January 07, 2005

Rule Of Law Becomes Rule Of Lawyers

The confirmation hearings for Bush's Attorney General nominee Alberto R. Gonzales are another cruel assault on the basic human values of truth, decency and justice.

This article by Mark Danner in The New York Times captures the horrible reality:
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans began torturing prisoners, and they have never really stopped...

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, 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.

On the other hand, perhaps it is fitting that Gonzales be confirmed. The system of torture has, after all, survived its disclosure. We have entered a new era; the traditional story line in which scandal leads to investigation and investigation leads to punishment has been supplanted by something else.

Wrongdoing is still exposed; we gaze at the photographs and read the documents, and then we listen to the president's spokesman "reiterate," as he did last week, "the president's determination that the United States never engage in torture." And there the story ends....

After Gonzales is confirmed, the road back - to justice, order and propriety - will be very long. Torture will belong to us all.
By all such accounts, in spite of his abhorrent past, Gonzales is likely to be approved by a GOP-dominated Senate, with the continued compliant support of Democrats without courage, morals or principle. Washington Post highlights exactly why Gonzales has risen so far so quickly - a illustrative tale of our times - and that is his immoral lawyerly capacity for using legal tricks to avoid TRUTH:
Gonzales said he could not recall key details of his involvement in the production of an August 2002 memo that narrowly defined the tactics that constitute torture. He also declined repeated invitations to repudiate a past administration assertion that the president has the authority to ignore anti-torture statutes on national security grounds.

Gonzales testified that while he disagreed with portions of the Justice Department memo, he could not recall whether he conveyed those objections to other government lawyers at the time. He said he did not quarrel with its general findings.

Gonzales said he could not remember who had requested the legal guidance on permissible interrogation tactics -- many officials have said it was the CIA -- but he acknowledged under questioning that high-pressure interrogation techniques were discussed in White House meetings at which he was present."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

gandhi - Back to the election for just a moment. I picked this up at Democratic Underground (i sense you are probably a regular there)....pay particular attention to this little tidbit...

Well, through all of Bev's public brashness and rants she has produced exactly ZERO evidence of vote rigging through BBV. She's reaching for the moon but is falling short. Madsen, Fischer, and Curtis? Well they are already on the moon (and from all I have read about them they should stay there). We have dead dogs, fake $21 million checks, sophomoric visual basic programs, and reform schools filled with teenage hackers trained to steal elections.

Arnebeck's suit is based primarily on the same flawed analysis of the "exit polls." It's going nowhere...

the thread is http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=261751

Jaraparilla said...

Neonknight ,

I am not a regular at Democratic Underground, but I understand it is an open forum where anybody can express their views (as opposed to the GOP's Nazi-style groupthink). What you have posted represents the very subjective thoughts of ONE person (maybe it was even your own comment, for all I know) - it proves nothing except that you are incabable of serious rational argument.

There is a LOT of well-researched factual evidence at blackboxvoting.org (plus some emotional stuff, which is quite understandable to me, given what Bev Harris and here team have been up against for the last year or more).

Anonymous said...

gandhi - I went over there and read. Yes, I saw the emotional stuff....butZERO evidence that there was voter fraud.

Could you maybe point me to some???

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