Posted on 01/05/2005 10:09:43 AM PST by crushkerry
The confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzales to President Bush’s cabinet post of Attorney General will be the game in town during the next several weeks. Democrats are indignant about Gonzales’ role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. What role? Well, you see Alberto Gonzales wrote a memo. And if you read the memo in juuuuust the right light, you can see that Gonzales signed of on Lynndie England’s sadomasochistic jailhouse party.
Well, not really. But that’s what Democrats will say. Hill Democrats feel rather like the naked pile of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib after having had their hats handed two them on November 2nd, 2004. Apparently they can sympathize more easily with imprisoned terror suspects in Iraq than they can empathize with the innocent victims of 911 and the ongoing terror in Iraq.
So get ready to hear lots of grandstanding about “the torture memo” from people who most recently nominated for president a fellow who has admitted to burning villages and shooting innocent civilians in Vietnam.
And it won’t just be from the radical leftists. Anne Applebaum is no commie, to be sure. But she writes in this morning’s Washington Post:
Although many people bear some responsibility for these abuses, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is among those who bear the most responsibility. It was Gonzales who led the administration's internal discussion of what qualified as torture. It was Gonzales who advised the president that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to people captured in Afghanistan. It was Gonzales who helped craft some of the administration's worst domestic decisions, including the indefinite detention, without access to lawyers, of U.S. citizens Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi.
All this came from a solitary memorandum which said, rather un-controversially, that al Qaida and other terror groups are not nation states and therefore the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the treatment of al Qaida prisoners. Reports the New York Times:
Of the documents that have been made public, only one was written by Mr. Gonzales. In that memorandum, dated January 2002, he advised Mr. Bush that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to fighters captured in Afghanistan. The next month the White House decided that the Geneva Conventions would be applied to Taliban captives but not to detainees linked to Al Qaeda.
The real controversy here is whether or not the United States will fight the terror war with rules and tactics held over from World War II or if we will fight a new kind of war against a new kind of enemy. As Lee A. Casey and David B. Rivkin Jr. write in National Review:
The Geneva POW Convention was one of four treaties negotiated after World War II, with the circumstances of that conflict in mind. It assumed that captured combatants would by and large be young men conscripted into mid-20th-century-type mass armies controlled by nation-states, which themselves were ready and able to comply with the basic rules of war. Neither the treaty's drafters, nor its terms, nor the governments that agreed to it contemplated the development of transnational terror organizations beyond the control of any state, motivated by religious zealotry and capable of delivering massive attacks on the civilian population.
Even so, the Geneva Conventions do not extend POW protections to captured enemy combatants who do not qualify as "lawful" or "privileged belligerents." At a minimum, this status requires a proper command structure, uniforms, carrying arms openly, and otherwise operating in accordance with the laws of war. Those laws forbid the purposeful targeting of civilians — the preferred tactic of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Iraqi "insurgents."
An even more scaled down impression of the controversy breaks it down this way: are we going to fight this war as though we are fighting against terrorists, or as though we are fighting against purse snatchers? Jed Babbin points out in The American Spectator:
The new memo says that the August 2002 definition of torture was wrong to equate severity of physical abuse to that of serious physical injury resulting in organ failure or death. Instead, explaining both the international Convention Against Torture and U.S. law, the memo shows that many prisoner interrogation methods -- which are not allowed in interrogation of suspects in domestic criminal proceedings -- are perfectly permissible in dealing with terrorists.
So the controversy is small: Gonzales authored a single memo that said something rather self-evident about the nature of terrorists and this memo has helped the administration capture and interrogate evil people who wish us harm with new, aggressive tactics heretofore unafforded to US Presidents.
Despite all the vitriol and hyperbole we will hear during the Gonzales hearings, there is virtual unanimity among the pundit class that the Democrats have no prayer of stopping Gonzales’ confirmation. I suggest this is because the case against him has been dastardly blown up by people who have always opposed President Bush’s execution of this war. Indeed, some on the fringiest extremes oppose that idea that we fight it at all.
Ping
The dems are going to get painted with a bold brush in '06. They are taking the side of our emenies against the people with the stones to conduct the war. If this breaks this way there will be a 'supermajority' in the Senate after the '06 election.
Yes, it's a fair chance that the Pubs can get to 60 Senators in 06. :)
What happened to the days when the Dems, as chairmen, would recognize the Reps, who would begin their intro, then immediately gavel them down saying their time was out?
Let the dems have their forum on the capitol steps. The committees do not belong to them!
Why do conservatives support Gonzales? He is the guy, after all, who single handedly opposed Ted Olsen in the University of Michigan case. Because of Gonzales, the DOJ has gone on record in favor of having "diversity" trump merit in college admission.
We could have summarily shot these people when captured. They represent no real country; they are terrorists and bushwackers. They have no more rights than a spy, and should be treated as spies are in wartime.
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