Americans Can Handle the Truth

With the release of some of the Smirky/Darth torture memos and the deal for Rove and Meyers to talk to Congress about DoJ shenanigans, the justification for not prosecuting George W. Bush and company for war crimes continue to fall by the wayside.

Dahlia Lithwick takes down the worst excuses.

But it seems to me that along with good (or at least plausible) reasons for shielding Bush-era misconduct from public scrutiny, President Obama may also have some wrongheaded ideas about protecting Americans from knowing the truth.

Americans beg to differ. The president has been proved wrong in his claim that there is no political will in this country for unearthing wrongdoing. Polls increasingly show that—despite the tanking economy—close to two-thirds of the public want investigations into the Bush team's use of coercive interrogation and warrantless wiretapping.

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What else might the president be wrong about when it comes to concealing Bush's mistakes from Americans? Here's a partial list:

The line between "before" and "after." The position of the executive branch is that Obama believes in looking forward. America needs to turn the page; nothing is to be gained by digging up old skeletons; choose your future-facing metaphor. But as Sen. Patrick Leahy has taken to saying, "We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page." All crimes happen in the past. A legal regime that perpetually looked forward would be absurd. For years now, conservatives and victims' rights groups have used the language of "closure" to demand that rights be wronged and reparations be made when crimes occur. That's why 9/11 families were invited to witness tribunals at Guantanamo. Yet liberals, somehow, are loath to demand "closure" or "healing" or "resolution." When it comes from the left, such sentiment is perceived as bloodlust. Conservatives don't have a monopoly on looking backward.

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The fundamental mistake underpinning all the thinking above is that openness about past errors leads inexorably to ugliness, politicization, and rancor. But it's worth recalling for a moment that we are already knee-deep in ugliness, politicization, and rancor. Transparency is not necessarily the first step toward indiscriminate prosecutions of everyone who ever worked for President Bush. It doesn't mean that from now until forever, each administration will criminalize the policy differences of the administration before. It doesn't mean that all mistakes are war crimes, or that hereinafter all investigations are all "perjury traps." That's the kind of binary, good/evil thinking we were supposed to have left behind us last November.

If President Obama has some better rationale for hiding the markers along the road to torture or eavesdropping from the American people, it's time we heard it. But keeping this information from us for our own good is not an acceptable argument. The most recent OLC memos demonstrate precisely why the last eight years were so extraordinary. The suggestion that we just need to get over it is starting to sound extraordinary, too.

Read the whole thing.