Al Promises to Follow International Law This Time If Appointed As the New Yes-Man
Gonzales pledges to uphold treaties barring torture
Attorney general nominee responds to memo critics
MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 11:07 a.m. ET Jan. 6, 2005
WASHINGTON - Attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales vowed on Thursday to abide by international treaties on prisoner treatment if confirmed, but Senate critics asserted that policies he supported led to the torture of terrorism suspects at U.S. military prisons.
Senate Democrats vowed to ask tough questions of President Bush’s longtime legal adviser, with Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, saying his legal opinions had led to practices that were “tantamount to torture.”
"I hope things will be different if you are confirmed, Judge Gonzales," Leahy told the former Texas Supreme Court justice at the outset of his confirmation hearing.
Gonzales, who most recently served as President Bush's White House counsel, pledged in his opening remarks to abide by treaties that ban torture of prisoners if he is confirmed by the Senate as the first Hispanic attorney general.
Democrats: White House withholds documents
At the outset of the hearing, Democrats said that the White House had refused to give them all of the memos and documents they need to trace how policy decisions were reached regarding the treatment of alleged terrorists taken prisoner.
They released a letter from David Leitch, the White House's deputy counsel, telling Leahy that the administration has already turned over all of the documents it plans to make public.
Democrats said the refusal left them without clear answers about Gonzales' role in shaping President Bush's post-Sept. 11 terrorism policies.
"It appears that legal positions that you have supported have been used by the administration, the military and the CIA to justify torture and Geneva Convention violations by military and civilian personnel," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., in a statement prepared for the hearing.
"Memos you solicited, endorsed, approved or acquiesced in undermined longstanding traditions in our military and weakened important protections for our own troops serving abroad by violating the military's golden rule: that we treat captured enemy forces as we would want our own prisoners of war to be treated," the statement said.
Kennedy was referring to two legal memos prepared while Gonzales was White House counsel.
In a three-plus-page memo in January 2002, Gonzeles wrote arguing that al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were not the traditional soldiers such as the United States faced in World War I, World War II and the Korean War.
“In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments,” Gonzales wrote.
Gonzales approved second memo
He also approved a second memorandum, written by former Justice Department official Jay Bybee, that argued that a U.S. official or soldier accused of violating the 1996 War Crimes Act in interrogating a suspect could invoke national defense to avoid prosecution if, for example, “an impending terrorist attack threatens the lives of hundreds if not thousands of American citizens.”
There may be cases, Bybee wrote, where “an attack appears increasingly likely, but our intelligence services and armed forces cannot prevent it without the information from the interrogation of a specific individual.”
On March 13, 2003, more than a year before his memo was leaked to the press, Bybee won Senate confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
A month after Gonzales wrote his 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-Qaida 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.
Pledge to uphold treaties
In his opening remarks, Gonzales repeated the argument that terrorists are not soldiers and so are not covered by the Geneva treaty. Nonetheless, he said, “we must be committed to preserving civil rights and civil liberties.”
Bush has made clear that the government will defend Americans from terrorists “in a manner consistent with our nation’s values and applicable law, including our treaty obligations,” Gonzales said. “I pledge that, if I am confirmed as attorney general, I will abide by those commitments.”
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.
‘Judge Gonzales is right’
But Sen. John Cornyn,
R-Texas, said the criticism is partisan, and that it is settled law that Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.
“Now I hate to ruin a good story for the president’s political opponents, but there is one important problem with this criticism: Judge Gonzales is right,” Cornyn said in his introduction of Gonzales.
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 stands behind 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.
Confirmation expected
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.
MSNBC.com's Tom Curry and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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