Ari Melber makes a great point about outstanding questions of how the Obama administration will be able to restore the rule of law and prosecute those responsible for a number of civil liberties violations, war crimes, and anti-American acts.

The immunity crowd has one more card to play. Crimes committed on behalf of national security, they say, are different. On closer inspection, that claim also dissolves into an elitist pitch for the powerful.

The fact is that there are U.S. soldiers sitting in jail right now for what happened at Abu Ghraib.

The question is not whether to prosecute those crimes; that process has already begun. The question is whether the Bush administration correctly prosecuted the people actually responsible for the conduct — or whether the entire episode was blamed on those low on the chain of command.

This is very salient, especially given the intrinsic desire for people inside the Beltway to try and put the past behind us regardless of the consequences. There is always a desire to take any action on a situation and presume that it is sufficient to count as handling the problem.  We’re already seeing a drumbeat for Obama to put the past behind him and not investigate Bush era officialdom for their role in torture, warrantless wiretapping, and the illegal politicization of the Justice Department. Melber makes a strong case that because prosecution on some of these matters has already begun, the question should rightly be on whether they need stop with the new administration.

Continuing prosecutions of higher level Bush administration officials involves recognizing that the buck will almost never stop at a lowly grunt doing a job they weren’t trained to do. This isn’t about retribution or prosecuting the political. It’s about ensuring that there is meaningful disincentive for any other executive branch officials to ever again maintain such a casual attitude towards the law and the rule of law that they will not bow before the pressure of a White House with no moral inclination to keep the US government’s actions in line with our principles and beliefs.

The New York Times (finally) editorializes on President Bush’s knowledge and approval of US torture policies.

The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life.

We have questions to ask, in particular, about the involvement of Ms. Rice, who has managed to escape blame for the catastrophic decisions made while she was Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, and Mr. Powell, a career Army officer who should know that torture has little value as an interrogation method and puts captured Americans at much greater risk. Did they raise objections or warn of the disastrous effect on America’s standing in the world? Did anyone?

Mr. Bush has sidestepped or quashed every attempt to uncover the breadth and depth of his sordid actions. Congress is likely to endorse a cover-up of the extent of the illegal wiretapping he authorized after 9/11, and we are still waiting, with diminishing hopes, for a long-promised report on what the Bush team really knew before the Iraq invasion about those absent weapons of mass destruction — as opposed to what it proclaimed.

At this point it seems that getting answers will have to wait, at least, for a new Congress and a new president. Ideally, there would be both truth and accountability. At the very minimum the public needs the full truth.

Some will call this a backward-looking distraction, but only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again. [Emphasis added]

I challenge the NY Times editorial board to not forget this editorial nor their request for truth and accountability stemming from the Bush administration’s violations of American and international law. They are right that there will be many – Republicans, DC pundits, and calcified Democrats – that don’t want to spend time finding out what went wrong inside the Bush White House and who must be held accountable for it. In fact, I expect this position to be pushed for with deafening volume. It will be up to major media outlets like the Times to stand in the way of this desire to level down and gloss over the violations of the rule of law. Without major media outlets advocating for truth and accountability, none will take place. Again, I hope that the editors of the New York Times do not forget the words they wrote today come January, 2009.

President Bush knew of and approved of high level meetings in which White House officials like Rice, Powell, Cheney, Tenet, and Rumsfeld signed off on American torture policies. This strikes against the heart of who we are as a nation.

The ACLU and John Amato of Crooks & Liars are calling for a special counsel to investigate the Bush administration’s actions regarding torture and war crimes.

Join the ACLU and our friends at Crooks & Liars: Call on your members of Congress to demand an independent prosecutor to investigate possible violations by the Bush administration of laws including the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture Act and federal assault laws.

Please sign on.

Digby et alia at Hullaballoo have been doing a ton of leg work on this story since it broke, shock of shocks, on late Friday.

Separate from the discussions of what this says about Bush and his cabal or how and when these officials should be tried for their crimes against our country (not to mention the almost entirely unknown list of victims of policies set and approved by Bush and his top officials), there has to be a public, thorough re-commitment to the rule of law. NJ House candidate Dennis Shulman gets the ball rolling with a good statement at Open Left. But this is just a small start. We need to proclaim loud and clear that we do not believe in torture, that what was done both from a legalistic standpoint and under the guidance of such opinions was illegal, and that those who made these decisions will be held accountable.

Contrary to what Bush has said in the past, America has tortured on his watch. It is wrong and it cannot be allowed to go without massive public scrutiny and investigation leading to the prosecution of those who orchestrated this strike against the US Constitution and America’s sensibilities of human dignity.

Update:

Turkana at The Left Coaster has more.

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes a piece by Siobhan Gorman that reports that Bush is pushing Congressional Dems to come to the negotiating table on FISA and that he’s willing to make some concessions from his previous hard-line of retroactive immunity and expanded executive powers.

Over the two-week spring recess, administration officials contacted Democratic leaders to suggest they were open to compromise on updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “We definitely want to get it done,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. “We’ve had some initial conversations with Congress about the need to get FISA reform done quickly.” He added that Mr. Bush still prefers the Senate measure, which the White House negotiated with Senate Democrats.

In addition to rejecting immunity for companies, House Democrats want tougher judicial oversight of any eavesdropping effort. People familiar with the matter said the White House has floated ideas to find common ground but hasn’t offered a formal compromise proposal. Officials in both parties said judicial oversight might be an easier area for the administration to make concessions.

The White House’s more conciliatory posture reflects a recognition that the Bush administration’s leverage on national-security matters has slipped since this past summer, a top Republican congressional aide said. “There’s a recognition that if they’re actually going to get a product they can support, there’s going to have to be some new level of engagement,” the aide said.

It would be a profound mistake with repercussions lasting long, long past the expiration of President Bush’s term in office if congressional Democrats took this olive branch and negotiated FISA legislation that was acceptable to the Bush administration. The Bush administration want to negotiate now because they know that unless they get Democrats to deal with them now, they won’t get anything from Congress. This is a recognition that Democrats have been able to stall their push for retroactive immunity since last October and there is no resolution satisfactory to the Bush administration in sight.

For once, Democrats have power. Negotiating a “compromise” with Bush now would undercut the little power we have accrued in our efforts to defend the rule of law. There can be no compromise when it comes to expanding executive powers under this President, nor can their be a compromise when it comes to actions that strike against the rule of law.

Democrats must sit on their hands now and not extend them to President Bush. They should wait out the end of his term, then flex muscle in January 2009 under a Democratic president. If McCain is elected, that’s when we should be forced to consider negotiations. But to do it now just because Bush is asking nicely would be pure folly.