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Originally published on November 16, 2004 in the Chicago Sun Times

BY JESSE JACKSON

Is Abu Ghraib something that this country wants to reward? Is the torture that shamed us across the world and angered the professionals in the Pentagon for putting our own troops at risk now to be embraced and celebrated?

It is hard to imagine anyone less suited to be attorney general after Sept. 11 than John Ashcroft, President Bush's unfortunate choice for his first term. Amazingly, with Ashcroft's resignation, Bush seeks to have him succeeded by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, the zealous partisan who generated the memos that argued the president had the right to trample the Geneva Convention and authorize the torture of prisoners -- and that led directly to the crimes of Abu Ghraib.

The attorney general is America's lawyer. He or she is supposed to be not a partisan operator but a thoughtful advocate of justice. With the fears generated by Sept. 11 and the terrorist threat, we need an attorney general who can rouse the Justice Department and the FBI to pursue those who would harm us, even while protecting the rights of the innocent. We need someone who understands that you cannot defend America by trampling the Constitution, freedoms and rights that you are tasked to defend. Gonzales has shown that he doesn't understand that loyalty to the law must supercede loyalty to his patron. Even without the Abu Ghraib memos, Gonzales would be a suspect choice.

He is a long time crony of Bush. For years, he was counsel at Vinson and Elkins, the firm that represents Enron and Halliburton, both under active investigation by the Department of Justice. Gonzales got contributions from Enron when he ran for the Texas Supreme Court. As a member of that court, he accepted $3,000 from Halliburton just before the court was to hear an appeal of a case involving Halliburton's liability to an employee. Amazingly, Gonzales did not take himself off the case for his clear conflict of interest.

Worse, as chief legal counsel for then-Gov. Bush in Texas, Gonzales wrote Bush a memo on each death penalty case from which Bush decided whether the defendant should live or die. Atlantic Monthly analyzed the memos and concluded that Gonzales repeatedly failed to give the governor crucial information about the cases -- from ineffective counsel to actual evidence of potential innocence.

As White House counsel, Gonzales produced memos arguing that torture was limited only to extreme violence that led to maiming or "organ failure." He argued that the Geneva Convention, the law of the land that U.S. soldiers invoke to defend themselves when they are captured, was "quaint" and "outdated" in a war on terror.

He argued that, in a time of war, the president was above the law, could invoke his national security prerogatives and that subordinates torturing prisoners under the president's authority had a legal defense of necessity. America was shamed when the sordid extremes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo came to light. The administration blamed it all on a few "bad apples," and pushed to prosecute a handful of low-level soldiers.

Will the torture champion win approval in the Senate? Many Democrats are said to be cowed by the president's victory. Moderate Republicans who know better -- like John McCain or Chuck Hegel -- tend to line up and salute the White House when push comes to shove. And, of course, Hispanic groups want to applaud the nomination of a Latino to be attorney general. They face the same kind of choice that African-Americans faced when George Bush I named Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

In the Thomas nomination, I argued hard that we'd come too far to support a nominee solely on the basis of race, gender or religion. The obvious pride involved in the nomination was far outweighed by the threat posed by a jurist who wants to roll back civil rights, women's right to choose or, in this case, the basic rule of law.

Is the president above the law? Is Abu Ghraib representative of American justice? Our Constitution of checks and balances is mocked by a presidential claim of a royal prerogative to do as he pleases in the name of national security. By nominating the champion of Abu Ghraib as his attorney general, Bush disgraces far more than himself. He shames America.