Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (86104)	11/14/2004 4:08:52 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793980

You can expect the Dems to try to run with this issue in the confirmation hearings. Another page in the torture memo saga INTEL DUMP Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman report in Newsweek on some details about what role White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales played in the White House's debates over the laws of war and their application to detainees in the war on terrorism. Out of this debate came the decision to set aside the Geneva Conventions for Al Qaeda detainees, the decision to lock them up at Guantanamo Bay, and the now infamous torture memoranda. According to Newsweek, Gonzales played somewhat of an arbitrating and mediating role in debates between various factions within the Bush administration: msnbc.msn.com ... Gonzales's precise position was often a mystery. "When everybody else in the room was arguing, he's sitting there silently," says one former colleague. But Gonzales ultimately signed off on all of the administration's most controversial legal moves—including declaring U.S. citizens "enemy combatants" without permitting them to see lawyers and authorizing unorthodox interrogation techniques that critics say set the stage for the Abu Ghraib scandal. One legal issue that worried Gonzales from the start, sources tell NEWSWEEK, was that U.S. officials—even those inside the White House—might one day be charged with "war crimes" as a result of some of the new measures. Gonzales first raised the issue in a Jan. 25, 2002, memo to President George W. Bush arguing against granting Geneva Convention protections to Taliban and Qaeda prisoners captured in Afghanistan. He noted that a 1996 U.S. law permitted prosecution for violating Geneva Convention bans on "inhumane treatment." A determination by Bush that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the Afghan prisoners "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act" by future "prosecutors and independent counsels" who might view administration actions in a different light, Gonzales wrote. The same concern later prompted Gonzales—at the request of the then CIA Director George Tenet—to seek a memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel concluding the president could authorize the use of torture as a wartime interrogation technique (thereby immunizing CIA agents from being charged with violating a federal antitorture law). The disclosure of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo to Gonzales set off a firestorm, and top Justice officials demanded the White House repudiate the far-reaching legal claim. Gonzales later seemed to do that at a White House press briefing. But privately, some associates say, Gonzales was very much involved in the torture memo from the start. "The White House got exactly what it wanted," says one Justice official. Since then, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Justice Department's internal watchdog unit has quietly opened an inquiry into whether the lawyers who sent the memo to Gonzales breached their ethical obligations by seeming to condone torture. [Emphasis added] Analysis: The last part, about a DOJ inquiry into the lawyers who wrote the torture memos, is news. Until now, critics like me have charged that the lawyering in these documents fell far short of what was acceptable for a public servant, let alone one in elite offices like the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel or White House Counsel's office. But by and large, those criticisms have gone nowhere, and I have assumed this was because the lawyers were simply giving the client what he wanted. (Interesting side question: who is the client in a public law position like OLC chief? Is it the President? The AG? The Constitution? The nation? The Justice Department? One's answer will reveal a great deal about how one does this job.) We'll see where this inquiry goes. But I think its findings and results ought to become part of the record in Judge Gonzales' confirmation hearings for Attorney General. He seems to have played a key role in the decisionmaking process on this issue. On balance, I think the Senate's constitutional prerogative to inquire of him before giving its advice and consent to his nomination outweighs the claims of executive privilege which are sure to be thrown up by the White House in response to any effort to learn about its deliberative processes. This story ain't over -- not by a long shot.