The Politics Of Vengeance

It's payback time. Democrats are calling for investigations, congressional committees-of-inquiry—a special prosecutor, even, to hunt down those complicit in the more unsavory elements of President Bush's "global war on terror." Party leaders on Capitol Hill, like Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, have urged "an independent criminal probe" into, by Conyers's reckoning, virtually everything controversial the Bush administration did.

President-about-to-be Obama is reluctant. But he needs the support of congressional Democrats to pass his agenda. He would be well advised to take a pass, even if he loses some votes from his party's caucus along the way.

The call to arms may be seductive; its advocates couch their cries in terms of motherhood and apple pie: transparency, a need for a full accounting, the rule of law. Humbug. This is about vengeance, pure and simple. There is little of substance that we do not already know—about what happened, why, and who ordered it. Most of our knowledge has come from inquiring reporters: Jane Mayer's superb book, "The Dark Side," and Barton Gellman's "Angler" being the latest reconstructions. The new report from Representative Conyers's Judiciary Committee—a scattershot 486-page condemnation of Bush's "imperial presidency"—adds little insight to the public record. On the most important issue, what was done in the name of fighting terrorism, we know all too well who did what.

What we know: President Bush authorized everything. Not in detail perhaps, but he approved the principles, as any president—even an incurious and argument-averse president—must do. (Blaming the bad stuff on Vice President Dick Cheney is the purest form of avoidance; Cheney could have done nothing without the president's delegated authority.) We also know that the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department felt it their task to contrive legal justifications for whatever the White House wanted. The OLC's rulings may bend interpretations of executive power beyond the breaking point in the eyes of many Democrats and legal scholars but the OLC is the ruling legal authority inside the executive branch. We also know that officers of the CIA were explicitly assured that their actions had been judged legal.

Now turn to Congress—and the core charge that the administration "misled" the legislature and the American public by faking evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Really? There is ample evidence that Saddam was genuinely believed to have an arsenal by those with access to the intelligence. Why? Because Saddam's closest associates and his army commanders believed it; and told the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6, when, by ingenious and genuinely heroic efforts, those intelligence agencies made contact with them. All this is a matter of public record.

The political reality, also on the public record, is that Congress miserably failed in its task of checking the executive. The classified version of that seminal National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam's WMD contained caveats and dissents excised from the unclassified and published version. Those should have raised questions. The classified NIE was sent to Capitol Hill. How many legislators bothered to go to the vault to read it? Three.