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.
The president, exercising the powers granted him by Gonzales, nevertheless decided he would grant all terror war prisoners Geneva protection — at his discretion. The defence secretary subsequently approved the use of non-Geneva techniques at Guantanamo Bay for a few weeks before rescinding the order. And only last week, the administration formally withdrew its lax policy.
We also know that the administration sent the general responsible for interrogation at Guantanamo Bay to overhaul interrogation at Abu Ghraib. After that, the worst abuses occurred.
That’s all we know for certain about the direct policy directives of top Bush officials. Last week they declined to release more memos or documents to the Gonzales hearings.
The basic policy amounted to a presidential assertion that the prisoners were scum, deserved to be treated as such, but should be treated humanely nonetheless: a somewhat mixed message, to say the least. The distinction between a handful of known Al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and thousands of captured suspects in Iraq and elsewhere was not firmly drawn.
The consequences? Well, we now know a great deal about what has gone on in US detention facilities under the Bush administration. Several government and Red Cross reports detail the way many detainees have been treated.
We know for certain that the US has tortured five inmates to death. We know that 23 others have died in US custody in suspicious circumstances. We know that torture has been practised by almost every branch of the US military in sites all over the world — from Abu Ghraib to Tikrit, Mosul, Basra, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
We know that no incidents of abuse have been reported in regular internment facilities and that hundreds have occurred in prisons geared to getting intelligence. We know that thousands of men, women and children were grabbed almost at random from their homes in Baghdad, taken to Saddam’s former torture palace and subjected to abuse, murder, beatings, semi-crucifixions and rape.
All of this is detailed in the official reports. What has been perpetrated in secret prisons to “ghost detainees” hidden from Red Cross inspection we do not know. We may never know.
This is America? While White House lawyers were arguing about what separates torture from legitimate “coercive interrogation techniques”, the following was taking place. Prisoners were hanged for hours or days from bars or doors in semi-crucifixions; they were repeatedly beaten unconscious, woken and then beaten again for days on end; they were sodomised; they were urinated on, kicked in the head, had their ribs broken, and were subjected to electric shocks.
Some Muslims had pork or alcohol forced down their throats; they had tape placed over their mouths for reciting the Koran; many Muslims were forced to be naked in front of each other, members of the opposite sex and sometimes their own families. It was routine for the abuses to be photographed in order to threaten the showing of the humiliating footage to family members.
We have no evidence that any of this gained any actionable intelligence. And the random way in which people were dragged from their homes at night into under-manned and chaotic internment facilities did a great deal to lose the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis. When you use the headquarters of Saddam’s secret police for interrogation, you are not signalling something that might be called “liberation”.
Gonzales is not directly responsible for all this. But it’s clear that military commanders believed that their higher-ups had told them to take the gloves off. Cases are also being discovered in which prisoners were sent to countries that use much worse torture, such as Egypt, in clear violation of the Geneva conventions. Gonzales participated in a memo that sanctioned such practices.
We do not know if any of this has stopped. Abuses at Abu Ghraib continued after the scandal broke. Before the scandal FBI officials and others at the CIA had complained about what was going on at Guantanamo Bay. The abuses were not stopped then — either a sign of amazing insubordination on a widespread scale or a sign that these practices were approved.
I write about this with extreme anguish. I believe in this war as a war of liberation and increased security. I never believed America would stoop to this kind of horror. I still find it hard to believe.
Worse, it’s becoming clearer what Bush’s ultimate view is. None of the commanding officers in Iraq has been disciplined. One of the few hold-overs from the last administration is Donald Rumsfeld who, as secretary of defence, is the man ultimately responsible for the mess. Gonzales has been rewarded with an appointment to run the Justice — yes, Justice! — Department.
And the president, on the rare occasions he is challenged on this, simply reiterates that he is repelled and would never sanction any of it. Either he is dissembling or he doesn’t know what his military is doing. What other conclusion can we draw?
