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The harshest words and judgments came from Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.

Speaking of Gonzales’ role in the formulation of new and deeply disturbing U.S. policy on torture in war, on the defining and treatment of prisoners taken or seized in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on our holding pens at Guantanamo, Graham was direct and focused. He was the one who said, without fancy words or legalisms, that Gonzales had played a crucial role in “creating legal chaos,” in “putting our troops in jeopardy” and in “losing the moral high ground.”

“I do believe we have lost our way,” said Graham. …

Gonzales lost me in the third paragraph of his opening statement: “The Department of Justice’s top priority is to prevent terror attacks against our nation.”

I don’t agree with that — and neither does history. The office of attorney general, created by the Judiciary Act of 1789, was a one-man operation to prosecute lawsuits before the Supreme Court, which was created by the same act. Times change. The Justice Department now has 112,000 employees and multiple tasks. Obviously fighting terrorism is one of them, a priority of all the government. It is the top priority of the new Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed many duties (particularly immigration control) that were once delegated to Justice. Perhaps fighting terrorism could be considered the top priority of the Department of Defense these days, or even of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a small part of the Justice Department.

But the Justice Department’s priority should be “justice,” or as it officially defines its own role: “to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans.” …

The best analogy to these times in our history might be the excesses of World War I and its aftermath, which climaxed with the Palmer Raids from 1919 to 1921.

Alexander Mitchell Palmer, a former congressman who was President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, arrested and detained without charge more than 15,000 people on suspicion of being communists or anarchists or whatever. Socialist elected public officials were arbitrarily removed from office. A clothing salesman in Connecticut was thrown in jail for six months because someone overheard him saying he thought Lenin was very smart. And things got worse after an anarchist blew himself up in front of Palmer’s house.

Palmer made terrorism his top priority and ended up disgracing the Justice Department. I find it hard to believe Gonzales is as foolish and dangerous as Palmer was. But he has lost his way. Our new nominee was fool enough, or blindly loyal enough to his president, to clumsily argue that torture and secret detention were necessary now to keep America free — all in the name of justice.
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[via m-pyre]

“Promoting Torture’s Promoter”
By BOB HERBERT
January 7, 2005

The Bush administration hasn’t changed. This is an administration that believes it can do and say whatever it wants, and that attitude is changing the very nature of the United States. It is eroding the checks and balances so crucial to American-style democracy. It led the U.S., against the advice of most of the world, to launch the dreadful war in Iraq. It led Mr. Gonzales to ignore the expressed concerns of the State Department and top military brass as he blithely opened the gates for the prisoner abuse vehicles to roll through.

There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence. In the Bush administration, that mixture has been explosive. Forget the meant-to-be-comforting rhetoric surrounding Mr. Gonzales’s confirmation hearings. Nothing’s changed. As detailed in The Washington Post earlier this month, the administration is making secret plans for the possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists who will never even be charged.

Due process? That’s a laugh. Included among the detainees, the paper noted, are hundreds of people in military or C.I.A. custody “whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts.” And there will be plenty more detainees to come.

Who knows who these folks are or what they may be guilty of? We’ll have to trust in the likes of Alberto Gonzales or Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush’s new appointee to head the C.I.A., Porter Goss, to see that the right thing is done in each and every case.

Americans have tended to view the U.S. as the guardian of the highest ideals of justice and fairness. But that is a belief that’s getting more and more difficult to sustain. If the Justice Department can be the fiefdom of John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzales, those in search of the highest standards of justice have no choice but to look elsewhere.

It’s more fruitful now to look overseas. Last month Britain’s highest court ruled that the government could not continue to indefinitely detain foreigners suspected of terrorism without charging or trying them. One of the justices wrote that such detentions “call into question the very existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been very proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention.”

That’s a sentiment completely lost on an Alberto Gonzales or George W. Bush.

USATODAY.com – Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams “to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts,” and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004. …

The contract may be illegal “because Congress has prohibited propaganda,” or any sort of lobbying for programs funded by the government, said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “And it’s propaganda.”

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said he couldn’t comment because the White House is not involved in departments’ contracts. …

Williams’ contract was part of a $1 million deal with Ketchum [a public relations firm] that produced “video news releases” designed to look like news reports. The Bush administration used similar releases last year to promote its Medicare prescription drug plan, prompting a scolding from the Government Accountability Office, which called them an illegal use of taxpayers’ dollars.

Williams, 45, a former aide to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is one of the top black conservative voices in the nation. He hosts The Right Side on TV and radio, and writes op-ed pieces for newspapers, including USA TODAY, while running a public relations firm, Graham Williams Group.

So, your tax dollars are being spent to fund commentators and create fake news to brainwash you. Slavery is Freedom! mjh

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: New rape-treatment debate By Marie McCullough, Knight Ridder Newspapers

The Justice Department has issued its first-ever medical guidelines for treating sexual-assault victims — without mention of emergency contraception, the standard precaution against pregnancy after rape. …

In the half-page on pregnancy “risk evaluation and care,” the protocol says to take victims’ pregnancy fears “seriously,” give a pregnancy test, and “discuss treatment options, including reproductive-health services.”

Advocates note that emergency contraception — nothing more than high-dose birth-control pills — reduces the chance of pregnancy 75 to 90 percent, but only if taken within 72 hours of sex. …

The development of national guidelines was required under the 2000 renewal of the decade-old federal Violence Against Women Act to develop uniform, quality care for sexual-assault victims. …

Emergency contraception is controversial because, like stem cells and cloning, it has become tangled in the politics of abortion. The method usually works by keeping an egg from being released or being fertilized. However, it sometimes may prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus — equated with murder by some conservative groups and the Catholic Church (which opposes all forms of contraception).

“I think it’s very smart not to put that in the guidelines,” said Dr. George Isajiw, a board member of Physicians for Life, a Philadelphia anti-abortion group.

By giving emergency contraception, he said, “you’re giving a dangerous drug that’s not doing any good, or else you’re causing an abortion. As a moral principle, a woman has the right to defend herself against an aggressor. But she doesn’t have the right to kill the baby.”

Washington > Transcript: Senate Judiciary Committee Confirmation Hearing” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/politics/06TEXT-GONZALES.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=”>The New York Times > Washington > Transcript: Senate Judiciary Committee Confirmation Hearing

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY (D-VT): … When he was designated for this position by the president, Judge Gonzales said he’s looking forward to continuing to work with friends and colleagues in the White House in a different capacity on behalf of our president. But you know, there are going to be times, there may well be times when the attorney general of the United States has to enforce the law and he can’t be worried about friends or colleagues at the White House; his duty is to all Americans — Republicans, Democrats, independent — all Americans.

At a time when the Republican Party has control of all three branches of the federal government, my worry is that our system of checks and balances may become short-circuited by too few checks on assertions of executive branch authority. My concern is that during several high-profile matters in your professional career, you’ve appeared to serve as a facilitator rather than as an independent force in the policy-making process.

The job of attorney general is not about crafting rationalizations for ill-conceived ideas; it’s a much more vital role than that. Attorney general is about being a forceful, independent — independent — voice in our continuing quest for justice in defense of the constitutional rights of every single American. …

So these hearings are about nomination, but they’re also about accountability. From the outset of public disclosure of the Abu Ghraib photographs, the Bush administration maintained that any wrongdoing was simply a case of a few bad apples. But as bits of information have been made public, not by the administration but by the press over the last year, it has become clear to all that these incidents at U.S. facilities around the world are not just the acts of a few low-ranking members of the military; rather, in the upper reaches of the executive branch, a process was set in motion that rolled forward that produced scandalous results, almost like somebody opening the floodgates in a dam and the water flowed downstream until it overwhelmed everybody below. …

But senior officials in the Bush White House, the Ashcroft Justice Department, Rumsfeld Pentagon set in motion a systematic effort to minimize, distort and even ignore our laws, our policies, our international agreements on torture and the treatment of prisoners. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and later Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez authorized the use of techniques that were contrary to both U.S. military manuals but also international law.

Former CIA Director Tenet requested and Secretary Rumsfeld approved the secret detention of ghost detainees in Iraq, did that so they could be hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross. And still unexplained are instances where the U.S. government delivered prisoners to other countries so they could be tortured.

We have to ask: Where’s the responsibility and accountability for these abuses? …

As White House counsel, Judge Gonzales was at the center of discussions on the applicability of the Geneva Conventions to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the legality of detention and interrogation methods that have been seen as tantamount to torture. He oversaw the formulation of this administration’s extreme views of unfettered executive power and unprecedented government secrecy. I hope that things will be different if you are confirmed, Judge Gonzales. I hope that you will be accessible to members of this committee and be more responsive than your predecessor. …
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SEN. ORRIN HATCH (R-UT): Now let me just say — before I ask some questions of Judge Gonzales, I’d like to just take this opportunity to once again recognize the hard work, the dedication and many accomplishments of our current attorney general, John Ashcroft. He has been a terrific attorney general. He’s done a terrific job down there, and I think the way crime has come down and a lot of other things have happened for the betterment of the country are, frankly, because of his leadership. Frankly, it has not been lost on me that many of those who are opposing you today are people who have, in many respects, unfairly vilified the current attorney general over the last four years.
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SEN. KENNEDY: [T]he administration claimed during the hearings that we had with General Taguba that the Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples; there was no higher level of support or encouragement for the mistreatment of detainees. Then we learned that the Defense Department’s working group report of April 2003 had provided the broad legal support for the harsh interrogation tactics and it dramatically narrowed the definition of torture and it recognized the novel defenses for those who committed the torture. Then we learned that the legal basis for the working group report had been provided by the Justice Department in the Bybee memo. Now, that is what’s come up from the administration, that has come up — including the president of the United States. This committee, the Armed Services Committee has asked for these memos. We have depended upon what’s been leaked, what’s been put on the Internet, and what’s been obtained in the Freedom of Information and by various attorneys. So there’s a certain kind of sense by many of us here that the administration — and you’re the point person on the administration — has not been forthcoming on the whole issues of torture, which not just were committed at Abu Ghraib but is happening today, today. Now, the Bybee torture memoranda, written at your request — and I’d be interested in your reactions to this — made abuse of interrogation easier. It sharply narrowed the definition of torture and recognizes new defense for officials who commit torture. For two years, for two years, from August 2002 to June 2004, you never repudiated it. That’s the record. You never repudiated it. …

Now, the Post article states you chaired several meetings at which various interrogation techniques were discussed. These techniques included the threat of live burial and waterboarding, whereby the detainee is strapped to a board, forcibly pushed under water, wrapped in a wet towel and made to believe he might drown. The article states that you raised no objection, and without consulting military and State Department experts — they were not consulted, they were not invited to important meetings….
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MR. GONZALES: [W]ith respect to specific areas that I probably would like to have special emphasis on, of course the first one is the war on terror. I also, because of my background, believe very much in the protection of civil rights, the protection of our voting rights, the protection of our civil liberties. I continue to believe that we have too many drugs in our society, and that should be a focus. I am concerned about the violent crime in our society. I am concerned about the use of certain kinds of weapons in connection with those crimes. I think obscenity is something else that very much concerns me. I’ve got two young sons, and it really bothers me about how easy it is to have access to pornography. And so those are a few things that I would be focused on. But again, I think the Department of Justice is unique and that my goal, as impossible as it may be, or it may seem, is to try to ensure that justice is administered across the spectrum.
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Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.

MR. GONZALES: I believe that I said in response to an earlier question that I do believe it is possible, theoretically possible, for the Congress to pass a law that would be viewed as unconstitutional by a president of the United States. …

SEN. DURBIN: But you believe he has that authority; he could ignore a law passed by this Congress, signed by this president or another one, and decide that it is unconstitutional and refuse to comply with that law?

MR. GONZALES: Senator, again, you’re asking me where the — hypothetically, does that authority exist? And I guess I would have to say that hypothetically that authority may exist. …

SEN. DURBIN: … I’m troubled that you would think, as our incoming attorney general, that a president can pick or choose the laws that he thinks are unconstitutional and ultimately wait for that test in court to decide whether or not he’s going to comply with the law.
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Human Rights First | Human Rights First Blog – The Gonzales Confirmation Hearings

Testimony of Admiral John D. Hutson (Ret. USNavy): Even amidst war we should treat our enemies humanely, to do so is a sign of strength, to not do so is a sign of desperation.

I’m here to speak against the nomination of Gonzales because he does not understand that. His analysis is wrong, morally, legally and practically. It endangers our troops and makes our nation less safe.

His analysis of GCs shows disregard for rule of law and human rights. … I remind the committee that we’re conducting 40 or more death investigations of detainees in American Hands.

28 years in the military taught me: there are 2 indispensable aspects to military: chain of command and accountability…. Government lawyers including Gonzales let down US troops by their ill conceived advice. At the top of the chain of command they set the conditions so that many of those troops would commit serious crimes.

Damage has been done, but it’s never too late to do the right thing. If Gonzales goes on to be the chief law enforcement agent after this. We’re at a fork in the road – this nomination has given you the opportunity to tell the world what you think about those abuses…

The Daily Aneurysm at jabartlett.com

This isn’t about reforming Social Security at all–it’s about destroying it, which has been an extremist Republican goal practically since the program’s inception.

Getting rid of Social Security. Getting rid of the United Nations. Government through tribalism and fear of “the other.” Triumphalist Christianity. No more “activist judges.” Traditional family values. None of this is new stuff. It’s all been simmering on the right since the days of FDR. Only in the last 25 years has it moved from the loony precincts to the respectable ones. But it’s still the same agenda, only in a more expensive suit.

There’s a plausible argument that the South actually won the Civil War, only it took 130 years to claim its victory. Perhaps there’s an equally plausible argument that maybe, 40 or 50 years later than it expected, the John Birch Society is going to win its war against modernity, too.

Inaugural05.com :: Presidential Inauguration – Donor Information

$13,460,000 as of 12/31/04 including:

Exxon Mobil Corporation $250,000
Nuclear Energy Institute $100,000
Occidental Petroleum Corporation $250,000
CheveronTexaco $250,000
General Motors $100,000
Ford Motor Company $250,000
Microsoft Corporation $100,000

AND

Time Warner $250,000

Hell, Time made lots more than $250K putting Duhbya on the cover. mjh

Careful Not to Get Too Much Education…Or You Could Turn Liberal by Dr. Teresa Whitehurst

[T]he Southern Baptist Convention recently considered a proposal to urge all parents to pull their children out of public schools to prevent their exposure to “non-biblical ideas” which, as it happens, run rampant in fields like medicine, physics, archeology, literature, philosophy, history, astronomy, psychology, theology-in short, everything.

What will happen to that innovative American spirit if radical “conservatives” have their way with our educational system? How will the US fare in the global marketplace when certain ideas, or entire fields, become off-limits to students who’ve been indoctrinated to consult their ministers before learning new information?

What will happen to medical research, for instance, if this movement proceeds to its logical conclusion: outlawing the scientific method, a method notorious for not relying on biblical principles?

I fear men like [David] Horowitz because uncensored education is essential to our democracy, our people’s well-being and the nation’s long-term survival. The “conservative” movement that he’s spearheading reminds me of the news reports coming out of Iran in the months just prior to the conservative religious takeover of that country when its professors were warned to present the “correct” views in class.

This movement pretends to be about “balancing” liberal with conservative views, but the reality is a lot uglier than that. As the conversation I overheard suggests, this movement isn’t about balance, it’s about censorship-or even better, self-censorship that’s easily achieved by frightening students with social rejection, hellfire or both. Either way, scholarship is degraded in the process. …

Whether through self-censorship or junk education, our country’s children are paying the price for the political aggression of the far right. Robert Frost once wrote, “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.”

Tempers are short in today’s radical “conservative” America, and the emboldened radical right is in no mood to listen to anyone.