Gonzales nomination hearing: US Senate welcomes a war criminal

The testimony highlighted in these reports is, in fact, a lie. More fundamentally, however, the focus on whether or not the nominee for the office charged with upholding the US Constitution is for or against the barbaric methods associated with Nazism and military dictatorships is a stark indication of the terminal degeneration of American democracy.

The hearings had a farcical character. There was a pretense of “tough questioning” for the nominee, whom, as everyone present was well aware, is deeply complicit in war crimes. No one was “tough” enough to suggest that Gonzales should be behind bars rather than occupying the chief law enforcement position in the US. Nor did a single Democrat even go so far as to declare that Bush’s lawyer should be denied the nomination.

In what is now a standard device for blocking any unflinching examination of the issues at hand, much was made of Gonzales’s ethnic background.

Democrats and Republicans fell over each other in heaping praise upon the nominee for his Mexican-American roots and celebrating his nomination as some kind of Horatio Alger story, proving American racial equality. Gonzales himself claimed his ethnic background gave him a special sensitivity to civil rights.

All of this is nonsense. Gonzales’s rise has proven only that a lawyer willing to work on the behalf of the wealthy and powerful against the poor and oppressed, and who has no compunction about turning the law inside out to serve corporate interests, can go far in American bourgeois politics, whatever his or her background.

This career path took Gonzales from a law firm where he worked for the corporate criminals at Enron, to the Texas state house, where he exhibited his love of civil rights by helping George W. Bush sate his appetite for executing human beings, no small number of them Latinos. He then followed Bush to the White House, where his ability to justify and rationalize crimes in high places took on global significance.

As far as his Hispanic heritage goes, the operative tradition is that of Torquemada and Augusto Pinochet.

After Gonzales delivered his opening remarks Thursday, the first question came from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican chairman, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania: “Do you approve of torture?”

“Absolutely not, Senator,” Gonzales replied earnestly. Pressed on the issue by the panel’s ranking Democrat, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the nominee insisted that any questions about whether the US president has the power to authorize torture were “hypothetical” because the White House and the Justice Department had issued formal statements disavowing the practice.

Just a day after Gonzales appeared before the Senate panel, Army Specialist Charles Graner Jr. was hauled before a court martial at Fort Hood, Texas, to face charges of mistreating detainees, assault and dereliction of duty in connection with the systematic torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in the cellblocks of Abu Ghraib.

Graner and the half-dozen other junior enlisted personnel who have faced prosecution for their heinous actions at Abu Ghraib do not enjoy the luxury of citing the latest government memos and dismissing the issue of torture as “hypothetical.” He faces 17 years in prison, and the others could also get lengthy jail terms.

Attorneys for the soldier are invoking the infamous defense attempted by the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg: he was only following orders.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/gonz-j08.shtml