Maybe I’m the only one thinking this, but I wonder if the idea of aggressively pursuing investigations and possible criminal prosecutions of Bush administration officials for alleged abuses of U.S. and international law with respect to the treatment of purported terrorist suspects might pick up steam in the context over the ongoing public dustups over health-care reform.
Hear me out on this. The holdup from the Obama administration this spring and early summer on the detainee-abuse issue, it seemed to me, had its basis in the president’s interests in pushing a general sense of bipartisanship in the public-policy sphere, I think with an eye toward gaining support from Republicans on Capitol Hill for climate-change legislation and more importantly health-care reform.
Any sense that there can be bipartisan consensus is clearly wishful thinking at best considering the efforts of Republican partisans to play political hardball, to put what has been going on mildly, in regard to the dispensation of both issues.
There’s a growing sense among Democrats that it has been the push for bipartisanship on climate and health-care issues that has opened the door for the shenanigans of Republicans – including faked letters to Fifth District Congressman Tom Perriello and other congressional Democrats on climate-change legislation and the nonsense about death panels and vaccine teams and the rest on health care.
My sense is that Democrats are going to come back from the August congressional recess with a different attitude toward dealing with the GOP on those issues. How that plays into the matter of the detainee abuses might then be obvious. It should be imperative for the future of our nation anyway to at the least allow an investigation into the allegations regarding the breach of detainee rights to begin considering the implications of the allegations on the very nature of our free society. The idea that preventing that investigation from getting under way could preserve a bipartisan peace has proven to be laughable given the out-and-out partisan warfare that is being waged by Republicans.
There is thus no reason for Democrats to cite political interests as a reason to hold back on the initiation of a full-scale investigation into the alleged detainee abuses.
My political radar tells me that going for it in this instance would make good political sense. If nothing else, it would put Republicans back on the defensive, generally speaking.
– Column by Chris Graham
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