In This Instance, Letting Bygones Be Bygones Reeks

(8 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

A kind of political air freshener seems to have dulled the nostrils of some progressives. Either that or for them the aroma of the festering lesion anchored in the executive branch and fed by tendrils deep in the muck of Congress on both sides of the aisle has abated. The odor of Constitution-dismantling legislation and executive orders, the rendition and detention and torture and murder associated with the “war on terror,” the spying on citizens, and the all-round knavery magically seems to have transformed itself into a bowl of pot pourri.    

Made insensate by this, some progressives say that, come January, if the man behind the desk in the Oval Office is Barack Obama, we should forget about eight years’ of doings by George W. Bush, Richard Bruce Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and their cabal. Establish a committee along the lines of the 1975-76 Frank Church Committee as the ACLU and others have suggested? Nah. Waste of time. Just like impeachment. A diversion of attention from crucial issues when our nation is hurting and there is so much important stuff to accomplish: energy, health care, getting out of Iraq.

In the interest, therefore, of moving forward on what’s essential, their reasoning goes: “Let bygones be bygones.”

What’s the point of talking about investigating next year anyway since Mister Bush will probably pardon these guys five minutes before he leaves office? Just be glad they’ll be out of our hair even if that means they’re off the hook. Leave them to their conspicuous consumption and other plutocratic games. The future is what matters. Move on.

Ugh.

This approach takes Hunter’s exasperated sigh on the first day of Netroots Nation and turns it upside-down:

There will be reconciliation, and reconciliation will be defined by the conservative punditry as letting bygones be bygones — anything but that will be unacceptable and partisan, in itself.

That’s a critique not a plaudit.

The sort of reconciliation the oligarchs and their media megaphones want to impose is missing a crucial element: Truth. Not merely the truth of what we already know – domestic spying, unjust detention, “disappearance” of funds, rendition, torture, extrajudicial everything including murder – but also the truth of still unknown stuff the administration did or continues to do. Unknown stuff some of which predates the current administration, unknown stuff some of which may well continue afterward. The kind of stuff Spies for Hire author Tim Shorrock wrote about in Salon last week:

“If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration’s attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don’t know,” says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.

“You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse,” says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don’t know [the extent of] what laws have been violated.”

The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government’s extensive use of military assets — including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes — for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people.

Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA’s use of databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence activities, such as the U.S. government’s extensive use of no-fly lists and the Treasury Department’s list of “specially designated global terrorists” to identify potential suspects. As of mid-July, says Steinhardt, the no-fly list includes more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, “our cities would be ablaze.” A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government’s “inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect.”

The future is what matters. Another decade or two of allowing the maggots to hollow out the Constitution could make that already dicey future grim indeed. Avoiding it, if that is possible, means, first off, putting away the perfume and inhaling deeply of the stink. Doing so properly requires not the wussy, half-hearted, half-assed, wink-and-a-nod investigation that we’re all-too-familiar with, but a thorough, ruthless, hard-core, full-bore, no-questions-evaded probe that not only digs deep but also goes as far back as needed to get the whole picture, even if that means taking up where Frank Church left off 33 years ago.  

Why then all the shrugs about an investigation? Is it that paralyzing plague of progressives – outrage exhaustion? Has despair settled in permanently because the gauge has red-needled so frequently and hopes have been dashed so often by people who were supposed to be our allies, people we fought to get elected? Is it a feeling that there’s no way to get a full-blown investigation, and that any attempt will go lame 15 minutes after the opening gavel, so why bother? Is it a sense that leaders who took and kept impeachment off the table will do the same to any investigation, so why even dream about it? Is it fear that the complicity of some Democrats will be revealed to extend farther than now imagined? Is it a weird perception that spending time investigating the fundamental undermining of democratic rights will somehow interfere with implementing universal affordable health care and building a heartland corridor of wind turbines?

In the case of some alleged progressives, opposition to investigation and follow-up action is easily understood. They think Mister Bush and his crew haven’t done that much wrong. For instance, the pernicious views of legal scholar and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein regarding the unitary executive make his objections to going after the Cheney-Bush cabal perfectly understandable, if nonetheless reprehensible. Both Armando/Big Tent Democrat at TalkLeft and Glenn Greenwald at Salon have demolished Sunstein’s pro-Bush statements in this regard and his subsequent attempts to whitewash them. Wrote Greenwald last week:

Jane [Hamsher of Firedoglake] also asked [Bruce] Fein about Obama adviser Cass Sunstein’s recent statements that Bush officials should not be prosecuted for their illegal detention, interrogation and spying programs. To get a sense for why this matters, National Journal this morning listed Sunstein as one of a small handful of likely Supreme Court appointees in an Obama administration. But — similar to Fein’s point regarding Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman and comrades — Sunstein has long been one of the most vocal enablers of Bush radicalism and lawlessness, having continuously offered himself up over the last seven years to play the legal version of the TNR role of “even-liberal-Cass-Sunstein-agrees-with-Bush.”

For some progressives, the lack of enthusiasm for a Church-style committee emerges from the certain knowledge no conceivable Congressional probe will ever take a gander at the machinations of bipartisan American empire, so why urge any poking around at all? From such a perspective, any investigation will simply be an elaborate pretense run by Democrats and Republicans to lull Americans into thinking something is actually being achieved even as the corporatist elite continue their plunder and rapine as usual.

This kind of thinking denies that any good information came out of the flawed Watergate, Church Committee or Iran-contra investigations.

No doubt chances are slim to none for prosecuting the Cheney-Bush crew as well as for passing relevant reforms designed to shield citizens from the outlawry of future leaders. But slim is always better than none. Without a Congressional investigation, there’s no chance at all. How can progressives reconcile themselves to that?