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. [more]
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