Gonzalez On Justice
The reasons for Bush to become president of Iraq:
• The United States is already on Bush autopilot; his agenda is safe in the hands of Dick Cheney, who wrote a lot of the playbook anyway.
• Karl Rove is getting bored and needs a real challenge, and Iraqi campaigning makes the rhetorical phrase ''political bloodletting'' real.
• Bush could wear his ''mission accomplished'' flight suit all the time.
• Iraq is running out of its own politicians.
• Short campaigns mean less time to be caught in tongue-twisting contradictions.
• Bush can institute his Social Security reforms without carping from the elderly voters' lobby or economists -- Iraqis may not live long enough anyway.
• It guarantees that the United States gets exactly the kind of leadership it wants in Baghdad.
• As a Texan, he'll fit right into a country that has more guns than cars.
• Iraq has a crying need for someone who knows the ``awl bidness.''
• The climate is more like Texas' than D.C.'s.
• Many Iraqi people, too, speak English with an accent.
• Unmarried daughters have to live at home and stay out of trouble.
• Thanks to Saddam Hussein's precedent, no problem defying international treaties.
• Bush could find himself signing a death warrant for Hussein, the guy who ``tried to kill my dad.''
• No alcohol.
• No term limits.
• Iraqis love faith-based initiatives.
FROM "The Australian"
Under interrogationWashington
correspondent Roy EcclestonJanuary 08, 2005
IT was supposed to be just a few bad apples and largely limited to Iraq but a spate of new internal memos from the FBI has provided fresh accusations that the abuse of US prisoners in the "war on terror" has been systematic and sanctioned.The memos also suggest the harsh techniques - "tantamount to torture", according to the International Committee for the Red Cross - were often used at Guantanamo Bay, where two alleged Australian al-Qa'ida members - David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib - are in custody.
Habib, through his lawyers, made detailed claims this week that he was brutally tortured in Egypt after being transferred there by the US in October 2001, following his capture in Pakistan.
The US allegedly "rendered" him to Egypt because it wanted interrogators there to do their dirty work. Habib says he was subject to electric shocks, beatings and threats of drowning over six months before being shipped to Guantanamo.
The US denies it has such a policy, which would be illegal under international law. Increasingly though, America faces accusations it no longer relies on others to do the torture.
Reports of American troops brutalising captives have badly damaged the US's image. This week a dozen of the US's most senior retired military officers pointed the finger of blame at George W. Bush's top legal adviser Alberto Gonzales who appeared yesterday at a torrid Senate committee hearing considering whether to confirm his appointment as attorney-general.
The officers included several former top military judges, regional commanders-in-chief, and General John Shalikashvili who was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the 1990s. They didn't blame Gonzales exclusively for the problem but argued he was a prime cause of it.
Citing legal advice Gonzales gave Bush after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the officers said Gonzales "appears to have played a significant role in shaping US detention and interrogation operations in Afghanistan, Iraq [and] Guantanamo Bay".
Their chief concern was Gonzales's memo to Bush on January 25, 2002 advising that the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to the war in Afghanistan. The war on terrorism, he wrote, presented "a new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva's protections".
The former military officers said they were especially troubled because the White House decision to depart from the Geneva Conventions went "hand in hand with the decision to relax the definition of torture and to alter interrogation doctrine accordingly".
That was a reference to a memo from the Justice Department in August 2002 advising Bush that torture of al-Qa'ida terrorists might be justified in some cases.
The memo was drawn up on Gonzales's instructions after the CIA, seeking more aggressive methods to extract information from a senior al-Qa'ida terrorist, wanted to know how far it could go within the law.
The result was a legal ruling that defined torture so narrowly it would allow everything short of the pain experienced in serious physical injury, organ failure or even death. Only mental pain that lasted months or years qualified as torture, it argued.
Gonzales's role in the "torture memo" has been unclear. The Washington Post said this week he had chaired the meetings considering the memo. At least one meeting included a detailed description of the interrogation methods the CIA wanted to use, the paper said.
These included open-hand slapping, the threat of live burial and "waterboarding" described as strapping a prisoner to a board with his feet above his head, wrapping the face in wet towels and dripping water on to the head.
Testing on US troops "proved to produce an unbearable sensation of drowning," said the Post.
Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday he still believed the Geneva Convention didn't apply to al-Qa'ida, and should not. But he said he would never support torture.
Still, he did admit he had supported the legal position taken in the original torture memo. Today he says he supports a different definition of torture, after the Department of Justice suddenly revised its policy last month to say pain did not need to be severe to constitute torture.
But critics say the damage had already been done. Gonzales's advice that prisoners did not have Geneva protections, coupled with the "torture memo", led to a range of new "permissive" interrogation methods for the CIA and military.
Gonzales rejected that line, saying it was a lack of supervision and training that led to "confusion" by some interrogators about what was permissible, and not his legal advice.
He also pointed out that Bush early on explicitly ordered that all prisoners be treated humanely as if they did have the protections of the Geneva Convention.
Yet in the eyes of US military interrogators, the legal rulings stripped prisoners of some of their historic protections and opened the door to harsher treatment.
Geoffrey Miller, the general who ran Guantanamo before moving to Iraq where he was accused of implementing similar methods at Abu Ghraib, has denied any abusive interrogations were used.
A stack of FBI memos obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union paints a different picture.
"Top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers," says Anthony Romero, the director of the ACLU.
"Mr Gonzales bears much of the responsibility for creating the legal framework and permissive atmosphere that led to the torture and abuse at Guantanamo and elsewhere."
The FBI documents started to emerge in early December. One FBI agent called the interrogation methods at Guantanamo "torture techniques".
Another FBI official wrote to his bosses in May 2003 of a sharp exchange with Miller about what the FBI saw as ineffective and aggressive interrogations.
"Both sides agreed the bureau has its way of doing things and the DOD has their marching orders from SecDef," the memo said, referring to the Department of Defence and the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
"Although the two techniques differed drastically, both generals believed they had a job to do."
There was much the FBI saw and did not like. In August last year, an FBI agent reported seeing a prisoner in an interview room with loud music and strobe lights, "with an Israeli flag draped around him".
An FBI agent also reported that at different times he entered rooms in which the air-conditioning had either been turned up so high that the prisoner was shaking with cold, or that it had been turned off to make it "unbearably hot".
Gonzales denies his memos created a "permissive environment" for interrogators, although he admits some were confused about what they could do. If there was harsh treatment it was because "there wasn't adequate supervision".
The US had never condoned torture, he said, and sounded sceptical about the accuracy of the FBI allegations about Guantanamo - claims that didn't jell with his experience and information.
But in The New York Times last week, reporter Neil Lewis quoted a range of former Guantanamo intelligence officers and interrogators, all anonymously, detailing other examples of techniques they used at the base.
One in six inmates were said to suffer the harsh treatment, and the justification given was that interrogators had great flexibility in extracting information "because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base".
According to his critics, the absence of the Geneva protections was thanks largely to Alberto Gonzales - the man who will be America's top law officer.
