Uncovering the Final Secrets of the Bush Administration

By Charles Homans, Washington Monthly. Posted December 1, 2008.

Could Patrick Leahy do what Frank Church did? Perhaps. Will he? Not if he has any sense. Once Bush leaves office, the Democratic-controlled Congress will be under as much pressure as Obama to grapple with a massive economic crisis and bring resolution to two wars, to say nothing of tackling looming colossi such as America's energy and environmental policies, health care system, and entitlement programs. These are not small problems, and the best solutions to them will involve unpopular sacrifices. Given Congress's permanently low approval rating, its members don't have the political capital to spare on a major backward-looking investigation, even if they did have the time to do it.

Because the unfortunate fact is that such investigations, while necessary, tend to be politically poisonous for the lawmakers who run them. Frank Church had presidential aspirations in 1975, but the investigation ate up so much of his time that it kept him from campaigning (he later groused that it might have cost him a shot at being Jimmy Carter's vice president, too). The public and Congress, who had been furious about agency abuses of power in 1975, had mostly lost interest by the time the committee delivered its report a year later. Only one of its recommendations -- the surveillance court -- actually made it into law, and Church lost his Senate seat in the 1980 election following spurious accusations that his investigation had led to the assassination of a CIA station chief in Greece. The chairman of the concurrent investigative committee in the House, New York Democrat Otis Pike, saw his reputation similarly battered, and left office in 1979. It's doubtful that Church's and Pike's successors would fare much better in 2009. Scandal-fatigued voters probably consider the Bush era something best forgotten at this point, and would prefer that Congress simply turn the page on it, rather than pick through its adventures in agonizing detail.

Also, 2009 will not be 1975. The Democratic-led Church Committee's findings were widely accepted, but then committee counsel Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. points out that this had a lot to do with the target of the investigation: thirty years of intelligence activities, under five presidents and both major parties. "So when we were critical of what had been done," he says, "it didn't raise partisan concerns." Congress has also changed dramatically since the committee did its work. The partisan allegiances that came to the fore on Capitol Hill in the mid-1990s have hardened, and the public and Congress itself are both conditioned to assume -- not inaccurately -- that lawmakers' motives are now dictated more by party membership than by constitutional duty. The findings of an investigation exclusively targeting a Republican administration, conducted under the auspices of a Democratic Congress, would be too easy to dismiss. Moreover, Schwarz notes, the legislative branch is deeply implicated in what the executive branch did during the Bush years, and investigating itself would be something of a conflict of interest.

This doesn't mean that Congress should abandon the idea entirely. Instead, what Congress needs to do is figure out how to achieve the same goals while avoiding the political consequences. The best way to do this is to appoint someone else to do it, a panel that does for the wartime excesses of the Bush administration what the 9/11 Commission did for the September 11 attacks. In other words, a 9/12 Commission.

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The 9/11 Commission had its problems. It was given an impossible deadline, forced to spend far too much time wrangling for access, and awarded less start-up money than the government spends each year to police the use of food stamps. Co-chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton have said that they believed the commission was "set up to fail." Some critics have accused it of prizing consensus over fact-finding. But think for a second about what it accomplished: It gathered what would otherwise have been a diffuse and unintelligible heap of raw documents and interview transcripts into a digestible narrative with policy recommendations. Even Appeals Court Judge Richard A. Posner, in a dissenting New York Times review of the report, dubbed it "an improbable literary triumph," and publisher W. W. Norton has sold nearly 1.5 million copies of the authorized edition to date. The commission's hearings were widely viewed and considered credible by most viewers in subsequent polls. Its findings had enough bipartisan clout that the report's biggest recommendation -- the reorganization of the intelligence agencies under a single director -- was passed into law by the Republican Congress in 2004 even over the objections of some party leaders (the Democratic Congress later passed most of the rest). And the commission's hearings produced iconic moments: Condoleezza Rice sheepishly acknowledging the title of the August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing ("Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S."), and former chief terrorism adviser Richard Clarke declaring to the 9/11 victims' families that "your government failed you."

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Charles Homans is an editor of the Washington Monthly.

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