Via Glenn Greenwald, President-elect Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen, sounds incredibly impressive. She wrote this last March in response to revelations about the OLC, Dick Cheney, and Maher Arar.

The question how we restore our nation’s honor takes on new urgency and promise as we approach the end of this administration. We must resist Bush administration efforts to hide evidence of its wrongdoing through demands for retroactive immunity, assertions of state privilege, and implausible claims that openness will empower terrorists. . . .

Here is a partial answer to my own question of how should we behave, directed especially to the next president and members of his or her administration but also to all of use who will be relieved by the change: We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation’s past transgressions and reject Bush’s corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation’s honor be restored without full disclosure. (Emphasis & excerpts via Greenwald)

I agree with Greenwald when he writes on Johnsen:

I don’t know all that much about her, but anyone who can write this, in this unapologetic, euphemism-free and even impolitic tone, warning that the problem isn’t merely John Yoo but Bush himself, repeatedly demanding “outrage,” criticizing the Democratic Congress for legalizing Bush’s surveillance program, arguing that we cannot merely “move on” if we are to restore our national honor, stating the OLC’s “core job description” is to “say ‘no’ to the President,” all while emphasizing that the danger is unchecked power not just for the Bush administration but “for years and administrations to come” — and to do so in the middle of an election year when she knows she has a good chance to be appointed to a high-level position if the Democratic candidate won and yet nonetheless eschewed standard, obfuscating Beltway politesse about these matters — is someone whose appointment to such an important post is almost certainly a positive sign. (Emphasis in the original)

Hopefully Johnsen will keep her words of March 18, 2008 in mind as she services President Obama at the OLC and her beliefs of that time become grounding for how the Obama administration handles questions of Bush administrations violations of law and the rule of law and what accountability measures are taken over the next four years. Public accountability and investigation into what the Bush administration did and on what legal grounds they did it is an unquestioned necessity to allow our country to move forward. We can’t just forget the last eight years, especially vis a vis the rule of law and illegal actions by the Bush administration. The stakes are too great to forget.