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  • From: "Wendy" <crazygardens AT nationi.net>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] This is not good
  • Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 08:39:23 -0500

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?






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