In the past few days, two official documents on Iraq and the war on terror have come out: a bipartisan inquiry by the Senate Armed Services committee into treatment of detainees, and a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Reading through the executive summary of the first and highlights of the second gave me a distinct feeling of nausea—a sense of being dragged back down into an extremely unpleasant experience in which I’d been immersed for years and that I’d only recently started to leave behind.

No chance. A few sentences into each document and it was real and vivid all over again: the official lies and deceptions buried under acronyms and jargon; the headlong folly of arrogant policymakers; the fateful decisions made in the shadows or on the fly, and the years of terrible consequences.

These two documents bring very old news; there’s nothing remarkable about their main conclusions. The nausea I felt came from having seen and heard almost all of it before. The Senate inquiry finds that the humiliation and cruelty inflicted on prisoners at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib followed from directives that originated in the White House and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Inspector General’s report (which, at 513 pages, contains far more revealing detail than the declassified version of the Senate inquiry) establishes that the U.S. government was completely unprepared for the reconstruction of Iraq, owing to the almost criminal negligence of those responsible, and that the years since the invasion have been marked by bureaucratic confusion and incompetent execution, with private contractors playing a large role in the disaster. In both narratives, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld are the prime culprits, heading a large cast of failed officials, along with a few quiet dissidents. Both documents show, without quite saying so, that years of official statements amount to a long string of lies. These documents are, among other things, a vindication of American journalism, which was years ahead of the official story—something to be noted as newspapers come crashing down all around the country.

Is it worth having these belated official imprimaturs of what anyone paying attention has known for years? I think so. They will make it all the harder for officials who have written or plan to write self-justifying memoirs (such as this, this, this, this, and this) to claim that the tragedies of the past decade were someone else’s fault. They will also make it harder for partisan hacks to rewrite the story for political advantage. In the future, anyone demanding to know who lost Iraq or who’s to blame for the next acts of global jihad should be forced to explain these dispassionate findings from bipartisan or nonpartisan sources (the Senate inquiry marks the beginning of John McCain’s campaign for rehabilitation).

The trouble is, the information in these reports doesn’t tell the whole story, and it doesn’t tell it as a complete story. The reports only give us fragments, which will be too easily overlooked or forgotten. The official sanction of torture and the woeful management of occupied Iraq are related pieces of a much larger epic: the first is marked by criminality, the second by bureaucratic ineptitude, but they are joined together as expressions and outcomes of the ideas and habits of mind of the highest officials in the Bush Administration. Eventually the country will need, even if it won’t entirely want, the whole story to be told. The best way to tell it would be to reproduce the 9/11 Commission—to convene a single bipartisan panel, with the authority to look into the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of the war on terror, and give the panel full investigative power, even if its conclusions put some of the principals in legal jeopardy.

The next Administration and the next Congress will have to decide whether it’s worth the agony to look back. The agony will be worse, sooner or later, if we don’t.