Ding Dong, The 'Truth Commission' Is Dead

The death throes of Bush Derangement Syndrome? It appears so.

Editor’s Note: The U.S. government seems paralyzed at the prospect of holding ex-President George W. Bush and other senior officials accountable for war crimes, even as Spanish investigative judge Baltasar Garzon initiates an inquiry under international law regarding torture sanctioned by Bush’s lawyers.

In this guest essay, investigative journalist and former candidate for Vermont attorney general, Charlotte Dennett, describes a meeting with Sen. Patrick Leahy in which he acknowledges the failure of his plan for a “truth commission”:

Those of you following the George W. Bush prosecution trail will be interested to know that Patrick Leahy’s “truth commission” is a no-go. I was in a meeting with Leahy and four other Vermonters on Monday when he broke the news to us.

The crackpots will go to their graves swearing Bush is a war criminal. I hope they suffer.

Leahy’s own aversion to appointing a special prosecutor appeared to be more practical than philosophical.

”We don’t want another Abu Ghraib,” he said. “You know, ‘Boy, did we get those privates and corporals.’ So many up on high will never get touched. It’s like the war on drugs – ‘let’s get those black kids on cocaine.’”

So it’s not that Leahy had a problem with prosecutions per se. “I just worry that the prosecutions will be done only on middle-level people,” he said.

Well then, what would happen to the higher-ups? Leahy had said, on previous occasions, that the purpose of his truth commission was to grant immunity to those willing to testify – presumably middle-level people – and we could infer from that that they, in turn, would spill the beans on their superiors.

If any of the witnesses lied under oath or were less than thorough in their answers, Leahy had told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow a month ago, they could be prosecuted for perjury. But that still left the fate of high government officials uncertain.

Leahy had hinted to Maddow that if officials refused to honor subpoenas, they, too could be prosecuted. But in the real world, as Monday’s news suggests, the people most responsible for the crimes will continue to get off free.

Or maybe, just maybe, there's nothing there. I guess these idiots never considered that.