When Do We Start?

New Yorker blogger George Packer thinks that the recent Senate report and a report by the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction on the sanctioning of torture from the highest levels of the Bush Administration, up to and including the president and vice president themselves, is just a part of a larger puzzle that needs full exposure to public scrutiny.

Eventually the country will need, even if it won’t entirely want, the whole
story to be told. The best way to tell it would be to reproduce the 9/11
Commission—to convene a single bipartisan panel, with the authority to look into
the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of the war on terror, and
give the panel full investigative power, even if its conclusions put some of the
principals in legal jeopardy.

The next Administration and the next Congress will have to decide whether
it’s worth the agony to look back. The agony will be worse, sooner or later, if
we don’t.

I agree with Packer, but I think the timing has to be once American troops are largely out of harm's way. I don't see the benefit of holding hearings, public or otherwise, analyzing the prosecution of ongoing military operations. If such a commission were to release findings that war crimes were committed, or at least that the Bush administration bent laws to impose harsh interrogation techniques on detainees, that would just make Obama's job that much harder, as he tries to redeploy troops to Afghanistan and fulfill or beat the SOFA timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

Wait until we're out of there before we start poking into what happened and who did what.