Gonzales' confirmation hearing is underway

Gonzales - Enron - Bush - Taliban - John O'Neill Connections
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Gonzales' confirmation hearing is underway, with the White House refusing Thursday to provide senators additional documents on Gonzales' involvement in the decision to allow aggressive interrogations of terrorism detainees, setting up a confrontation with Democrats looking into his role in the now-repudiated policies. (LIVE: Gonzales confirmation hearing

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Posted 1/6/2005 8:46 AM Updated 1/6/2005 11:29 AM

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Gonzales facing torture memo questions
From staff and wire reports
WASHINGTON — Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, facing tough questions from lawmakers about his role in the Bush administration's decision to allow aggressive interrogations of terrorism detainees, is pledging to abide by treaties that ban torture of prisoners.
Gonzales questioned in 2002 whether some Geneva Convention prohibitions apply to terror combatants.
Lawrence Jackson, AP

Gonzales' confirmation hearing is underway, with the White House refusing Thursday to provide senators additional documents on Gonzales' involvement in the decision to allow aggressive interrogations of terrorism detainees, setting up a confrontation with Democrats looking into his role in the now-repudiated policies. (LIVE: Gonzales confirmation hearing )

Gonzales said this morning that, if confirmed, he would abide by the Geneva Conventions' strict prohibitions against torture and all treaty obligations. "I am sickened and outraged" by the torture scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, he told senators.

"I have a deep and abiding commitment to the fundamental American principle that we are a nation of laws and not of men," Gonzales said. He colled the nomination "the highest honor of my professional career."

At the White House, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush had "full trust" in Gonzales and hoped the Senate would "move forward quickly."

"The (prisoner treatment) policy that the president set — that I think Judge Gonzales was talking about in his opening remarks — is very clear and that is that we adhere to our laws and our treaty obligations," McClellan said.

From the opening of the hearing, it was clear Gonzales would face tough questions from some panel Democrats."These hearings are about a nomination, but they are also about accountability," Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the panel's ranking Democrat, said Thursday.

He raised questions about Gonzales' actions as as White House counsel, specially concerning a January 2002 memo Gonzales wrote arguing that the war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Leahy pressed Gonzales on whether he believed the president, as commander in chief, could override legal opinions and authorize torture. Gonzales said Bush had not authorized torture and had made it clear he would not.

"That is a hypothetical question that would require the analysis of a great number of factors," Gonzales said of Leahy's question. He said he could not answer the question because it involved an ongoing legal dispute.

"That's malarkey," Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said of Gonzales' claim. "You are obligated to comment. It's your job."

"This is important stuff because there was a fundamental disagreement within the administration" on the torture issue, Biden said. But he noted that no senator had announced his opposition to Gonzales' nomination.

"I like you. You're the real deal," Biden said of Gonzales.

In introducing the nominee, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Gonzales' legal opinion was "absolutely right."

Gonzales "should by all accounts have a perfectly happy ending, but that's not how Washington works," Cronyn said at the hearing. "Only in Washington can a good man get raked over the coals for doing his job."

"Let us confirm this good man," Cornyn said of Gonzales.

As President Bush's top lawyer, Gonzales had a hand in much of the White House's post-Sept. 11 terrorism policies. A month after Gonzales' memo, Bush signed an order declaring he had the authority to bypass the accords "in this or future conflicts." Bush's order also said the Geneva treaty's references to prisoners of war did not apply to al-Qaeda or "unlawful combatants" from the Taliban.

Some Gonzales critics say that decision and his memo justifying it helped lead to the torture scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and prisoner abuses in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Last June, the Justice Department withdrew its 2002 memos arguing that the president's wartime authority supersedes laws and treaties governing treatment of prisoners.

Gonzales has repudiated torture before. "The president has stated that this administration does not condone torture. If anyone engages in such conduct, he or she will be held accountable," Gonzales said in a White House online discussion on July 7.

Democrats aren't satisfied with just those statements and say they plan to question Gonzales extensively about his paper trail in crafting the government's policies on questioning foreign prisoners.

"It is clear he was in the chain receiving this critical documentation relative to changing American standards on the treatment of prisoners, so he was not a bystander, he was part of it," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.

John Yoo, who helped write the key memo at Justice's Office of Legal Counsel that critics said appeared to condone torture, said Gonzales and top Justice officials did not attempt to influence or interfere with the content, although they were briefed on drafts.

"The idea that the Office of Legal Counsel was providing advice that was dictated, demanded or influenced by the White House, that's just flatly untrue," said Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Bush firmly backs Gonzales' nomination.

"Judge Gonzales is a very trusted adviser to the president (and is) doing an outstanding job," McClellan told reporters traveling Wednesday with the president aboard Air Force One.

Even Democrats say they expect Gonzales to be confirmed. Republicans control a Senate split between 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and one independent.

Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado, one of the first Hispanics elected to the Senate in more than 20 years and one of only two newly elected Democrats in November, plans to introduce Gonzales at the hearing. Salazar has said he intends to vote for Gonzales.

Democrats also plan to question Gonzales on other terrorism issues, including the government's detention of Jose Padilla, who has been held for 31 months without being charged as an enemy combatant suspected of plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States.

Other topics that Gonzales probably will have to address include the administration's more restrictive rules on releasing government documents; the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriages; and memos he prepared for then-Gov. Bush about clemency appeals for Texas death row inmates.

Contributing: The Associated Press and USATODAY.com's Randy Lilleston.
==========================

On 29 April 2004, 60 Minutes II on CBS reported:

Last month, the U.S. Army announced 17 soldiers in Iraq, including a brigadier general, had been removed from duty after charges of mistreating Iraqi prisoners.

But the details of what happened have been kept secret, until now.
CLICK FULL REPORT:

No trial provides a better basis for understanding the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949. Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters are generally disappointed. What is shocking about Nuremberg is the ordinariness of the defendants: men who may be good fathers, kind to animals, even unassuming--yet committed unspeakable crimes. Years later, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote of "the banality of evil." Like Eichmann, most Nuremberg defendants never aspired to be villains. Rather, they either overidentified with an ideological cause or suffered from a lack of imagination: they couldn't fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated decisions....
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nuremberg.htm

The Nuremberg Trials
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nurembergACCOUNT.html

War Crimes After Nuremberg
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/NurembergEpilogue.html

May 20, 2004
Orders to Torture
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal now implicates the highest levels of the Bush Administration in violating federal law and in war crimes. In barely two weeks, the story has shifted from horrific photographs of prisoners to intimations of homicide; from prison mismanagement blamed on the fog of war to the cool clarity of deliberate White House designs to protect torturers from prosecution; from "the six morons who lost the war" to the Defense Secretary, the White House Counsel and the President himself.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20040607&s=editors