Backing Gonzales Is Backing Torture (Robert Scheer)

[struggle4progress]

That is the central question the Senate Judiciary Committee faces Thursday as it begins hearings on the confirmation of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales as the next attorney general of the United States. At stake is whether Congress wants to conveniently absolve Gonzales of his clear attempt to have the President subvert US law in order to whitewash barbaric practices performed by US interrogators in the name of national security. <snip>

"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," Gonzales wrote in a legal memo to President Bush on Jan. 25, 2002. Declaring the war-on-terror prisoners exempt from the Geneva Convention, he argued, "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act."

Acting like a sleazy attorney advising a client on how not to be convicted of an ongoing crime, Gonzales was apparently not worried about irrational foreign courts or high-minded jurists in The Hague, but rather US prosecutors who might enforce federal laws that ban torture of foreign prisoners of war. Indeed, Gonzales made the case for a legal end run around the 1996 War Crimes Act, which mandates criminal penalties, including the death sentence, for any US military or other personnel who engage in crimes of torture.

"It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441" of the act, Gonzales wrote. "Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." <snip>

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2281&ncid=742&e=1&u=/thenation/20050104/cm_thenation/20050110scheer0104

[marc_the_dem]

1. Alberto

is an embarrassment to Hispanics everywhere...

[ixion]

2. backing BushCo is backing torture, really

Gonzales acted only as a stooge, as a bureaucratic enabler, which is of course why he is being rewarded handsomely by the theocracy. :eyes:

[Briar]

3. Yes

Every American who voted for Bush backed torture and an illegal war.

[indepat]

5. Every American eligible to register who did not vote also backed torture

et al IMHO.

[Demeter]

4. Yes, But That Won't Stop the Parade

off the cliff--just like lemmings.