How much more Bush can we take?

President Clinton was impeached for lying about highly inappropriate personal behavior which had nothing to do with how he governed or protected our nation. Fast forward to today, when nearly three-quarters of Americans believe President Bush was “hiding something” or “mostly lying” about the evidence for weapons of mass destruction, and half of Americans believe he “intentionally misled” us into the war in Iraq (The New York Times/CBS News Poll 12/8/05).

That alone should be enough for the Congress to start asking some tough questions about possible deception by the Bush Administration.

Yet this high level of mistrust was before it was disclosed that President Bush secretly authorized the N.S.A. to conduct wiretaps of communications with Americans without court order. There is widespread belief, across the political spectrum, that this program may be illegal. At the very least, Bush has continued to lie to the American people about his conduct of the war on terror. How else to explain a remark he made in Buffalo, NY in 2004 that “a wiretap requires a court order”? That was made more than two years after he authorized the N.S.A. activity.

If that doesn’t send a chill down your back, how about the repeated assertions by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that terrorism detainees are being treated “humanely” – despite case after case of abuse, torture and even death, many too gruesome to mention. The Bush administration claims that this is just the work of a few errant soldiers, yet the ACLU has obtained over 70,000 pages of government documents covering what surely is a much more pervasive problem, for which President Bush is holding no senior officials accountable. In one specific instance, the CIA inspector general found in 2004 that some aspects of his agency’s treatment of detainees might constitute cruel and inhuman treatment as defined by an international treaty to which the U.S. is a signatory.

While Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was busy last December trying to convince Europeans that “the United States does not condone torture,” the Administration was doing all it could to keep the Congress from passing an amendment prohibiting torture. What does that tell you about the President’s commitment to human rights and the truth?

On these critical issues of national security and fundamental American values, it is time for Congress to aggressively and tirelessly work to uncover the facts about whether President Bush has lied and broken the law in prosecuting the war on terror.

Indeed, Congress should go a step further and appoint an independent counsel to conduct this inquiry. It tolerated a 10-year, $20 million Independent Counsel investigation of a Clinton cabinet secretary, Henry Cisneros, for lying about payments to his mistress. Surely it can find the wherewithal to investigate an Administration that is quite clearly taking enormous liberties with the truth, and perhaps more.