When considering what to do about abuses of the past seven years, it is worthwhile taking stock of how far we've come. When President-elect Obama takes office, the worst abuses of the Bush administration will be at an end: no more torture, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or rendition to other countries for mistreatment. Obama has promised to abide by the laws passed by Congress and I fully expect that when he disagrees with an interpretation of those laws, he will inform the Congress and the American people of his views. There will be no more warrantless wiretapping in violation of congressional statutes.

At the same time, as a democracy it is essential that we know our history, hold officials accountable -- at least through public condemnation-- and provide some redress for individual wrongs.

There are many ways to do so and as pointed out by others, it is not necessary to pursue just one course to these ends. I do disagree with Charles, however, that a "9/12" commission charged with looking at all issues makes sense.

In this post, I'll explain why I think surveillance issues should be dealt with separately from the torture and detention issues. And I second Suzanne's call for a comprehensive review of domestic surveillance and intelligence policies going forward.

In the case of torture, we have thankfully agreed (again) as a country that it is off the table; the Congress has reiterated the ban against both torture and cruel and inhumane treatment. But for the intransigence of President Bush, that ban would have been implemented by the requirement that everyone, including the CIA, follow the Army's Field Manual on interrogations consistent with the Geneva Conventions.

In the case of domestic surveillance, we have hardly begun to examine what are the constitutional means necessary for the government to collect information on Americans. While the Congress acquiesced to the Administration's demand for the Patriot Act and amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it did so with very little information or understanding of how such new authorities would work, or the risks or necessity of granting the government much broader powers to collect much more information on many more people. In the words of one observer:

[D]espite our reverence for the constitutional principles of limited Government and freedom of the individual, Government is in danger of tilting the scales against those concepts by means of its information gathering tactics and its technical capacity to store and distribute information. When this quite natural tendency of Government to acquire and keep and share information about citizens is enhanced by computer technology and when it is subjected to the unrestrained motives of countless political administrators, the resulting threat to individual privacy makes it necessary for Congress to reaffirm the principle of limited, responsive Government on behalf of freedom.

Each time we give up a bit of information about ourselves to the Government, we give up some of our freedom: the more the Government or any institution knows about us, the more power it has over us. When the Government knows all of our secrets, we stand naked before official power. Stripped of our privacy, we lose our rights and privileges. The Bill of Rights then becomes just so many words.

This warning was uttered by Senator Sam Ervin in 1974, a conservative Southern senator, who was one of the leaders of the Senate Watergate hearings.

As Suzanne notes, President-elect Obama has promised an executive-branch review of domestic surveillance. But Congress also needs to examine the effects of the broad patchwork of existing laws and regulations, which over the past seven years have been repeatedly weakened. We need an inquiry that focuses on whether such authorities are building a government surveillance capacity that will not be compatible with the Bill of Rights.

Equally important, we need such an inquiry in order to insure that the limited resources of the government are most effectively focused on those who in fact pose real and substantial threats to the country, not for example, on peace activists or religious minorities.

The necessary review of domestic surveillance must be much more focused on current and future policies than the necessary inquiries about accountability for torture and detention. (Both inquiries of course must look both to past activities and future recommendations, but the focus will be quite different.)

Some important efforts are already underway. Congress required an Inspector General report by next summer on the NSA warrantless wiretapping programs. The Congress has asked for the authorizing legal memos for those programs and the next administration should declassify them and make them public. Congress should immediately obtain answers to some basic questions about how many Americans have been the subject of government scrutiny; what is the volume of information in government databases; how many officials have access to it; and what are the limits on keeping or disseminating information on individuals, who are not the subject of a criminal or terrorism investigation.

But Congress also has the responsibility for writing the rules on surveillance- and has a deadline for reconsidering the sunsetted amendments to the FISA as well as three parts of the Patriot Act. It cannot do so without fully informing itself and the American people of the big picture: what are the scope of domestic threats and how effectively are agency resources being used, what is the overall effect of the patchwork of legal authorities and are there real safeguards against the real threats to constitutional rights? As Mickey writes, that is the essential responsibility of the legislature and it should not be contracted out. The responsibility of the new Administration will be to cooperate with - rather than obstruct - that effort and I, for one am hopeful on both counts.