Gonzales Hearings start Thurs Jan 6

[Moses]

Demand Careful Scrutiny of Alberto Gonzales' Record

When: Thursday, January 6  10:00 a.m. (Be there early to ensure a seat!)
Where: Senate Hart Building Room 216

On Thursday, January 6, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush's nominee to serve as the United States Attorney General. The Attorney General is the nation's principal enforcer of civil rights laws and civil liberties.

While the ACLU does not -- as a matter of policy -- take a position on the nomination of attorney general, we are urging Senators to carefully consider Gonzales' record as White House Counsel and special counsel to then-Governor Bush, particularly with regard to his role in:

• setting administration policy on detention, interrogation, and torture;

• setting policy that required or encouraged Department of Defense and the CIA to cast aside laws and practices that would have prevented torture;

• setting policies that undermine checks and balances and threaten basic rights;

• shaping the overall civil rights record of the Bush administration; and

• presenting clemency cases to then-Governor Bush in a manner wholly inadequate to determine whether the death penalty was the appropriate punishment, whether the condemned prisoner had received a fair trial, or even whether the prisoner was actually innocent.

Join civil rights leaders in attending Thursday's hearing! By packing the committee room with concerned citizens, we can send the message that the Senate must thoughtfully and thoroughly conduct its "advise and consent" duties and must demand that the Attorney General fully and vigorously enforce the nation's civil rights laws and civil liberties protections.

If you are planning to come, please let us know by emailing us at [e-mail]



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[Moses]

June 10, 2004

QUESTION: Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law.

So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?

BUSH: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you.

We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government.

[Moses]

Gonzales: The Fight Is On

Wed Jan 5, 5:19 PM ET

 Op/Ed - The Nation

Bruce Shapiro

It says something that the most vigorous opposition to Alberto Gonzales's nomination for US Attorney General emanates from recently retired military officers, not the civil rights lobby. It also says something that even as the White House, through a new Justice Department (news - web sites) memo, sought to defuse Gonzales's record as the legal godfather of Abu Ghraib and waterboarding, word leaked of an emerging Administration plan for lifetime internment of terror suspects, without trial, in a worldwide network of US-built prisons. This is the first Attorney General nomination of global consequence, a dimension to which Washington only slowly awakened as Gonzales headed into his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

 <br>From the day he was named by President Bush, Gonzales posed a dilemma for Democrats and civil rights organizations: Is this nominee worth fighting? Conventional wisdom counseled caution: As the first Latino AG nominee, he has a compelling personal yarn; he would secure easy confirmation from the Republican Senate; and besides, Gonzales is ABA--Anybody But Ashcroft. Democrats (notably New York's Chuck Schumer) immediately signaled their likely acquiescence. For weeks, most leading civil rights groups, with the exception of the defiant Center for Constitutional Rights, limited themselves to toothless calls for "vigorous scrutiny." The best liberals could hope for, went the insiders' whispers, would be to "make a record" that might inhibit a future Gonzales nomination to the Supreme Court.


On the eve of the Gonzales hearings, a different dynamic began to emerge. First the Justice Department published a memo "superseding" the elaborate justification for torture Gonzales himself had commissioned from the Office of Legal Counsel's Jay Bybee: a new memo so patently timed to the hearings that it only made questions for the nominee more compelling, especially since the White House continued to withhold crucial documents detailing Gonzales's role in the torture scandal. Notable, too, was the new memo's overt evasion of the original Bybee document's assertion of unreviewable presidential authority to classify prisoners outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions and torture laws.


Then the intervention of a dozen retired high-ranking military officers--some of them lifelong Republicans--made it clear that this is no ordinary confirmation fight. No domestic Cabinet nominee has ever been charged by generals with having "fostered greater animosity toward the United States, undermined our intelligence gathering efforts and added to the risks facing our troops around the world." These career officers--who take their oaths to the Constitution, not George Bush --believe that Gonzales's legal tactics are wrecking years of post-Vietnam efforts to prevent contemporary My Lais.


It's one thing for the ACLU to criticize Gonzales, quite another when he gets denounced by the very military leadership Republicans have long claimed to stand for. The officers' letter provided covering fire as People for the American Way--until January in the "cautious scrutiny" camp--added its full-throated opposition, and religious leaders began to speak up.


These retired officers (and Human Rights First, which sponsored their press conference) remembered what Democratic pragmatists forgot in the despairing weeks of November: For reasons ranging from ideology to personal malfeasance, seemingly secure Cabinet confirmations can spin wildly out of control when the heat is on--witness John Tower and Zoë Baird. And Gonzales is not universally admired in the Senate Republican Caucus. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, formerly with the military's legal corps, remains disgusted by Abu Ghraib and the chain of decisions that led to it. Just days before Gonzales's hearing, Senator Richard Lugar blasted the new White House internment-without-trial plan. (That plan, depending on the existence of authoritarian allies to do our dirty work, suggests just how cynical is the President's "democracy on the march" rhetoric.)


So the fight is joined. Gonzales, it is true, is not a fanatical religious conservative or an orthodox strict constructionist. His record suggests instead an enthusiastic apostle of the imperial executive. "Making a record" in the event of his Supreme Court nomination is at best secondary: The far more immediate danger is the record he will make as Attorney General, and the record of defeatism Democrats will establish if they offer anything less than principled opposition. With the Gonzales fight, the Senate--Democrats and Republicans alike--directly confronts issues that have lurked in the background for four years: questions not just of human rights for terrorism suspects worldwide but of a presidency absorbed in its own quest for unrestrained power, both domestic and international.