The attorney-general comes to town

[Briar]

The attorney-general comes to town
Fred Halliday


Alberto Gonzales's evasions and apologetics about torture expose the United States administration’s wider moral blindness, says Fred Halliday.






Alberto Gonzales, the attorney-general of the United States, is all that the modern state would wish to have as its representative: detached in the fulfilment of his bureaucratic obligations; obedient to, if not obsequious towards, his boss; wordy and word-twisting in matters of legal definition; stonewalling on matters of substance; and, above all, distinctly cold in matters of human concern.

When he took the stage at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London on 7 March 2006, to speak on anti-terrorism policy and the need for international cooperation, Gonzales – the highest legal authority in the executive branch of the world's leading democracy – did not immediately command attention. Yet the attorney general, a former White House counsel, is the man who presided over (and to a considerable degree served to authorize) a range of contentious US detention policies, from Guantànamo to Abu Ghraib, from "rendition" to "stress positions".

Gonzales was evasive on matters of substance, jocular in response to questions touching on matters of human suffering. Asked if he thought that setting dogs on naked prisoners was a form of torture, he said he did not give opinions on individual detention practices. He shifted responsibility – and hence blame – from the department of justice to the department of defence when it suited him. Above all, he was apparently oblivious and indifferent to the consternation, rage and concern which recent US policies – enacted following the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington – have occasioned.

There is nearly always something slightly chilling when groups of mid-Atlantic government officials, arrayed in phalanxes of grey suits, get together to discuss their security concerns. But never, in more than thirty years of observing such occasions, have I seen such an appalling, collusive, complacent and – in its own understated way – evil, performance as this.

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http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization/attorney_general_3399.jsp#

[Demeter]

1. Too Bad There's No War Crime Warrant Out For Gonzales Yet.