the citizen-viewer

Even Amnesty International is excited about Senator Patrick Leahy’s proposal to create a truth commission to investigate rights abuses during the last administration, or claims to be. Reading between the lines of their announcement (which seems to be on e-mail only), what’s missing is an endorsement of his plan.

And there’s good reason to withhold it.

Before you sign Leahy’s petition, take a close look. He proposes, in vague terms, “a truth and reconciliation commission, to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration’s constitutional abuses so we make sure they never happen again.”

Missing from his language is any mention of the possibility of prosecution. And in fact, truth commissions in other countries and similar inquiries in the US have typically foreclosed or severely limited future prosecutions — essentially trading away justice to get some of the truth as a consolation prize.

This approach may be appropriate in countries that are emerging from civil conflict, delicately trying to rebuild a peaceful society and desperate to avoid renewed war. In these cases, justice may be out of reach, and a bit of truth might be as much as one could hope for.

But it’s not appropriate in a country with well-developed legal structures and an operational judiciary, where all the tools exist to conduct criminal investigations, to indict those with substantial evidence of criminal activity against them, and to put them in the dock to face their accusers.

Assuming we live in the latter kind of country, Leahy’s proposal seems to be designed to put perpetrators of the most serious crimes of our time into a special category: above the law. After all, the rest of us don’t get to face a truth commission if we’re accused of a crime. We face a court of law, and the possibility of prison. Even death.

Are our institutions so weak that we must compromise justice in hope of escaping civil conflict? Senator Leahy seems to think so. If he is right, then as a senator he shares responsibility for the collapse of our civil society.

Too many times, we’ve seen the frightened rabbits in Congress join with their collegial collaborators to create mechanisms that gives us half-truths instead of justice. Like the Iran-Contra hearings, these mechanisms allow privileged criminals to go free, and to join future adminstrations. And kill again.