Attorney General Nominee Unsure if Torture is Legal

	Gonzales speaks
	The New York Times Saturday, Jan 8, 2005

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/07/opinion/edgonzales.html

It was nice to hear Alberto Gonzales tell the Senate Judiciary Committee in his opening statement Thursday that he doesn't approve of torture and that as attorney general, he'll uphold the law. But things went rapidly downhill after that. By the time the hearing ended, Gonzales, now the White House counsel, had turned it into one of those depressing exercises in avoiding straight answers and evading accountability. The spectacle brought to mind the hearings last spring when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team dutifully denounced the horrors of Abu Ghraib and then refused to accept any responsibility.

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Gonzales said the Abu Ghraib photos "sickened and outraged" him.

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But he would not acknowledge that he or any other senior administration official was to blame, even though he was a central figure in the policy decisions that laid the groundwork for the abuse at Abu Ghraib and other U.S. military prisons.

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In broad terms, Gonzales offered the politically necessary repudiation of the Justice Department memo that said President George W. Bush could authorize Americans to torture prisoners with impunity and that redefined torture to exclude almost any brutality.

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But it took a half-dozen questions by almost as many senators to get Gonzales to say declaratively that he now rejects that specific view, which the administration allowed to stand for nearly two years, until it was disclosed by news accounts. And then he equivocated astonishingly when asked whether U.S. soldiers or intelligence agents could "legally engage in torture under any circumstances."

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"I don't believe so, but I'd want to get back to you on that and make sure I don't provide a misleading answer," said Gonzales, who went through many hours of preparation for these very questions.

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