By John E. Mulligan
Journal Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration did damage to the nation that should be examined so that it can be undone and avoided in the future, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. But if a ``truth commission'' is created to make such inquiries, its operations should be limited, Whitehouse believes, and some investigations might better be conducted by other organizations.

The rule of law was harmed by what the Bush administration did to justify improper anti-terrorist policies and other actions, Whitehouse has argued for many months. ``If you don't go back and understand and explain what happened, he said in an interview last week, ``that's the difference between a lesson for our democracy and a blueprint for somebody to come back and do it all over again.''

The Rhode Island Democrat applauded recently when Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., proposed the creation of an independent commission -- with subpoena power -- to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the Bush administration. Leahy has suggested a broad range of inquiry, including the use of intelligence reports to argue for an invasion of Iraq, the legal justifications for harsh interrogation techniques and warrantless wiretapping, and the firing of federal prosecutors.

Whitehouse said at the time that a truth commission is ``one way'' to examine the record. In an interview, he argued for caution on a number of fronts. ``One is the simple breadth and depth issue,'' he said. ``If you're going to have one truth commission that looks at a dozen different things, then it probably isn't going to get into a lot of great depth in any of them, so that creates a difficulty.''

Beyond the possibility of limiting a truth commission's investigations, Whitehouse also said that the existing systems of criminal justice and of congressional supervision should be permitted to do their work in this arena. For example, he noted that a federal prosecutor has worked with a federal grand jury for months to investigate possible lawbreaking in the firings of several U.S. attorneys during the Bush administration. While the criminal investigation is under way, Whitehouse said, ``it's not helpful for another commission to step in and start looking through the same material and talking to the same people.''

Whitehouse, who pursued these issues as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said there should be a detailed investigation of the methods that the Bush administration used to secure legal justification for such actions as waterboarding terrorist suspects -- even if the harsh questioning technique is outlawed as a form of torture.

``It's important to look back because you need to defend the integrity of governtmental processes that have been set up and improved over decades and when somebody takes a shortcut, when somebody finds a way to tunnel through, you've got to go back and figure out what they did, expose it, and that is a healthy and salutary way of preventing it from happening again,'' he said.