On torture, Gonzalez, and how the right has it wrong.

[mdhunter]

A cautionary note to my fellow DUers not to get caught in the conservative trap of tying Gonzalez to the Abu Ghraib scandal.

I've heard from acquanitences recently, and have likely been guilty of doing so myself, attempts to discuss toture in the context of the Abu Ghraib prison photos, and Gonzalez's role in such.

I will conceed that with few exceptions the photos so far released don't seem to be torture, strictly speaking. Degrading, criminal, inhumane and punishable, for sure - but maybe not quite, again for most of the pictures, up to the standard of torture.

I am only concerned with Gonzalez's role with respect to the pictures insofar as his opinions helped create an atmosphere condusive to that behavior. But, admittedly, that is the lessor of my worries. I want to know about the treatment prisoners received when there were no cameras around, when they were being interrogated, and how it was that a few of them wound up dead.

If acts tantamount to torture occured, I don't think we have, or will, see the photographs on the nightly news. That is why I think it miguided for the right, and some of us, to say, "Well, looking at those photographs, I don't see real torture, so the Gonzalez memo didn't amount to anything."

The question of torture, Abu Ghraib, and the complicity of Gonzalez are interrelated, but not identical. I suspect the vileness extended deeper into Abu Ghraib than we have been privy to see, and it is what happened there in it's depths with which I am most concerned.

So, the right - and our congressional leaders, it seems - are ready to give Gonzalez a pass based in part on the linking of him exclusively to the prison scandal photos. I still do not know what went on inside, and whether or not this man was the cause of suffering. He should not be confirmed until that question has been satisfactorially answered.