecution of criminals, it could make compensating the victims far easier for everyone involved.