Hightower Lowdown

Washington insiders are circling the wagons to keep us from looking at illegalities and executive abuses committed by the Bush-Cheney regime. "A new president doesn't want to look vengeful," is how a former White House lawyer put it. "The last thing a new administration wants to do is spend its time and energy rehashing the perceived sins of the old one."

But this is not about hash--it's about the Constitution, and it's not about vengeance, but about whether presidents and vice-presidents can use executive privilege and claims of war powers to subvert the rule of law.

While the Bushites were publicly insisting that they didn't condone torture, they were aggressively practicing it in Guantanamo and elsewhere. Is there no reckoning for that? Or for spying illegally on millions of Americans? Or for unilaterally rewriting laws by tacking "signing statements" onto them? Or for politicizing the powerful role of federal prosecutors? Or for abusing the state-secrets privilege in order to impose executive supremacy over the courts and Congress?

If we just shove all these precedents in some White House closet, future presidents might haul them out whenever they want. Bush, Cheney, and their apologists now assert that even if there were illegal acts, it's OK because they made America safer. Well, did they really? If there's no digging into what happened and what effect it had, we won't know.

Obama's White House shouldn't be the one to do this job. Congress should set up a no-nonsense investigative commission with full subpoena power to get the real story.