When the most partisan, most left-wing Democrat in the U.S. Senate says he wants to investigate his political adversaries “in a manner removed from partisan politics,” he’s being disingenuous. Even more disingenuous is calling the exercise a “truth commission.” But that’s Patrick Leahy for you.

The Judiciary Committee chairman has not had much to say about the Obama administration’s decision to release Binyam Mohammed, the al-Qaeda jihadist who was planning to carry out mass-murder attacks in American cities, who is now free and clear to live and plot in Londonistan. Leahy did, however, make time last week to conduct a hearing on his banana-republic scheme for a “non-partisan” — also non-elected, non-accountable — sideshow that would conduct an inquisition into the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies. His model, he has explained, is South Africa’s “truth and reconciliation commission.”

Let’s roll that around the brain, shall we? Leahy refers to the post-apartheid retrospective conducted by a committee of human-rights activists on behalf of a newly reborn country that had endured years of de facto civil war stemming from systematic racism. South Africans had suffered three decades of torture, maiming, and assassinations, both from the regime’s secret police and from the terrorist insurgency of the African National Congress.

By contrast, about six years ago, while operating in foreign countries, the CIA waterboarded three alien terrorists who had choreographed attacks that killed thousands of Americans and who had been trained to resist conventional interrogation techniques. These terrorists were sufficiently high-ranking to have information about ongoing plots to commit further atrocities — which is why, when informed about the enhanced interrogation practices, top lawmakers from both parties, including Nancy Pelosi, admonished the agency to make sure they were being tough enough in seeking new intelligence from the prisoners.

So much for Senator Leahy’s analogy. It’s difficult to see how the American and South African situations could be more dissimilar.

What we actually have here is a brass-knuckles partisan whose interest is neither reconciliation nor truth. Leahy wants a scorched-earth attack on his political adversaries, but he doesn’t want his fingerprints on the match. A commission would do the trick. Its unacknowledged mandate would be to smear Bush officials as war criminals and to lay the groundwork for their indictment by foreign tribunals. The Democrats’ base would be gratified, but Democratic politicians would be spared the political fallout that would result from bringing prosecutions that would outrage the nation — prosecutions the Obama Justice Department hasn’t the nerve to commence. Democrats would get the “reckoning” Attorney General Eric Holder talked about when he was an Obama campaign flack without getting their hands dirty.

Outsourcing political hit jobs to blue-ribbon panels is not how our republic works. This is especially true when the material facts already are well established, and when the real question is what, if anything, ought to be done about them. Leahy, Rep. John Conyers, and other anti-war leftists are attempting to hide behind this commission to launch criminal prosecutions of their political opponents and to seek changes in the laws governing our national-security practices. Under our Constitution, those are responsibilities of elected officials who answer to voters — not the work of commissions acting at arm’s length from the mechanisms of political accountability.

The executive branch has to answer for the cases it chooses to bring, and it is legally obliged to investigate under rules of law designed to protect privacy — such as grand-jury secrecy, regulations against leaking investigative information, and DOJ protocols against publicly naming suspects until the government is ready to put its money where its mouth is by filing charges. Nothing prevents the Justice Department from pursuing this case, and, in fact, it is actively investigating both waterboarding and the CIA’s destruction of interrogation tapes.

To bring torture or war-crimes charges, though, prosecutors would have to determine whether waterboarding violated the relevant statutes at the time it was employed. That is far from clear, despite Leahy’s blithe certitude on the subject. Whether waterboarding, by itself, meets the exacting severe-pain standard for establishing torture (which Congress made to distinguish the barbarity of torture from lesser forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment) is doubtful. And though Congress has had several opportunities to end all debate by simply specifying waterboarding as an offense under the war-crimes law, it has refused to do this. Declining to do so was a cynical dodge that provided Democrats with political cover in two directions: They can urge that the CIA be “tough enough” in order to avoid criticism in the wake of any future terrorist attack, but also condemn the same tough methods they called for when their far-left base bays for blood.

And even if we assume, arguendo, that CIA waterboarding constituted a crime, there is still the question of prosecutorial discretion.

Regardless of the Left’s endless talk about our “reputation in the world,” tens of millions of Americans — including rank-and-file Democrats — reluctantly endorse the concept of subjecting a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to waterboarding in order to obtain information about imminent terror strikes. That doesn’t mean they “favor” waterboarding; it means they grasp that unsavory means are sometimes necessary to prevent heinous ends, just as we accept war in order to defeat tyranny and execute murderers to prevent additional murders. This common sense is lost on much of the political and academic classes, though not all. Both Bill Clinton and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, to cite two examples, have spoken in favor of permitting torture — not mere waterboarding, but indisputable torture — in certain dire circumstances.

The Justice Department and the president would have to weigh how the public they are charged with serving would react to war-crimes or torture prosecutions with those facts in mind. Similarly, if Congress wanted to conduct more robust oversight as a check on the executive branch, or if it wanted to tighten up federal laws to encourage future prosecution of aggressive interrogators, it would have to do so in the light of day, through the regular political processes. Leahy & Co. would have to explain to voters why they would prefer to risk seeing thousands of Americans killed than harm a hair on the head of a single morally culpable terrorist.

That’s mature governing. We’re not South Africa, or Chile, or Rwanda — at least, not yet. We don’t have national soap operas in the form of truth commissions. We have trials when the Justice Department decides the public interest is served by filing an indictment, and we have legislative activity when Congress decides the public interest is served by altering the law. And based on those decisions, voters figure out whether it would be better to have a new administration or new lawmakers. We don’t elect these people so they can abdicate their public trust to a collection of Beltway fixers nobody voted for.

At his hearing, Leahy nattered about wanting “to find the facts.” What rot. As he is well aware, the facts are known. They’ve been exposed, investigated, studied, and demagogued again and again. The CIA waterboarded top al-Qaeda captives. Its agents acted on orders from their chain of command, given after policymakers got advice from the Justice Department; the nature of that advice has long been known to Congress and has now been made public. The actions occurred years ago, under emergency conditions. Nearly 3,000 Americans had been slaughtered, the enemy was promising more 9/11-style attacks, and the captives in question knew al-Qaeda’s plans. And it bears repeating that top Democrats were pushing our interrogators to take off the kid gloves. The tactics used appear to have yielded intelligence that led to the apprehension of jihadists and the prevention of attacks.

Need more truth? Investigations of the sort Democrats call for, let alone indictments, would induce both administration officials and professional intelligence officers to retain counsel at enormous personal expense; some of them already are incurring those costs. Current and future government agents would understand that protecting the United States may prove financially and professionally ruinous. The result would be the risk-averse bureaucratic climate lamented by the 9/11 Commission in the report that Democrats tripped over themselves to praise when it was issued. Foreign tribunals would be encouraged to press war-crimes charges against American officials for actions taken in defense of this country — actions that, in the case of the Bush administration, succeeded for seven years in preventing a repeat of 9/11.

Perhaps worst of all, it would tear the country asunder. Poll-obsessed Democrats continue to misunderstand this point. It is doubtless true that the war in Iraq has been difficult and unpopular. The Left, however, confounds public sentiment on Iraq with the public’s attitude about the war in general. Americans still despise al-Qaeda and want its operatives aggressively hounded. They care deeply about their security. An unaccountable morality play that inevitably compromises that security would enrage millions of citizens.

If Democrats in Congress and in the new administration think the costs and risks are worth bearing, let them step up to the plate and make the case through the ordinary processes of government. “We won,” they proclaim, and they insist that they represent the change Americans want. If that’s the “truth,” why hide behind a commission? And if it’s not a truth they care to explore, they should stand down.

– Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).