Forgive and Forget - No Way!

One temptation we should resist with every fiber of our being is the temptation to let the past eight years recede from memory without insisting upon public accountability for Bush administration officials.

I understand that Americans are currently concerned with what seem like more pressing matters. But here's just one reminder of what Bush officials did, in our names, and how they nearly destroyed our constitutional order in seeking to aggrandize executive power. I could provide many more examples.

Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned portions of the Military Commissions Act and restored the writ of habeus corpus, and congressional complicity with the assault on our constitutional order appears to have been politically punished. But that's not nearly enough.

Torture needs to be exposed and repudiated. Government lawlessness needs to be exposed and repudiated, officially and publicly. We need to read those secret legal memoranda authorizing "enhanced interrogation techniques" and other executive actions to see the extent to which the administration used the OLC to write its own laws without congressional input or judicial review. We need a full investigation into the politization of the Justice Department. We need a full account of the initial surveillance program that was so patently illegal that the entire leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI threatened to resign in mass unless the program was altered. We need a full account of these and many other matters, and we should demand such an account.

None of this is nice, and its easy to smear those calling for accountability as vindictive. But if we don't do it, we can expect all of this to happen again during the next crisis - perhaps by a more ruthless and competent administration, and one that will be able to cite Bush administration actions as precedent for its own.

Joe H.