Thursday, January 06, 2005
Gonzales's perverse pro-torture reasoning is now on full display. He passed along with his okay this pro-torture memo from the Justice Department in August, 2002 and led the administration's meetings on bending the laws and treaties to accomodate torture, but now he's backpedaling from his original positions. He evasively failed to disavow his earlier actions under tough questioning from Democrats. No wonder: he wrote his own memo to the President recommending that the Geneva contention shouldn't apply to accused terrorists. The New York Times offers a clear overview -- with links -- of the legal scaffolding built by administration officials, including Gonzales, that paved the way for torture and abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
As journalist Mark Danner argues in an op-ed piece against Gonzales, "Mr. Gonzales is unfit to serve as attorney general...Mr. Gonzales is unfit because the slow river of litigation is certain to bring before the next attorney general a raft of torture cases that challenge the very policies that he personally helped devise and put into practice. He is unfit because, while the attorney general is charged with upholding the law, the documents show that as White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his client to concoct strategies to circumvent it. And he is unfit, finally, because he has rightly become the symbol of the United States' fateful departure from a body of settled international law and human rights practice for which the country claims to stand."
As journalist Mark Danner argues in an op-ed piece against Gonzales, "Mr. Gonzales is unfit to serve as attorney general...Mr. Gonzales is unfit because the slow river of litigation is certain to bring before the next attorney general a raft of torture cases that challenge the very policies that he personally helped devise and put into practice. He is unfit because, while the attorney general is charged with upholding the law, the documents show that as White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his client to concoct strategies to circumvent it. And he is unfit, finally, because he has rightly become the symbol of the United States' fateful departure from a body of settled international law and human rights practice for which the country claims to stand."
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