[Mb-civic] (no subject)

[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult" 
Democracy Now! 

Wednesday 26 January 2005 

As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares to vote today on the nomination of 
Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, we hear a speech by Pulitzer-prize 
winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh on torture from Guantánamo to Abu 
Ghraib to Vietnam. [includes rush transcript] 

Four British citizens have been released without charge from Guantánamo Bay 
after nearly 3 years in custody. They are suing the US government for tens of 
millions of dollars in damages. 

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to 
vote on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General. As White 
House counsel, Gonzales helped lay the legal groundwork that led to the torture of 
detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. 

We turn now to Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. 
Hersh first exposed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the New Yorker magazine 
in April 2004 and is author of "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu 
Ghraib." He spoke last month at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in New York. 

Transcript 

Amy Goodman : We turn now to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, 
author of the book, Chain Of Command: The Road From 9-11 to Abu Ghraib. He 
spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York. 

Seymour Hersh : About what's going on in terms of the President is that as 
virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history 
more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush 
feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed - I don't 
know whether he thinks he's doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or 
whether it's some mandate from - you know, I just don't know, but George Bush 
thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been 
doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the 
number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body 
bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a 
price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's 
inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them 
who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of 
us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who 
voted for him weren't voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're 
going to have. 

It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question 
is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move 
him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely 
appropriate? All of us - you have to - I can't begin to exaggerate how frightening 
the position is - we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, 
because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, 
the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, 
is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what 
it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon - by 
statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has 
been wanting to do, and that is basically man hunting and killing them before 
they kill us, as Peter said. "They did it to us. We've got to do it to them." 
That is the attitude that - at the very top of our government exists. And so, 
I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can - you know, 
there's not much more to go on with. 

I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all 
forget this word "insurgency". It's one of the most misleading words of all. 
Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of 
disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action 
against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we 
started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are 
fighting the very people that started - they only choose to fight in different 
time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. 
It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us 
take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're 
very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no 
intelligence. Maybe it's - it's - it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what 
they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. 
We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that 
we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. 
There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, 
it's - somebody in the system, an officer - and by the way, the good part of 
it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me. 

There's a lot of anxiety inside the - you know, our professional military and 
our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill 
of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do - 
there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways - one 
of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken 
over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed 
the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have 
to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, 
but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, 
with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our 
Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few 
men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What 
they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside - 
the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but 
the intelligence people. There were people - serious senior analysts who 
disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White 
House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the 
last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's 
what's happening. The real target has been "diminish the agency." I'm writing 
about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a 
tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power. 

On the other hand, the facts - there are some facts. We can't win this war. 
We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the 
other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since 
we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the 
Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and 
is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him 
on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing 
happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number 
of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically 
bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force 
base I think we're operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft 
carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of 
the operational fights. There's no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. 
They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not 
told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry 
out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to 
it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq - some of you 
remember Vietnam - Iraq is being turn into a "free-fire zone" right in front 
of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a 
Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban 
bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was 
three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at 
home. I'm one of the people - I don't call people at work. I call them at home, 
and he has one of those caller I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he 
said, "Welcome to Stalingrad." We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's 
being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it. 

We have a President that - and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper - 
when a reporter or journalist asked - actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about 
lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up 
and says, "Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do it," 
as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing - nothing 
to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say 
again and again, "well, we don't do torture." We know what happened. We know 
about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some 
profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The 
ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what's happened with 
the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the 
not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, 
when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our 
children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in 
the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being 
blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with 
a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these 
people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only 
stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to 
know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell 
you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. 
In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on 
there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. 
Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on 
it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became 
public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute 
seven "bad seeds", enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit 
they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were 
basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in 
charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb 
things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They've gotten 
away with it. 

So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell 
you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington 
Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in 
Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the 
Post did a little story about it. They quoted - his name was Hodak. His 
father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern 
Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it 
was like after his son died. He said, "Today everything seems strange. Laundry 
is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing 
and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away." 
There's going to be - you know, when I did My Lai - I tell this story a lot. 
When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so 
almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that 
they had - for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of 
American soldiers - the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers 
don't see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by 
snipers, because It's always hidden. There's inevitable anger and rage and you 
dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. 
They're "rag-heads". They're less than human. The casualty count - as in Sudan, 
equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case, you know, 
it's - in this case, these - a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. 
They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, 
maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up - they 
thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men 
and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they 
had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and 
Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit - the 
Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They 
collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and 
Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids 
who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, 
those kind of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, 
who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment - one of 
the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the 
mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him 
under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were sitting 
having the K rations - that's what they called them - MRE's now - the kid 
somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began - and 
Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told 
Medlow: Kill him, "Plug him," he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful 
lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it so Calley ran up as everybody 
watched, with his carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in 
the back of the head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his 
foot blown off. He was being medevac'd out. As he was being medevac'd out, he 
cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, "God has 
punished me, and he's going to punish you, too." 

So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I 
called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, "I'm coming to 
see you. I don't remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew 
over there and to get there, you had to go to ­ I think Indianapolis and then 
to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this 
little farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the 
Norman Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 
80. Gristled, old. Way old ­ hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm 
here to see your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He knows you're coming. 
Then she said, one of these great - she said to me, "I gave them a good boy. 
And they sent me back a murderer." So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New 
Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of 
you know about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all 
of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working 
class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to 
talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is 
simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at 
Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of - The sequence is: 
they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in 
the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The 
daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different 
person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think 
it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for - you know, 
these - some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West 
Virginia. This not - this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her 
husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of 
the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment 
in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from 
everybody. Then over - as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this 
daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black 
tattoos put on her, over increasingly - over her body, the back, the arms, the 
legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads 
the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, "Were you there?" 
She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes 
- the daughter had come home - before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had 
given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with 
the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while 
she was overseas, sort of a - I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns 
out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the 
kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said 
I went and looked at the computer. She knows - she doesn't know about 
depression. She doesn't know about Freud. She just said, I was just - I was just 
going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say 
anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and 
sure enough there was a file marked "Iraq". She hit the button. Out came 100 
photographs. They were photographs that became - one of them was published. We 
published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is 
something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man 
leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on 
each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What 
we didn't publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man - pretty 
hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. 
There's another story. 

For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of - you know, 
we all deal in "macro" in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're 
nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. 
Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no 
clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld 
anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of 
integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual 
integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over - by cultists. Anyway, 
what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get 
around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids 
come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never 
hear about. That's wards - you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, 
but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of 
vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, 
there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors 
are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical 
treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to 
extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going 
to - it's - I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling 
from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the 
soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're 
going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more 
dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be 
the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold 
your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the 
third thing is Europe - Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage 
there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see 
something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody - it's going to 
be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody 
stops buying our bonds, our credit - our - we're spending $2 billion a day to 
float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, 
everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see 
enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another 
year, and the damage he's going to do between then and now is enormous. We're 
going to have some very bad months ahead. 



Go to Original 

Speedy Gonzales &the Rule of Law 
By Huck Gutman 
The Statesman, India 

Wednesday 26 January 2005 


> Ethics, in today's America, primarily refers to sex: no Presidential 
> fooling around, no sanctioning of homosexual love. But what about the appointment 
> as Attorney General of a person for whom the Geneva Convention is 'obsolete' 
> and 'quaint', asks Huck Gutman.
 
What does it mean that Alberto Gonzales is about to be approved as Attorney 
General of the USA? That this particular appointee of President George W Bush 
will become the chief law enforcement officer of the American nation? 
The President's advisors and spin doctors proclaim his elevation from the 
President's counsel to his current position, as a moment of historic magnitude. 
For the first time in American history, a Hispanic will occupy one of the four 
highest administrative offices in the nation. They cite his story, the rise 
from rags to riches, as proof that democracy and egalitarian opportunity are 
alive and well in the world's sole superpower. Even the often-pugnacious 
Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking member of the opposition party on the 
Judiciary Committee which vetted and will vote on the nomination, recently said: 
"The road you've travelled, from being a 12-year-old boy, just about the age 
of your oldest son, selling soft drinks at football games, all the way to the 
state house in Texas and our White House is a tribute to you and your family." 

Bush is no doubt mindful of the Latino success story that Gonzales embodies. 
Hispanics, according to exit polls, gave 44 per cent of their votes to Bush in 
the just-concluded presidential election. Gonzales' appointment is a matter 
of pride for many Hispanics, even among those who didn't support or vote for 
Bush. 
But something other than identity politics and cultural pride are at stake in 
the Gonzales appointment. 
More than any other event, this appointment, and the ease with which it will 
pass the Senate without significant opposition, reveals the extent to which 
the USA is moving ex-peditiously, and without significant complaint, along a 
road that leads to what one can only, uncomfortably, call fascism. 
Gonzales stands as the apostle of torture in the administrative councils of 
the American polity. When it appeared that questioning of "suspects" held as 
possible informants about the murderous attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 
11 September 2001 might violate the Geneva Convention, international law and 
American law, Gonzales asked Department of Justice attorneys for a definition 
of what constitutes torture, and to whom the prevailing legal restrictions on 
torture might apply. 
On 25 January 2002, a memorandum from Gonzales to Bush stated that "the war 
against terrorism is a new kind of war" which "renders obsolete Geneva's strict 
limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its 
provisions." The prohibition against torture was thus found to be "obsolete" 
and "quaint", as if it were a hand-cranked phonograph in our day of stereos and 
portable CD players. 
Much was made of the USA's previous President, Bill Clinton, and his 
dalliance with a young intern, Monica Lewinsky. Again and again, conservative critics 
called him "immoral". Let there be no doubt: there is something morally wrong 
about breaking marriage vows and about using the perquisites of power and age 
to take advantage of a young woman. But the fate of a nation scarcely swung on 
some sexual escapade in the White House, however distasteful and upsetting 
the incident may have been. Such is not the case with Gonzales and his unethical 
work in the White House. 
It is more difficult to talk about ethics than we often imagine. Philosophers 
do it, religious sages do it, but in daily life we are more likely to talk 
about other things: sports, cinema, political intrigues, celebrities. When we 
talk about ethics, we often fall back on morality, on the codes that have been 
handed down to us by our parents, our religion, our schooling or (more and more 
in today's world) what pundits tell us in the mass media. 
But ethics goes to the very deepest concerns of human life. It inquires into 
how we will live together with others ­ sometimes those immediately around us, 
sometimes those of that larger world of community or town or nation or even 
world ­ in a way that is compassionate, fair, just and responsible. 
What does it mean to be a "good" man or woman? That is the central question 
addressed by ethics, the very core of ethical inquiry. 
Whatever answer one moves toward in defining what comprises a "good" human 
being, we can be certain that the answer does not include condoning the torture 
of other human beings. 
Yet, at this moment the USA is poised to anoint as its chief law enforcement 
official a man who counsels and condones the use of torture. 
Nor was his January 2002 memo aberrant, an accident. Six months later, in 
August 2002, Gonzales cleared a Justice Department memo that stated bluntly that 
both international treaties such as the Geneva Convention and US law do "not 
apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants." 
Simple reasoning, but terrifyingly strange: If you're not an American, then it is 
OK for the American authorities to torture you. 
That memo, which is addressed to Gonzales, opens with the words "You have 
asked for our Office's views regarding the standards of conduct under the 
Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or 
Punishment." It states that Americans acting under the President's authority can 
inflict "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment to prisoners without violating 
laws and treaties against torture. Torture can properly be claimed, according to 
the memo prepared by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, only when there is 
severe pain of "an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical 
injury such as death or organ failure." If you aren't dead or close to it, it 
isn't torture. 
Mark Danner, the author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Gharib and the War 
on Terror, recently wrote with admirable clarity of Gonzales: "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." 
In his opening testimony before the US Senate, which continues to consider 
his nomination, Gonzales claimed he was only soliciting opinions, that this was 
his job as counsel. 
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. 
In the first place, he passed along opinions over his signature, so that 
those opinions carried his implicit, and likely his explicit, consent. 
In the second place, choosing to ask if torture is legal, and asking if it 
can be narrowly defined as only the most harrowing of conduct, are not innocent 
acts: they presume that extant prohibitions against torture might and probably 
should be weakened. His request was to cast about for legal loopholes rather 
than to seek to clarify fundamental principles of the rule of law. And, in 
fact, Gonzales' staff played a role in preparing the memo which found those 
loopholes: Timothy E Flanigan, his deputy counsel, talked about a draft of the 
memorandum with lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel before it was finalised. 
(It should be noted that when the memo became public, and only then, the 
administration repudiated it.) 
But the worst offence is one which the Senators ­ who, not wanting to offend 
Hispanic voters, will end up overwhelmingly approving Gonzales as Attorney 
General ­ refuse to address. 
The purpose of legal counsel is not merely to tell one's employer what is 
legal. The purpose of a counsel is to "counsel": to offer sound advice, not just 
about narrow constructions of legality, but about the rightness of proposed 
courses of action.. "This might be legal," a counsel should advise his client, 
"but it is the wrong thing to do." It may be wrong because it is impractical, 
or because it has negative operational consequences, or because is costly, or 
because it opens one to litigation by those who challenge its legality. But it 
may also be wrong because it is unethical. 
The fact that Gonzales solicited and then passed along advice which defined 
prohibitions against torture as quaint and obsolete is not as egregious as the 
fact that he passed that advice along without saying, "This is a legal 
opinion, but anyone can offer an opinion. This opinion is wrong, both because it is 
too narrow legally, and more importantly, because it is unethical." He should 
have informed Bush that the Geneva Convention protects people everywhere from 
unjust and inhumane treatment, and that its abrogation would have severe 
consequences for the conduct of nations ­ and specifically, in the diminishing of 
protection for US troops abroad. (Secretary of state Powell submitted a memo to 
the President saying exactly that. But then, Powell is now on the way out, and 
Gonzales is now on the way in.) 
He should have said torture is heinous, and when carried out systematically, 
it is a crime against humanity. Instead, he looked for ways to justify 
torture. 
Later he, like everyone in the Bush administration, professed amazement that 
American soldiers tortured prisoners at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq. (Well, they 
weren't dead and didn't have organ failure, so maybe it wasn't really 
torture?) (But I should not jest, not even parenthetically: We are speaking of 
torture, here.) 
Such a man as Gonzales should not be walking the streets. He should be 
brought up for trial on the basis of enabling war crimes. Instead, he is the 
soon-to-be confirmed next Attorney General of the USA. Its chief law-enforcement 
officer. 
Ethics seem irrelevant in the USA today, despite much talk by pollsters that 
ethical issues have an effect on elections. (That sort of ethics refers 
primarily to sex: no Presidential fooling around, no sanctioning of homosexual 
behaviour through "gay marriage".) Meanwhile, Bush is determined to use his power 
to get what he wants, even if what he wants is wrong. Even if what he wants is 
to torture suspects and to appoint a possible war criminal to head up the 
legal functions of the US government. 
And the American people? A lassitude has set in. There is work, there is 
shopping, there are television and video games and popu
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