President Obama did the right thing this week when he ordered the release of Justice Department memos that the Bush administration used to justify CIA torture of Al Qaeda prisoners in its custody.
The president and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. also were correct when they not only renounced any future recourse to torture, but said there will be no prosecutions of the officers who did so under orders and believed their actions were legal.
The president is whistling past the graveyard, though, when he insists that this is "a time for reflection, not retribution." Without facts, reflection is little more than daydreaming. That's why Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) is right to call for a truth commission that can render an accurate historical accounting of the executive branch's shameful conduct over the last seven years.
A truth commission is particularly important because of the public rhetoric of former Bush administration officials -- the very ones who pushed so hard behind closed doors for permission to torture and who have argued so strenuously that the legal memos ought to remain secret.
These officials, foremost among them former Vice President Dick Cheney, have not simply argued that releasing the memos and renouncing the kind of interrogation they sanctioned is bad national security policy or legally mistaken. Instead, they've gone well beyond that and actually insisted that torture "worked."
In at least two interviews since leaving office, Cheney has made precisely that case. "If it hadn't been for what we did -- with respect to the ... enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees -- then we would have been attacked again," he told interviewers in February. Whenever he's been pressed for details on which of the tortured prisoners provided such critical details or which planned attacks may have been foiled, he has declined to give useful answers.
In an article published on the Wall Street Journal's Op-Ed page Friday, former CIA director Michael V. Hayden and former Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey made an even more explicit case that torture "worked" against Al Qaeda terrorists Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, leading to the capture of "other senior terrorists and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S."
(Like Cheney, they didn't identify the disrupted plots, although a footnote on one of the newly released memos suggests that Mohammed was tortured into revealing a plot to crash an airliner into a building in L.A.)
