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Editor’s Note: The U.S. government seems paralyzed at the prospect of holding ex-President George W. Bush and other senior officials accountable for war crimes, even as Spanish investigative judge Baltasar Garzon initiates an inquiry under international law regarding torture sanctioned by Bush’s lawyers.

In this guest essay, investigative journalist and former candidate for Vermont attorney general, Charlotte Dennett, describes a meeting with Sen. Patrick Leahy in which he acknowledges the failure of his plan for a “truth commission”:

Those of you following the George W. Bush prosecution trail will be interested to know that Patrick Leahy’s “truth commission” is a no-go. I was in a meeting with Leahy and four other Vermonters on Monday when he broke the news to us.

We had asked for the meeting to learn why he supported a truth commission over the appointment of a special prosecutor.

Halfway through the allotted 30 minute meeting (with him taking up much of the time explaining why he was not generally opposed to prosecution, since he had been a DA for eight years and had the highest conviction rate in Vermont), he told us that his truth commission had failed to get the broad support it needed in Congress, and since he couldn’t get one Republican to come behind the plan, “it’s not going to happen.”
           
It was a sobering exchange. The meeting had begun with our expressing serious concerns about ongoing dangers to our democracy, with the trend going to executive power while damaging our Constitution.

“We are a nation of laws,” said Dan DeWalt, who had helped organize 36 Vermont towns to vote for impeachment of Bush on town meeting day. “If we have a system of justice, why not let it take its course? It seems to many Americans that the rich and powerful don’t have the same system of justice, and they’re getting away with torture, murder, fraud, and Ponzi schemes.” 

By the end of the meeting, we were beginning to wonder whether anything at all was going to done  – by Congress, by Attorney General Eric Holder, by President Barack Obama – to hold the Bush team accountable for its crimes.

Leahy’s own aversion to appointing a special prosecutor appeared to be more practical than philosophical.
 
”We don’t want another Abu Ghraib,” he said. “You know, ‘Boy, did we get those privates and corporals.’ So many up on high will never get touched. It’s like the war on drugs – ‘let’s get those black kids on cocaine.’”

So it’s not that Leahy had a problem with prosecutions per se. “I just worry that the prosecutions will be done only on middle-level people,” he said.  

Well then, what would happen to the higher-ups? Leahy had said, on previous occasions, that the purpose of his truth commission was to grant immunity to those willing to testify – presumably middle-level people – and we could infer from that that they, in turn, would spill the beans on their superiors.

If any of the witnesses lied under oath or were less than thorough in their answers, Leahy had told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow a month ago, they could be prosecuted for perjury. But that still left the fate of high government officials uncertain.

Leahy had hinted to Maddow that if officials refused to honor subpoenas, they, too could be prosecuted. But in the real world, as Monday’s news suggests, the people most responsible for the crimes will continue to get off free.

We should at least be content, Leahy said, with his success in forcing former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s resignation in 2007.

After Leahy left the meeting, his aide, Chuck Ross, assured our group that there was no one more devoted to protecting the Constitution than Leahy.

“He has been persistent in the face of obfuscation,” Ross said. “He got rid of Gonzales. I would challenge you to find someone who has done more to defend the Constitution.”

Then Ross let out a memorable one-liner: “He’s all you’ve got.”

What? Leahy’s all we’ve got to protect the Constitution? And we have to accept Gonzales’s resignation as the only punishment for years of gutting the rule of law? It took about five minutes for all this to sink in.

Then fellow Vermonter John Nirenberg spoke, I think, for all of us: “If he’s the only guy, this is not a healthy situation.”

It is, perhaps, no coincidence, that the same time Leahy downplayed the truth commission, congressional aides were quoted by reporter Jason Leopold of Consortiumnews.com that “the focus has shifted to the economy and that pressure for a special prosecutor to bring criminal charges over the Bush administration’s past actions could become a distraction to that focus.”

Leahy’s aide Ross had said the same thing. Everyone was focusing on the economy.

So now, it seems, the wrecked economy – complements of the Bush administration -- is becoming the excuse for congressional inaction after eight years of unremitting malfeasance by the Bush administration.

This is serious, folks. Appointing a special prosecutor had been the top issue on President Obama’s Web site when he took office. Either he’s not listening any more, or his supporters are “looking forward, not backward,” just as he prefers – and just as his right flank (the CIA, the neocons, and everyone else who has something to hide) desperately want.

It remains to be seen if Obama’s huge base can get through to him on this issue, now that he occupies the White House. If they cannot, then the failure to hold even a truth commission, let alone prosecutions, signals a return to the same old way of doing things. Deterrence be damned.

Charlotte Dennett is a lawyer and investigative journalist. She recently ran for Attorney General in Vermont on a pledge to prosecute George W. Bush under state criminal statutes for murder (i.e .for sending troops to their deaths in Iraq under false pretenses). She also promised, if elected, to appoint legendary Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi as her special prosecutor. She lost the election but has continued to keep abreast of developments within the accountability movement. Dennett is the author of the forthcoming book: The People v Bush: One Lawyer’s Campaign To Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encountered Along the Way, to be published by Chelsea Green in September 2009.

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