Welcome to uExpress featuring Richard Reeves — The Best Advice and Opinions The Universe!
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.