Now that the Democrats control Congress, chair its committees and can issue subpoenas when necessary, they are making progress in ferreting out secrets of the past six years. But some of the biggest ones still need exposure. For example:

? If not George Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark or those nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, why exactly did we start this war in Iraq, now in its fifth year and degenerated into mainly a religious civil war?

? What else went on in the Justice Department under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales besides authorizing torture of war prisoners, wiretapping without warrants and, most recently, politicizing the U.S. attorneys?

? And what exactly was the White House role in the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys? The answer may lie in the mysteriously “lost” e-mails from Karl Rove and others to the Justice Department.

? Why were so many applicants for federal jobs asked for their opinions about abortion and Roe v. Wade?

? How exactly did the link between the Rumsfeld Pentagon and Vice President Cheney’s office work to feed raw intelligence into administration decision making?

? How about a full accounting of Halliburton’s contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, their negotiation, their costs, their performance and their profits?

? What has been the cost and effectiveness of the administration’s widespread outsourcing of war fighting to Blackwater USA and other private, for-profit companies.

? When will the Senate Intelligence Committee finish its long-delayed studies of errors in predicting what would happen after the invasion of Iraq and whether administration officials manipulated and misrepresented intelligence reports?

The American people demonstrated in the elections last fall that they wanted a change. They showed that they were far ahead of Congress – as well as the mainstream press – in seeing that the Iraq war was not only being mismanaged but that it was a mistake in the first place.

Much of the criticism of the war in Iraq centers on the current 30,000-troop escalation of American forces there. The larger question involves the roles of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet. And it involves the long campaign for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to create a model democracy for a new Middle East and evidently a site for a forward U.S. military base in the area.

Investigations of what has gone on in the past six years are far more than Monday morning quarterbacking or political vengeance. They are a means of telling the American public what it wants and deserves to know about the Bush era. Understanding the recent past is essential to planning a better future.