I completely agree, Elvis. I hope that the Senate grills Gonzales mercilessly in his confirmation hearing, and I hope that the press, the courts, and the Congress scrutinize every questionable policy and action of Bush and his Justice Department in these matters. Their record so far has been disgusting.
Sure there is. An NPR news report mentioned that the Deputy AG is often considered the one to replace the AG when he goes, but that the present Deputy AG is not in the running precisely because he’s refused to knuckle under to political pressure from the Bushies.
They don’t WANT integrity, they want a yes-man.
Ummmm, actually, I thought an earlier post made the point very well that that is PRECISELY what it was intended to be. And became.
Nor is it reasonable to think he didn’t even know about it.
It was part of the same policy-making process about which he had to be at least aware, and probably part of. I don’t see a distinction worth preserving.
We’ll just have to see if the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are even allowed to ask him about it at his hearings, or if any of the Republicans has the integrity to.
Who exactly is this rumored virgin among the whores? Please, be specific about this person’s identity, then explain why you believe this person would be someone Bush would nominate if Gonzales decided to pack up and move back to Houston.
And how do you know this, exactly? How do you know that Gonzales intended his Geneva Convention memo to be a blessing for torture? What document or statement establishes this intent?
As I said, he should be grilled mercilessly on the question during his confirmation hearing, but as things stand at the moment, all you’ve got is a memo saying the G.C. doesn’t apply.
Nina Totenberg didn’t make his identity clear when she made her report, but she did make very clear that Bush would NOT nominate this guy precisely because he had integrity. Bush wants a whore, a very accommodating whore.
Once again, you are asking us, in your lawyerly way, not to see an obvious connection. Sorry, Minty, it’s very obvious that the whole rationale for investigating the status of the Gitmo prisoners was to find legal cover for mistreating them. Which Gonzales obviously did.
I agree. I just can’t think of an alternative motive for determining that Gitmo prisoners were not covered by Geneva.
Same here. The court here is the one of Public Opinion. The standards of evidence are those of common sense.
I’m sure he did, given that the August 2002 memo was addressed to him. What we don’t know is what he did about it. I assume he simply acquiesced, but then we’re just back to my point about chastity and harlots.
Ah, okay. So some unidentified person was not nominated by Bush because said person possesses some sort of undefined integrity. Gotcha.
Quite so. But among all the whores in the White House, what’s so special about the lack of chastity for this one?
Sez you. Me, I prefer to inquire into the evidence of those alleged connections, rather than merely assume that they actually exist.
I personally agree with Gonzales’ assessment that al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners are not POWs within the scope of the Geneva Convention, and have written at length in other threads defending that position. Does this mean that I support torture and mistreatment of those prisoners? Heck no, it doesn’t.
I can, any number of them. Like the desire not to release these guys after the end of the Afghan conflict, or the necessity of providing them with accommodations equivalent to the American troops stationed at Gitmo, or the necessity of charging them with criminal acts and trying them in front of an ordinary court-martial, or the desire to cut off their communications with the outside world. None of those have anything at all to do with torture.
Not to mention, of course, that they don’t actually fit into the G.C.'s defined categories of POWs. But that’s just the legal analysis, not the policy justifications.
mg: How do you know that Gonzales intended his Geneva Convention memo to be a blessing for torture? What document or statement establishes this intent? […]
So, given that whoever Bush nominates is going to be someone who supports the president’s policies on the detainees, is Gonzales better or worse than the alternatives?
I see your point about the unfairness of assuming that Gonzales personally advocated torture or considered it a defensible tactic. Nonetheless, from a PR standpoint, he’s already heavily “tainted” as the counsel who provided a legal justification for the use of torture.
Can we really afford to appoint somebody to lead the United States Department of Justice who has that kind of label around his neck? You are right that any other Bush nominee probably wouldn’t have significantly different opinions, but at least they wouldn’t already have made a name for themselves as “the pro-torture counsel”. Considering how we denounced the atrocities of torture in Iraq under Uday and Qusay Hussein, and the impact of the scandal of Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, don’t you think that at least we shouldn’t be seeking out people with pro-torture associations to put in the national spotlight?
Of course it’s unfair to Gonzales to reject him on account of the “torture taint” if his actual position is different from his PR image in this regard. However, it’s an unfair but inescapable fact that politics is made up of image as well as reality, and I think there’s no doubt that a Gonzales appointment would be a PR bonanza for anti-US forces and shit-stirrers in Iraq and elsewhere. His connection with torture policy appears to be taken for granted by standard ME news sources such as Al-Jazeera, for one thing:
At the very least, Gonzales should be searchingly questioned at his confirmation hearing about his defense of these policies. If he can’t repudiate them convincingly, is it really worth taking the PR hit involved in making him AG, when we could get any one of dozens of other conservatives from the Bush legal stable who don’t have a pre-existing rep for promoting the torture of detainees?
Sorry to be so cynically realpolitikal about somebody that minty defends as basically a good and competent guy, but this is a very high-profile appointment here: Caesar’s wife and all that.
Somehow, I don’t think this White House is all that concerned about public relations with other countries. Nor do I think that such P.R. concerns are all that compelling a reason to oppose a nomination. But by all means, let’s send Gonzales over to the Senate for his confirmation hearings, and let’s hear what he has to say about these “torture memo” allegations.
This was bugging me so I looked it up, using wikipedia’s list of U.S. Attorneys General as my reference.
Since WWII there have been 13 midterm changes of AG. In five of those the Deputy AG was tapped. I’m not sure I’d consider that often.
I’m not going to repeat my opinions here; the Pit thread that minty linked to has them.
It’s not so much Bush’s image I’m worried about, it’s the U.S.'s image. Bush has made his bed in filth, let him lie in it. But other nations will not take it well if our AG is a guy issuing memos in defence of torture. It could do the U.S. reputation harm in ways that extend far, far beyond Bush’s eight years of stupidity. I think that’s a reasonable consideration.
We used to have an excellent reputation for not doing this sort of thing, a reputation garnered by our soldiers in WWII and Korea, when so many armies thought torturing and killing prisoners were fine things to do. It’s a shame to see their moral courage being lost for such paltry gains.
Your concern is praise worthy… but the “excellent” reputation is no more (Abu Ghraib and especially Gitmo)… so Gonzalez won’t be much noticed outside the US… unless the media make a big fuss out of it of course.
Which, of course, he has not done. C’mon, how much would it hurt your position to acknowlege that Gonzales did not write anything defending the use of torture.
While our reputation on this issue may be worsening, I dispute your assertion that the American reputation was ever “excellent” with respect to such matters. Little matters like Vietnam and Central America tend to undermine one’s moral authority on the dignified treatment of one’s enemies.
As to the whores and virgins arguments (why do we have to have whores - why not studs instead - sheez), here’s the thing. Bush appoints. Congress approves. So saying that most of the people he might have on his A list of appointees are whores is not really the issue. The issue is whether Congress will or should marry a whore or hold out for a virgin.
It goes back to separation of powers and a system of checks and balances. Sure - I truly believe most of the people Bush will think of are scuz. But Congress, not just the Dems but Congress in general, has been treated like a whipping boy by the Administration and this is their chance to say: We get the the final nod, so you have to dig a little deeper and come up with someone acceptable.
This administration has everyone running around phrasing every question with the Executive Branch at the center - i.e., which whore will Bush pick. At some point you have to realize that he who phrases the question controls the answer. Congress can and should, IMO, rephrase the question - i.e., who will we approve. It may be that we are so far down the path that the (to this administration) foreign concept of a compromise appointee won’t ever come up. It all depends on who takes control of the question.
I think this doesn’t really take into account the nature of the examinations and memos. Keep in mind that Gonzales solicited the “legal torture” memo, although he didn’t write it. Also keep in mind that the memo he did author does not discuss the Geneva Conventions in a void. It discusses them in the specific context of application of the War Crimes Act.
Let me repeat that bit - War Crimes Act.
In that context, coupled with soliciting memos on torture, it is pretty difficult to claim that the only thing under consideration was cutting off their communications with the outside world (btw - there would be some procedures for that under the Conventions as well as under normal criminal law applications) or provision of accomodations.
The other thing that makes it all a bit shattrering, for me, is that the methods and procedures he espoused never presented any opportunity for anyone to be able to present facts or information that they were NOT an enemy combatant. I don’t think they ever really even made a decent “failed state” argument. But in any event, let’s look at how reliable our intelligence efforts have been to date. Also how well our translators have(not) done to date. How confident can anyone be, based on the records to date, the anyone picked up was Al-Qaeda?
Oh well. Someone just “reassured” me by saying that after resigning as AG, Ashcroft has opened a door for his own appointment to the Supreme Court later.
vomits
Thanks, now I’m going to have nightmares.
I think when I eventually have kids, I’m going to tell them spooky stories about Ashcroft to scare them. Screw the boogie man, Ashcroft is really scary.
But promise you won’t play that scary tape of him singing to them, even if they are really really really bad kids.
Please?