There are thousands of digital photos and even more substantiated reports of this administration and its accomplices torturing prisoners at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay. Yet Senators sat stone faced while he looked them in the eye and told this incredibly transparent lie. We shouldn't expect any more than that from the Republicans on the Committee, we know that the fix is in and that they are participants. But WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRATS? They should have been infuriated and outraged. Why didn't one of them stand up, point a fist at Gonzales and threaten him with perjury charges if he didn't recant that statement? WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRATS???
If Herman Goering had sat in front of this committee and said. "We don't torture people. We don't murder Jews. We don't have concentration camps where people are slaughtered." would this committee have just sat there and nodded??? When the trains come through our neighborhoods and take the gays or the blacks or the Jews or whoever they take this time, will we all just stand there and nod??? WHERE WILL WE DRAW THE LINE???
At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders last month [Dec. 2004] scrapped a legislative measure that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.
In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October…Condoleezza Rice, the National security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy."
Some Democratic Congressional officials said they believed the Bush administration was trying to maintain some legal latitude for the C.I.A. to use interrogation practices more extreme than those permitted by the military. Martin Lederman, a former Justice Department lawyer who left the department in 2002, said…that he believed that the administration had "always wanted to leave a loophole where the C.I.A. could engage in actions just up to the line of torture."
An August 2002 legal opinion by the Justice Department said that interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable without being considered torture. The administration disavowed that opinion last summer after the classified legal opinion was publicly disclosed.
The only public statement from the Bush administration about [restrictions] came last June [2004], when the Defense Department expressed strong opposition to a measure included in the defense authorization bill. That measure, adopted by the Senate, also imposed restrictions prohibiting the use of torture as well as cruel, inhuman and other degrading treatment but applied only to Defense Department personnel.
Source: "White House Fought New Curbs On Interrogations, Officials Say" by Douglas Jehl and David Johnston - New York Times - 1/13/05
During his confirmation hearings, Gonzales said that he and [Bush] oppose "torture and abuse." Yet in his written response to queries from the Senate judiciary committee, he noted that foreign prisoners held overseas can be subjected to treatment by US intelligence officers that is "cruel, inhumane or degrading," even though this sort of abuse is banned by an international treaty the United States ratified. So doesn't that mean that his public testimony to the committee was false? Perhaps a lie? After all, he clearly stated in that written reply that [Bush] and he do support "abuse" in certain cases.
Source: "Capital Games: More Talking Back To Bush" by David Corn - The Nation - January 2005
Source: Stephen Crowley - New York Times
Source: billandkent.com
Source: billandkent.com
Source: billandkent.com
Source: billandkent.com
Orrin Hatch - R / Arlen Specter - R / Patrick Leahy - D
Source: Photo - Doug Mills - New York Times