Pressure Mounts to Investigate Bush Officials « The Washington Independent

The pressure is ratcheting up on President-elect Barack Obama to do something as soon as he takes office about the Bush administration’s years of law-breaking.

The lawyer and writer Scott Horton, in an excellent feature in the December issue of Harper’s, lays out the Obama administration’s options. Horton points out that there is a long litany of potential crimes the new administration could go after -– from using the Justice Dept. for political purposes to issuing no-bid military contracts to corrupt companies.

But the most obvious crime that’s prime for prosecution is officially sanctioned torture.

Advocates like Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, have harsh words for former Clinton Justice Dept. officials like Robert Litt, now advising Obama not to prosecute Bush officials and risk appearing vindictive and divisive. Litt and others, including influential Obama advisers like Cass Sunstein, have suggested they don’t want Obama to squander the good will he’s generated from both sides of the aisle.

As I wrote earlier, lots of others have been offering the same sort of advice. Meanwhile, some law professors, like George Washington’s Jonathan Turley, who even supported the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, have made a persuasive argument that we can’t tolerate law-breaking by public officials.

But I think Horton, who’s a master of the law and history on this subject, may have the best answer: a commission created by the president that would investigate what happened and recommend prosecution if the facts warrant it. The commission should be nonpartisan –- made up of career prosecutors, lawyers and assistants, rather than political officials and operatives like the 9-11 commission, which lost credibility when its conclusions were watered down and subsequently attacked from all sides.

Last week, human-rights advocates from UC-Berkeley and the Center for Constitutional Rights made a similar recommendation in a new report about the impact of Bush administration interrogation tactics on Guantanamo detainees.

If the new president authorized and supported it, the commission’s recommendations would be far harder to ignore than were, say, those of the 9-11 commission. If prosecution is ultimately warranted, the president would be under considerable pressure to follow through.

What’s more, it would look like an impartial administration of justice. Not like a new administration launching a retributive, divisive and partisan attack.

As I wrote last week, closing Guantanamo Bay is a good first step, but it doesn’t go far enough. The new Obama administration is going to have to take more affirmative steps to end U.S.-sponsored abusive detentions and interrogations around the world, and to send a clear message that the United States, including the president, can be trusted to follow the rule of law.

Creating a commission to investigate whether the Bush administration abused that trust would go a long way toward making that message credible.