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["Wendy" <crazygardens AT nationi.net>]

Does anyone here see something really wrong with this?  Can't Bush find 
anyone for his administration that is not either a boot-licker or a 
scoundrel?



>From the Washington Post

Mr. Gonzales's Record
Monday, November 22, 2004; Page A18


INVESTIGATIONS have determined that some U.S. interrogators who tortured 
Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison reasonably believed that their 
actions had been authorized by a memorandum from the headquarters of Lt. 
Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who approved such techniques as hooding, imposing 
"stress positions" and using dogs to inspire fear. According to one official 
report, although those methods clearly violate the Geneva Conventions, they 
were sanctioned by Gen. Sanchez's legal staff "using reasoning from the 
president's memorandum of February 7, 2002," which determined that the 
conventions should be set aside for people deemed "unlawful combatants."

The architect of that presidential memorandum was Alberto R. Gonzales, the 
White House counsel who now has been nominated by President Bush to serve as 
attorney general. Like several other senior administration officials, Mr. 
Gonzales has never accepted responsibility, or been held accountable, for 
his role in setting administration policies that led to extensive violations 
of international law -- and U.S. standards of justice -- in Iraq, 
Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay and in other still-secret detention 
facilities. Mr. Gonzales should not become attorney general without being 
asked by the Senate to answer for that record.

The starting point was Mr. Gonzales's recommendation to Mr. Bush that he 
declare the Geneva Conventions -- whose rules on the questioning of 
prisoners he derided as "obsolete" -- inapplicable to detainees from 
Afghanistan. That decision caused enormous damage to U.S. standing even with 
close allies, yet from a practical point of view was entirely unnecessary. 
Mr. Gonzales ignored the advice of the administration's most seasoned 
national security officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell 
and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told him it was possible 
to indefinitely detain and vigorously interrogate al Qaeda members without 
violating Geneva, and that he risked undermining a U.S. military culture of 
treating prisoners humanely. That prophecy came true when Gen. Sanchez used 
Mr. Gonzales's logic to authorize the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The 
position Mr. Gonzales endorsed, that the president could declare that all 
those captured in Afghanistan were not entitled to Geneva protections, has 
since been ruled illegal by one federal judge and has led to numerous other 
judicial complications.

Around the same time Mr. Gonzales convened a working group and pressed it to 
develop a system of "military commissions" for the detainees that would 
bypass both federal courts and the military's own justice system. Once again 
he ignored the military's own legal professionals, who believed the 
court-martial system was adequate. Once again trust in the United States was 
seriously eroded, without any useful result. After three years, not a single 
trial has been completed; instead, the system has been invalidated by one 
federal judge while the Supreme Court has ruled that all the foreign 
detainees can challenge their detentions in federal court. The Supreme Court 
also ruled that the government could not hold a U.S. citizen without court 
review or the right to counsel -- again invalidating the stance that Mr. 
Gonzales adopted in the case of terrorism suspects Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose 
Padilla.

Within months of Mr. Bush's adoption of the Geneva decision, the CIA was 
using harsh questioning methods on a senior al Qaeda leader, Abu Zubaida, 
and asking the White House for legal justification. Mr. Gonzales 
commissioned a memo from the Justice Department in the summer of 2002 that 
asserted the president's right to order the torture of detainees and 
redefined torture itself so that pain short of organ failure, death or 
permanent psychological damage did not qualify. According to a report in 
Newsweek magazine, the memo was written after a meeting convened by Mr. 
Gonzales at which specific torture practices were discussed and approved, 
including "water-boarding," a technique designed to cause a sensation of 
drowning.

After the scandal over abuse at Abu Ghraib erupted, Mr. Gonzales tried to 
distance himself from the torture memo, though what is known indicates that 
he played a central role in its formulation. Like Mr. Bush and other senior 
officials, he has ignored the abundant evidence that the decision on the 
Geneva Conventions led directly to the abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and 
Iraq. His damaging and erroneous legal positions have been altered only in 
response to court rulings and then only grudgingly. Senators should ask Mr. 
Gonzales to explain his definition of torture and to say whether he believes 
captors in other nations could legally inflict pain short of organ failure 
on detained Americans. They should also ask why he chose to exclude or 
disregard the views of the uniformed military legal corps in his 
consideration of military commissions and the application of the Geneva 
Conventions. Above all, Mr. Gonzales should answer this question: Why is a 
lawyer whose opinions have produced such disastrous results for his 
government -- in their practical application, in their effect on U.S. 
international standing and in their repeated reversal by U.S. courts --  
qualified to serve as attorney general?