January 9, 2005

We Torture Prisoners

Don't We?

By BILL PRESS

Go figure. Since his re-election, President Bush has given the Presidential Medal of Honor to George Tenet, who ignored all the warnings about Sept. 11. He nominated Bernard Kerik, serial adulterer, as director of homeland security. And he has named Alberto Gonzales, enabler of torture, as attorney general. Strange behavior for a man who claims to run on moral values.

On the surface, Gonzales looks like the perfect candidate for the job. He grew up dirt poor, joined the Air Force, went to Harvard, came back to Texas and served as chief legal adviser to the governor, secretary of state, and Supreme Court justice. For the last four years, he’s been President Bush’s White House counsel.

Gonzales would, in fact, be the perfect American success story. Rags to power. Except that he has used his power to do so much wrong. And his record shows that he is more inclined to tell Bush what Bush wants to hear, rather than give good, solid legal advice. His loyalty has always been to the man who appointed him, not to the law.

It started in Texas, with the death penalty. Knowing his strong support for capital punishment, Gonzales advised Bush to approve every one of 152 executions he presided over as governor. And he did so in what have been described as “only the most cursory of memos,” ignoring conflicting evidence or even, in some cases, lack of evidence.

Gonzales also declared that Texas was not bound by the rules of the Vienna Convention, which forbid one nation from executing the citizen of another without providing access to legal counsel from his native country. Acting on his advice, Bush approved the execution of a citizen of Mexico. Now we know, that was a just a warm-up for Gonzales’s later rejection of the Geneva Convention and its proscriptions against torture.

To me, the issue of torture is not complicated. It’s a real-life application of the Golden Rule. How would we want Americans treated if they were taken prisoner? Would we want them hung from the ceiling, stripped naked, chained to the floor, submerged in water, forced to stand with black robes over their head and electrical wires attached to their testicles? Hell no.

Then we should not treat other prisoners of war that way. Yet we did. At Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. We’ve seen the pictures. Eyewitnesses from the FBI have confirmed the torture of prisoners. And it didn’t just happen. Those abuses can’t be blamed, as the Bush administration has tried, on sadistic soldiers in the field. They happened as a direct result of administration policies that came straight from the White House: policies written, at the president’s request, by Alberto Gonzales.

It’s too late now for Gonzales to say he doesn’t approve of torture, or that he was sickened by seeing the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib. And it’s too late for him to insist that President Bush would never, ever allow torture to happen. The damage is already done.

It was Gonzales who advised the president after Sept. 11 that provisions of the Geneva Convention, prohibiting torture, were “quaint” and “obsolete.” It was Gonzales who told the president he could get around the treaty by simply calling the captives “enemy combatants,” instead of “prisoners of war.”

And, as recently reported, it was Gonzales who prompted an August 2002 Justice Department policy defining torture so broadly you almost had to kill somebody before qualifying. That policy was dropped only late in 2004, when it was leaked to the media and the White House realized it could sink Gonzales’ chances of confirmation.

Only the most naïve could believe that Gonzales will suddenly change his spots and develop a new respect for the law, once he moves to Justice. In fact, he has already proven he won’t. At his first confirmation hearing, he was asked repeatedly by Sen. Pat Leahy if he agreed with the administration’s 2002 policy that the president has the authority to override existing laws against torture and immunize any American guilty of torture. Gonzales refused to answer. If you won’t answer that question, you can’t be trusted. Period.

By his cavalier disregard for the law, Gonzales has brought disgrace to the United States — for which, he should have been fired, not rewarded. One thing for sure: If confirmed as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales won’t be as bad as John Ashcroft. He’ll be worse.