The Tortuous Mr. Gonzales

The Senate confirmation hearings for Mr. Alberto R. Gonzales, White House Counsel, nominated by El Presidente to be Attorney General, are set for tomorrow before the Judiciary Committee (on C-SPAN starting at 10 a.m.).

We get somewhat lost in all the memoranda that flew in and out of the Bush White House during the last two years on the issue of torture, so forgive us while we sort this out (helped a great deal by a news account published this a.m. in the NYTimes, featuring leaked information out of the Justice Department):

1. In a memorandum, dated January 2002, Mr. Gonzales advised President Bush that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to fighters captured in Afghanistan. The next month the White House decided that the Geneva Conventions would be applied to Taliban captives but not to detainees linked to Al Qaeda. That memorandum concluded that interrogators had great leeway to question detainees using "coercive techniques" that they could assert were not torture. Never addressed: how do you tell Taliban from Al Qaeda?

2. Mr. Gonzales, on behalf of the White House, intervened directly with the Department of Justice, requesting a memorandum on torture (and it's pretty clear he was nudging the lawyers over there to give him what he wanted ... a virtual blank check for his boss to do whatever needed to be done to get information out of captives). According to the NYTimes, "Mr. Gonzales's request ... was somewhat unusual ... because he went directly to lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, bypassing the office of the deputy attorney general, which is often notified of politically delicate requests for legal opinions made by executive-branch agencies, including the White House." In other words, Gonzales found some lawyers to do this dirty work for him, while giving their bosses plausible deniability. The lawyers Gonzales found were primarily Jay S. Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the notorious John Yoo, now on the law faculty at the University of Calif.-Berkeley. Mr. Bybee and Mr. Yoo indulged Mr. Gonzales's wildest fantasies. They produced the much-debated Justice Department memorandum of Aug. 1, 2002, which limited the definition of torture as treatment causing pain associated with death or organ failure and said that Mr. Bush could circumvent domestic and international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security. Mr. Gonzales has spoken of this memorandum as a "response to questions," without saying that most of the questions were his and that he had carefully picked the lawyers who would do the answering. The NYTimes's unidentified source said that Mr. Gonzales was very good at eliciting the answers he wanted.

3. The Justice Department formally rescinded the August Bybee/Yoo memorandum just last week, quietly posting the revision without announcement on its web site on December 30th. The new memorandum issued a legal opinion saying that torture should be more broadly defined and that there was no need to say that President Bush had the authority to sanction torture because "he has said unequivocally that it is not permitted." The revision stated that "torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms." It rejected the language in the earlier Bybee/Yoo memorandum, which said that only physical pain "of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure" constituted torture punishable by law. The timing of this new revision is interesting, and Justice Department officials told the NYTimes that Mr. Gonzales was involved in its preparation.

So ... Need a quicker summary? Here 'tis:

El Presidente feels he needs to torture people in the name of spreading democracy. His lawyer, Mr. Gonzales, manufactures (or induces Justice Dept. flunkies to manufacture) a "legal" opinion that it's just fine for El Presidente to torture certain undesirables because -- hey! -- it isn't actually torture anyway. But -- oops! -- Mr. Gonzales gets nominated to head the Justice Dept. (nice irony, that!), so the Justice Dept. once again obliges its masters and puts out a new memorandum which tries to pull Mr. Gonzales' walnuts out of the cracker.

Tell us again about the most moral presidency of all times.

UPDATE: Here's another account of Mr. Gonzales, also based on unnamed sources, which suggests that Gonzales was actually just a patsy for Dick Cheney's lawyer, David S. Addington. Here's the key passage: "...another official familiar with the administration's legal policymaking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because such deliberations are supposed to be confidential, said that Gonzales often acquiesced in policymaking by others. This might not be the best quality for an official nominated to be attorney general, the nation's top law enforcement job, the administration official said."

Of course, acquiesence to El Presidente is what has kept Gonzales at Bush's side for almost a decade.