In two columns last week and this week, Village Voice columnist and legendary civil liberties activist Nat Hentoff argues vigorously for bringing American officials responsible for human rights abuses during The Bush Years to be brought up on War Crimes charges. Last week he said:

With regard to serial war crimes, “accountability” would mean putting on trial George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and his longtime associate, David Addington, and a coven of lawyers from the Justice and Defense departments.

He continued:

If you remember, the Constitution begins: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It’s our government. And neither Dick Cheney nor George W. Bush was among our Founders.

While Obama emphasizes that we must look forward and not backward, there is a way to clean out the cesspools of the last eight years.

Next week: the first steps on how to structure realistic, open forums of accountability—even if President Barack Obama chooses not to join us.

In this week’s installment, he continues the argument:

Among President Obama’s advisers (and, seemingly, in the man himself), there is a division as to what, if anything, should be done to the chief rapists of the Constitution since 9/11. On one hand, with so much for the new president to do, he’ll need public support, so why distract the citizenry with old news? Also, for many of us, there’s much more concern about keeping our jobs (or scrambling to find new ones) than finding out who ordered waterboarding or gave the CIA blanket permission to hide away suspects in secret “black-site” prisons.

The answer to this quandary—and I think Barack Obama is capable of understanding this—is provided by Scott Horton, former president of the International League for Human Rights, and a Tom Paine of our time, in a story in Harper’s December issue, called “Justice After Bush”: “If the people wish to retain sovereignty, they must also reclaim responsibility for the actions taken in their name. As of yet, they have not. . . . Pursuing the Bush administration for crimes long known to the public may amount to a kind of hypocrisy, but it is a necessary hypocrisy. The alternative, simply doing nothing, not only ratifies torture (among other crimes), it ratifies the failure of the people to control the actions of their government” (emphasis added).

We need to keep vigilant what the new administration does and take action if our government won’t.