[Mb-civic] washingtonpost.com The Vote on Mr. Gonzales

[Michael Butler]

washingtonpost.com 
The Vote on Mr. Gonzales




 Sunday, January 16, 2005; Page B06

 DESPITE A POOR performance at his confirmation hearing, Alberto R. Gonzales
appears almost certain to be confirmed by the Senate as attorney general.
Senators of both parties declared themselves dissatisfied with Mr.
Gonzales's lack of responsiveness to questions about his judgments as White
House counsel on the detention of foreign prisoners. Some expressed dismay
at his reluctance to state that it is illegal for American personnel to use
torture, or for the president to order it. A number of senators clearly
believe, as we do, that Mr. Gonzales bears partial responsibility for
decisions that have led to shocking, systematic and ongoing violations of
human rights by the United States. Most apparently intend to vote for him
anyway. At a time when nominees for the Cabinet can be disqualified because
of their failure to pay taxes on a nanny's salary, this reluctance to hold
Mr. Gonzales accountable is shameful. He does not deserve to be confirmed as
attorney general.

We make this judgment bearing in mind the president's prerogative to choose
his own cabinet, a privilege to which we deferred four years ago when
President Bush nominated John D. Ashcroft to lead the Justice Department. In
some important respects, Mr. Gonzales is a more attractive figure than Mr.
Ashcroft. His personal story as a Hispanic American is inspiring, and he
appears less ideological and confrontational than the outgoing attorney
general. Mr. Gonzales is also not the only official implicated in the
torture and abuse of detainees. Other senior officials played a larger role
in formulating and implementing the policies, and Mr. Bush is ultimately
responsible for them. It is nevertheless indisputable that Mr. Gonzales
oversaw and approved a decision to disregard the Geneva Conventions for
detainees from Afghanistan; that he endorsed interrogation methods that
military and FBI professionals regarded as illegal and improper; and that he
supported the indefinite detention of both foreigners and Americans without
due process. To confirm such an official as attorney general is to ratify
decisions that are at odds with fundamental American values.

 Mr. Gonzales's defenders argue that his position on the Geneva Conventions
amounted to a judgment that captured members of al Qaeda did not deserve
official status as prisoners of war. If that had been his recommendation,
then the United States never would have suffered the enormous damage to its
global prestige caused by the detention of foreigners at the Guantanamo Bay
prison. In fact, the White House counsel endorsed the view that the hundreds
of combatants rounded up by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, who
included members of the Taliban army, foreign volunteers and a few innocent
bystanders, as well as al Qaeda militants, could be collectively and
indiscriminately denied Geneva protections without the individual hearings
that the treaty provides for. That judgment, which has been ruled illegal by
a federal court, resulted in hundreds of detainees being held for two years
without any legal process. In addition to blackening the reputation of the
United States, the policy opened the way to last year's decision by the
Supreme Court, which ruled that the prisoners were entitled to appeal their
detentions in federal courts. The court also ruled that an American citizen
could not be detained and held as an "enemy combatant" without court review
or the right to counsel, invalidating Mr. Gonzales's position in the cases
of Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla.

 Mr. Gonzales made a second bad judgment about the Geneva Conventions: that
their restrictions on interrogations were "obsolete." Quite apart from the
question of POW status for detainees, this determination invalidated the
Army's doctrine for questioning enemy prisoners, which is based on the
Geneva Conventions and had proved its worth over decades. Mr. Gonzales
ignored the many professional experts, ranging from the Army's own legal
corps to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who told him that existing
interrogation practices were effective and that setting them aside would
open the way to abuses and invite retaliation against Americans. Instead,
during meetings in his office from which these professionals were excluded,
he supported the use of such methods as "waterboarding," which causes an
excruciating sensation of drowning. Though initially approved for use by the
CIA against al Qaeda, illegal techniques such as these quickly were picked
up by military interrogators at Guantanamo and later in Afghanistan and
Iraq. Several official investigations have confirmed that in the absence of
a clear doctrine -- the standing one having been declared "obsolete" -- U.S.
personnel across the world felt empowered to use methods that most lawyers,
and almost all the democratic world, regard as torture.

Mr. Gonzales stated for the record at his hearing that he opposes torture.
Yet he made no effort to separate himself from legal judgments that narrowed
torture's definition so much as to authorize such methods as waterboarding
for use by the CIA abroad. Despite the revision of a Justice Department memo
on torture, he and the administration he represents continue to regard those
practices as legal and continue to condone slightly milder abuse, such as
prolonged sensory deprivation and the use of dogs, for Guantanamo. As Mr.
Gonzales confirmed at his hearing, U.S. obligations under an anti-torture
convention mean that the methods at Guantanamo must be allowable under the
Fifth, Eighth and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution. According to the
logic of the attorney general nominee, federal authorities could deprive
American citizens of sleep, isolate them in cold cells while bombarding them
with unpleasant noises and interrogate them 20 hours a day while the
prisoners were naked and hooded, all without violating the Constitution.
Senators who vote to ratify Mr. Gonzales's nomination will bear the
responsibility of ratifying such views as legitimate.

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