Prosecution of The Bush Administration Should Be About Justice, Not Revenge

Opinion by Gilbert Mercier, NEWS  JUNKIE  POST

Yesterday, some key Democrats from both the Senate & the House of Representatives were doing the round of  Sunday’s political shows. Some Democrats went as far as accusing former Vice President Dick Cheney of ” breaching the law” by ordering the CIA to withhold information from Congress about a secret counter-terrorism program.

Further, some top lawmakers want to hold hearings on the matter. Among them is Senator Kent Conrad, in an interview with CNN yesterday the Senator said:

“This is a question of whether the former Vice President denied certain sensitive information to the intelligence leaders in Congress. That is not acceptable, it is a serious breach. CIA notification about its secret program is required by law.”

In the House, Representative Anna Eshoo, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she would seek an outside counsel to investigate the issue. In an interview with the Washington Post Rep. Eshoo said:

“We have to know who gave the order for this, who gave the order to conceal this and where did they draw the money for this.”

Representative Eshoo is prepared to use the Committee subpoena power to interview officials who oversaw intelligence issues in the Bush administration.

The strongest statement came from Senator Leahy, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Leahy told CBS:

“I think it is impossible to just leave it lay when you have something like this. It is either true or it is not true. I would like to know if it’s true or not. I mean, nobody in this country is above the law. You can’t have somebody say, well, if you are a Vice President you don’t have to obey the law.”

The New-York Times originally broke the story about Dick Cheney’s role in keeping the CIA program under wrap. Apparently, CIA’s Leon Panetta decided to shut down the program as soon as he found out about it on June 23.

Prosecuting the Bush administration for this will be controversial in some quarters. The Obama administration doesn’t want something like this to distract from its demanding policy agenda, however it has be done, not only to hold Dick Cheney and other top echelon officials of the Bush administration accountable, but mainly to make sure it doesn’t happen again with future administrations.