Meteor Blades has an excellent diary bumped on the front page dealing with the drawbacks of a potential Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the treatment of detainees under the Bush administration. Read it, if you haven't already.
I want to chip in by reinforcing MB's basic point, which is that truth and reconciliation commissions are a totally inappropriate model for congressional investigations.
More than this, calls for such a commission highlight a startling level of insularity in Washington that is likely to be at the root of how the Bush administration's crimes were committed in the first place.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions have a pedigree that goes back to South Africa, via places like East Timor, Liberia, Rwanda, Chile and Argentina.
Truth and reconciliation is a mechanism by which countries heal themselves after civil wars, dictatorships, or brutal and immoral state policies in which large sections of the population is complicit. Examples would be crimes like genocide, policies such as apartheid, or crimes committed by government-backed civilian militia against their own people.
The idea of truth and reconciliation is that it is the best and only option when crimes have been committed by certain sections of a community against another, in numbers that preclude any practical possibility of putting the perpetrators in jail.
*Truth and reconciliation is for situations where guilt is shared so broadly and so deeply throughout the community that justice is impossible.
*Truth and reconciliation is for crimes where the community as a whole is both perpetrator and victim.
*Truth and reconciliation as an option for addressing the crimes of the Bush administration therefore makes no sense whatsoever.
Millions of Americans did not torture their fellow Americans. Millions did not subject millions to rendition or indefinite detention. Millions of Americans did not manipulate intelligence to send their own sons and daughters to war. Guilt is not shared broadly and deeply, but instead is traceable to specific decisions and actions by named individuals within government departments and state institutions.
So what do calls for such a commission tell us about Washington?
Truth and reconciliation is for crimes where the community as a whole is both perpetrator and victim. These are crimes perpetrated by Washington. A truth and reconciliation commission therefore makes no sense unless Washington also views itself as the victim.
Never mind the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in a war based on lies. Never mind the millions displaced from their homes by fear. Never mind those tortured and ritually humiliated in Abu Grahib. Never mind the numberless and nameless subjects of rendition, torture and illegal detention, all practices that continue to this day.
No, in a breathtaking example of the unique insularity that characterizes the American capital, Washington is in danger of forgetting that its actions had any impact on anyone else at all.
Unless we are careful, we will be back to the situation where nothing penetrates the Washington bubble. We should remember that it was from inside that bubble, isolated from feedback and decoupled from reality, that the dangerous ideologues of the Bush administration executed their fantasies and ultimately disconnected the government from the people.
We can't allow our leaders and representatives to be more concerned with the damage they have done to their own self-esteem than they are with the carnage, fear and agony that they have wrought on others.
If all-healing post-partisanship is the limit of congress' ambition, the real victims of this dark period in US history will be left to a lifelong, bitter reconciliation with the truth that justice is a luxury denied to most.