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.

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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.