If it turns out that we can't (i.e., that Obama's DoJ won't) prosecute the Busheviks, this is a great idea; and let's ask Sen. Leahy to include election theft--through electronic fraud and vote suppression--to the docket.
MCM Leahy Proposes 'Truth Commission' to Probe Bush Abuses By Jason Leopold The Public Record Monday, 09 February 2009 12:07 <http://www.pubrecord.org/torture/673-leahy-proposes-truth-commission-to-probe-bush-era-abuses.html>http://www.pubrecord.org/torture/673-leahy-proposes-truth-commission-to-probe-bush-era-abuses.html Senator Patrick Leahy Monday proposed the creation of a "truth and reconciliation commission" to investigate Bush administration abuses such as its use of torture and domestic surveillance. Leahy, the chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, made the announcement during a speech at Georgetown University's Law Center. His announcement will likely be followed in the days ahead with a proposed bill to create an investigative panel "to get to the bottom of what happened, and why, so we make sure it never happens again." "One path to that goal would be a reconciliation process and truth commission," Leahy said. "We could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair minded, and without axes to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth. People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts. If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth." President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney both admitted publicly last year they had personally authorized the waterboarding of at least three suspected terrorists and allowed interrogators to use harsh methods against 33 other suspects. However, Bush and Cheney denied that these actions violated anti-torture laws. Waterboarding is a technique that makes the victim believe he is drowning and has been regarded as torture at least since the Spanish Inquisition. The U.S. government has treated its use in battlefield interrogations as a war crime, and the Justice Department prosecuted a Texas sheriff in the 1980s for using waterboarding to extract confessions from suspects. Last month, Leahy's counterpart in the House, Rep. John Conyers, introduced legislation to create a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to probe the "broad range" of policies pursued by the Bush administration "under claims of unreviewable war powers," including torture of detainees and warrantless wiretaps. In a column published Jan. 31 on the Huffington Post, Conyers said an examination of what the Bush administration has done requires a comprehensive overview of how these abusive policies evolved. "While disparate investigations by committees of Congress, private organizations and the press have uncovered many important facts, no single investigation has had access to the full range of information regarding the Bush administration's interrelated programs on surveillance, detention, interrogation and rendition," Conyers wrote. "The existence of a substantially developed factual record will simplify the work to come, but cannot replace it. Furthermore, much of this information, such as the Central Intelligence Agency's 2004 Inspector General report on interrogation, remains highly classified and hidden from the American people. An independent review is needed to determine the maximum information that can be publicly released." While Conyers has also called for the appointment of an independent counsel to launch a criminal probe into the Bush administration's policies, Leahy said his proposal would be designed to appease public demands for accountability and not recommend prosecutions of any sort. "We need to come to a shared understanding of the mistakes of the past," said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. "Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuing of what happened....I don't want to embarrass anybody. I don't want to punish anybody. I just want the truth to come out so this never happens again." Leahy said the commission, whose membership could either be congressional or presidential appointees, would have subpoena power and could grant witnesses immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony--except in cases of perjury--about how some of the Bush administration's most controversial policies were formed. Leahy is one of a handful of Democratic leaders who has come out in support of investigating the Bush administration's policies since Barack Obama's inauguration last month. Last month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he would support funding and staff for additional fact-finding by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which last month released a report tracing abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib to Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, decision to exclude terror suspects from Geneva Convention protections. Additionally, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, a former federal prosecutor and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said during a conference two weeks ago that, "we need to follow this thing into those dense weeds and shine a bright light into what was done." Whitehouse's made those comments at a two-day medical conference sponsored by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which has called for an investigation into the Bush administration's use of interrogation techniques that have been widely regarded as torture. "We can paper it over if we choose, but the blueprint is still lying there for others to do it all over again. It's important that we not let this moment pass," he told the 400 or so attendees. Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters: "Looking at what has been done is necessary." And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed support for House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers's plan to create a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to probe the "broad range" of policies pursued by the Bush administration "under claims of unreviewable war powers." Attorney General Eric Holder said during his confirmation hearing earlier this month that "waterboarding is torture," but the Obama administration has hesitated to launch new investigations of the Bush administration's crimes partly out of fear that would infuriate Republicans who might retaliate by obstructing Democratic economic plans during a deepening recession. On Monday, some Republicans dismissed Leahy's remarks as "politics as usual." "No good purpose is served by continuing to persecute those who served in the previous administration," said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. "President Obama promised to usher in an era of "change" and bipartisan harmony. Unfortunately, the continued effort by some Democrats to unjustly malign former Bush Administration officials is politics as usual." Incoming CIA Director Leon Panetta said during his confirmation hearing last week that the Obama administration would not seek to prosecute CIA interrogators who performed brutal techniques, such as waterboarding, against suspected terrorist detainees. Panetta told The Associated Press in an interview after his confirmation hearing that "we just can't operate if people feel even if they are following the legal opinions of the Justice Department they could be in danger of prosecution." The authors of those legal memos, however, are under scrutiny by a Justice Department watchdog. Sen. Whitehouse and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, wrote a letter to the agency last year requesting an investigation into the role "Justice Department officials [played] in authorizing and/or overseeing the use of waterboarding by the Central Intelligence Agency... and whether those who authorized it violated the law." The senators' Feb. 12, 2008, letter to Inspector General Glenn Fine and H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), asked them to examine whether the legal advice met professional standards and whether the lawyers were "insulated from outside pressure to reach a particular conclusion?" Whitehouse and Durbin also asked what role was played by Bush's White House and the CIA in possibly influencing "deliberations about the lawfulness of waterboarding?" Less than a week later, Jarrett responded by saying the senators' concerns were already part of a pending investigation that OPR was conducting into the genesis of the Aug. 1, 2002, legal opinion widely known as the "torture memo." The memo, which gave a legal stamp of approval for the Bush administration's torture policies, was written by Deputy Attorney General John Yoo, who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and was signed by his boss, Jay Bybee, who is now a federal appeals court judge. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The OPR inquiry is expected to be completed by early March. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to Mark Crispin Miller's "News From Underground" newsgroup. To unsubscribe, send a blank email to [email protected] OR go to http://groups.google.com/group/newsfromunderground and click on the "Unsubscribe or change membership" link in the yellow bar at the top of the page, then click the "Unsubscribe" button on the next page. For more News From Underground, visit http://markcrispinmiller.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
