PARIS—Come May Day I will take in an expected huge march and demonstration celebrating International Labor Day (a holiday that had its origins in Chicago) then later talk to a meeting of Democrats Abroad-France analyzing Obama’s first hundred days.

But there’s a gray cloud hanging over what should otherwise be a highly celebratory hundred-days media fest at home. It’s the debate over whether we as a nation should investigate and bring to justice those in the previous administration who were responsible for torture and other possible war crimes.

Opinion ranges all the way from “Forget it—no crimes were committed and besides it wasn’t torture anyway” tosomething like “Bust all the bastards from Bush/Cheney on down the line!”

With the horrendously detailed exposure of an International Red Cross report—recently made public by Mark Danner in a two-part series in the New York Review of Books—there can be little doubt left in anyone’s mind that prisoners were tortured. The right-wing position seems to be that torture or not, it was justified under the circumstances and may have helped us pursue Al Qaeda and such enemies.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont wants a kind of “truth and reconciliation commission,” with no punishments to be meted out except exposure; others want a major congressional investigation, while still others want the Justice Department to undertake a criminal investigation.

President Obama, having released a series of Bush Administration documents and memos illustrating how torture was in effect justified and legalized, does not want to carry the matter any further, saying it would be a diversion of resources at a time when we must cope with the economy, his extensive legislative programs and the linked wars of Iraq, Afghanistan and prospectively Pakistan.

His line has long been that we must look forward, not backward in recrimination—which is an especially strange perspective for a lawyer to take. What is justice in the first place if not an effort to seek the truth by looking backward at a crime or suspected crime and prosecute its perpetrators?

Are we not looking backward, say, at ex-governor Rod Blagojevich’s apparent criminal actions of weeks, months and years ago, and awaiting his trial (with relish)? Are we supposed to look “forward” now that he’s been impeached and ousted, perhaps simply write off his antics as politics-as-usual and let him romp off to do his reality show?

No—we’re giving him his day in court with the (yuk yuk) presumption of innocence.

I would modestly propose that those who sought to justify and declare legal certain forms of torture, plus those who went on to order them done, should be subjected to scrupulous legal scrutiny to determine whether they committed crimes. If so, they should be dealt with in a manner prescribed by law, regardless of the office they held in the previous administration or in any agency of government, such as the CIA.

Obama’s opposition to any further investigations is political. First, they would set off poisonous reactions from congressional Republicans, with whom he still hopes to gain some level of legislative cooperation. Second, they would likely demoralize the CIA and related agencies, possibly undercutting the legitimate work they must do in this time of international crisis.

These are valid concerns, understandable in political terms, but morally and legally unjustified. He also says that pursing this course would divert energy from the many problems confronting us. But Paul Krugman and others handily demolish that argument, pointing out that, for example, Timothy Geithner would not be involved in any such investigation; he would still be giving full time to the economic issues. And so forth.

The pursuit of justice can never be considered a diversion, for political or any other reasons—it is exactly what we are supposed to do in this democracy. It is, if you will, a patriotic duty.

It’s clear as well that we must take yet another step and investigate the very conception and rationalization of the Iraq war itself, which many of us believe was equally illegitimate and possibly unlawful—the original crime leading to the subsequent crime.

Obama stands at the brink of yet another useless war that can sully this nation long past his next hundred days. Perhaps a search for the truth of the recent past might give him pause before we all suffer further consequences.

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Don Rose is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer