Worse than Ashcroft?
Ted Rall argues Gonzales will be worse than Ashcroft here.
Below is an excerpt:
If Bush gets his way, the nation's chief law enforcement official will be a man whose warped interpretation of presidential power, contempt for due process and gleeful deconstruction of fundamental human values puts him at odds with every patriotic American.
Gonzales is the author of the infamous August 2002 "Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A," a legal opinion issued while on his current job as White House Counsel. The 50-page "torture memo," which provides government interrogators justification to torture suspects in the war on terrorism, isn't just another memo. It's a benchmark position paper, a document that Administration figures from Bush and Rumsfeld down to CIA interrogators at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib still rely upon to protect themselves from possible future prosecution for war crimes.
....Even the extreme mistreatment Gonzales still calls "torture," says Gonzales, is permitted--up to and including the death of the victim. This is because a post-9/11 torturer "would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by...Al Qaeda."
The military's judge advocate generals (JAGs), not known for squishy liberalism, say that Gonzales is nuts. "It's really unprecedented," says a senior military attorney. "For almost 30 years we've taught the Geneva Convention one way. Once you start telling people it's okay to break the law, there's no telling where they might stop." ....
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