Bush’s new sheriff reveals a double standard on torture

[emad]

Sunday Times

Comment: Andrew Sullivan: Bush’s new sheriff reveals a double standard on torture

As nominees go, Alberto Gonzales, the man George W Bush has chosen as his prospective attorney-general, is an appealing figure. A boyish-looking 49-year-old, he’s a Latino from humble beginnings who is poised to become America’s chief law enforcement officer.
In his Senate confirmation hearings last week, he was poised, calm, even beguiling when evasive. But his nomination has raised issues a little deeper than mere biography or charm.

You know things have become somewhat dark in Washington when one of the first questions Gonzales was asked — by the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee no less — was: “Do you approve of torture?” The answer, mercifully, was: “Absolutely not.”

And the truth is that there is no evidence that he does. But the evidence we do have — all in government documents — is that Gonzales’s legal judgments as White House counsel upheld the argument that the president was entitled as commander-in-chief to sanction the torture of detainees in the war on terror anywhere in the world.

Gonzales argued that Al-Qaeda prisoners did not qualify for protection under the Geneva conventions, and that even if they did, the president had the authority to overrule both those conventions and American law forbidding torture. Another memo from the Justice Department defined torture in a narrow way, permitting what most reasonable people would think of as brutality in the interrogation of terrorist suspects.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1431300,00.html

[Nikepallas]

1. What the hell gets me is the fact that this piece of work

has gotten as far and the nominating process. No other true President would even hold his head up trying to nominate a person like this.

He wrote the memos allowing torture their is proof.