[Mb-civic] Promoting Torture's Promoter - NYTimes

[Michael Butler]

January 7, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST 

Promoting Torture's Promoter
 By  BOB HERBERT 
 

 If the United States were to look into a mirror right now, it wouldn't
recognize itself.

 The administration that thumbed its nose at the Geneva Conventions seems
equally dismissive of such grand American values as honor, justice,
integrity, due process and the truth. So there was Alberto Gonzales,
counselor to the president and enabler in chief of the pro-torture lobby,
interviewing on Capitol Hill yesterday for the post of attorney general,
which just happens to be the highest law enforcement office in the land.

Mr. Gonzales shouldn't be allowed anywhere near that office. His judgments
regarding the detention and treatment of prisoners rounded up in Iraq and
the so-called war on terror have been both unsound and shameful. Some of the
practices that evolved from his judgments were appalling, gruesome,
medieval.

 But this is the Bush administration, where incompetence and outright
failure are rewarded with the nation's highest honors. (Remember the
Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded last month to George Tenet et al.?) So
not only is Mr. Gonzales's name being stenciled onto the attorney general's
door, but a plush judicial seat is being readied for his anticipated
elevation to the Supreme Court.

It's a measure of the irrelevance of the Democratic Party that a man who
played such a significant role in the policies that led to the
still-unfolding prisoner abuse and torture scandals is expected to win easy
Senate confirmation and become attorney general. The Democrats have become
the 98-pound weaklings of the 21st century.

 The Bush administration and Mr. Gonzales are trying to sell the fiction
that they've seen the light. In answer to a setup question at his Judiciary
Committee hearing, Mr. Gonzales said he is against torture. And the Justice
Department issued a legal opinion last week that said "torture is abhorrent
both to American law and values and international norms."

What took so long? Why were we ever - under any circumstances - torturing,
maiming, sexually abusing and even killing prisoners? And where is the
evidence that we've stopped?

The Bush administration hasn't changed. This is an administration that
believes it can do and say whatever it wants, and that attitude is changing
the very nature of the United States. It is eroding the checks and balances
so crucial to American-style democracy. It led the U.S., against the advice
of most of the world, to launch the dreadful war in Iraq. It led Mr.
Gonzales to ignore the expressed concerns of the State Department and top
military brass as he blithely opened the gates for the prisoner abuse
vehicles to roll through.

There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and
incompetence. In the Bush administration, that mixture has been explosive.
Forget the meant-to-be-comforting rhetoric surrounding Mr. Gonzales's
confirmation hearings. Nothing's changed. As detailed in The Washington Post
earlier this month, the administration is making secret plans for the
possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists who will never even be
charged.

 Due process? That's a laugh. Included among the detainees, the paper noted,
are hundreds of people in military or C.I.A. custody "whom the government
does not have enough evidence to charge in courts." And there will be plenty
more detainees to come.

 Who knows who these folks are or what they may be guilty of? We'll have to
trust in the likes of Alberto Gonzales or Donald Rumsfeld or President
Bush's new appointee to head the C.I.A., Porter Goss, to see that the right
thing is done in each and every case.

Americans have tended to view the U.S. as the guardian of the highest ideals
of justice and fairness. But that is a belief that's getting more and more
difficult to sustain. If the Justice Department can be the fiefdom of John
Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales, those in search of the highest standards of
justice have no choice but to look elsewhere.

It's more fruitful now to look overseas. Last month Britain's highest court
ruled that the government could not continue to indefinitely detain
foreigners suspected of terrorism without charging or trying them. One of
the justices wrote that such detentions "call into question the very
existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been
very proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention."

That's a sentiment completely lost on an Alberto Gonzales or George W. Bush.

 E-mail: bobherb at nytimes.com

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