UNITED STATES: Torture advocate to be attorney-general

Rohan Pearce

Months ago, civil libertarians and supporters of democratic rights might have greeted the news of John Ashcroft's imminent retirement from the position of US attorney-general with relief.

After all, Ashcroft, a nutty fundamentalist Christian who spent $8000 on curtains to cover up the "rude bits" on statues in the Department of Justice, had presided over an enormous rollback of civil liberties. But no-one should expect anything different from his replacement, former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.

During his time as the Bush administration's senior lawyer, Gonzales was implicated in its "normalising" of torture, and rejection of prisoners' rights in war.

A memo that Gonzales sent Bush in 2002 argued that the "war on terror", "places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians... In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

The exposure of the torture scandals at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq demonstrate just which provisions the White House believes have been rendered "quaint".

A May 24 article in US magazine Newsweek explained that, from Gonzales' point of view, an added benefit of declaring that the "war on terror" rendered the Geneva Conventions void was preventing US officials being charged with war crimes.

Who knows, at least he may remove the curtains.

From Green Left Weekly, November 17, 2004.

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From GLW issue 606