By Doyle McManus
Despite Obama's reluctance to confront possible misconduct in the Bush administration's war on terror, the outrage just won't go away.
Whenever he's asked about the scandals of America's war on terror -- the torture, the wrongful detentions, the legal corners cut -- President Obama has responded with some version of this statement: "We have to focus on getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."
But that approach can't work. The unanswered questions are too many, the lawsuits too numerous, the fundamental questions of accountability too nagging. We need a public reckoning -- and, much as they might like to avoid the distraction, Obama and his people must know it.
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Obama may prefer to soar above painful questions about what his predecessor's CIA did, but he is unlikely to have that luxury, even if Holder backs off. A series of looming disclosures are likely to keep the debate over accountability alive.
The inspector general's 2004 report is due to be released (with secrets blacked out) by Aug. 31 in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. The Justice Department's own ethics office is about to release a report judging the department lawyers who drew up the so-called torture memos that offered legal justification for detainee abuse. A federal prosecutor is investigating the CIA's decision in 2005 to destroy 92 videotapes of detainee interrogations, including the repeated waterboarding of Al Qaeda figure Abu Zubaydah. And Feinstein's Senate Intelligence Committee staff is grinding away at a comprehensive report on interrogations that may not be complete before the end of the year.