January 04, 2005
Alberto Gonzales in a Capture Hood
Alberto Gonzales in a "capture hood." Now that's a picture I'd pay the AP to see. Especially, if that's what he's wearing when he answers the questions of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I'd like to hear him explain that the sensation of being deprived of the full use of his senses isn't a life-changing experience; that as soon as he's confirmed as Attorney General of the United States he's going to forget all about it.
As Counsel to the President, Alberto Gonzales prepared memos advising his boss on the legality of torture. That was his job; to explain the laws that even apply to the man in the hightest office of the land.
But, that's not exactly what Mr. Gonzales did. When it came to the use of torture, he wrote memoranda (documents that record what people have agreed to and want to remember) providing an explanation of why the international prohibitions against torture don't apply to captives who aren't regular soldiers, especially if their treatment doesn't actually kill them.
There are some people who would like to question Mr. Gonzales about the pictures of people, bloodied and beaten by their captors and restrained in their own excrement for days. They argue that the people who engaged in those acts were acting under his direction--that his memoranda for the President were sent over to the Pentagon and the CIA and the FBI and provided a whole lot of people with legal cover to do unspeakable things.
I don't want to see those pictures. Mr. Gonzales isn't in them and there's always the possibility that the captives, having been driven to the edge of insanity, were out of control and a direct threat to their keepers.
The capture hoods are another matter. They've obviously been purchased in bulk and their ubiquitous use, especially on the civilians being rounded up by the thousands in Iraq, are testimony to an official policy of torture, perpetrated on such a scale that it couldn't have been ignored by the people in charge of our government. The whole world has seen them.
So, the only question, it seems to me is whether Mr. Gonzales is perceptive enough to recognize torture when it's presented to him. That's what his testimony from inside a capture hood would reveal. He could tell us whether the inability to see, to hear clearly, to smell anything but the stench of the fabric and his own breath and the consequence of inhaling the same air he'd just expelled didn't make an impression that would stay with him to the end of his days.
Of course, Mr. Gonzales sitting in front of the Senators (and a few dozen photographers) won't experience quite the same level of fear as hooded captives being prodded with weapons and yelled at in a foreign tongue. There's virtually no chance that he might be executed on the spot, as we know from news accounts and the testimony of our troops, a significant number of Iraqis, hooded and not, were.
But, though torture is a near-death experience and it's what Mr. Gonzales argued was OK, it's probably not necessary replicate it exactly. After a few hours inside a hood, Mr. Gonzales should be able to tell us what we need to know; whether he still holds that opinion or if, on the basis of personal experience, he is convinced that torture is immoral, in addition to being illegal; behavior the Attorney General of the United States would not tolerate under any circumstance.
Perhaps it was all a bad mistake. But, admitting a mistake would mean admitting that torture happened. And that would raise the question whether the judgement of the man who wrote memoranda claiming that torture is legal can be trusted not to make a similar mistake again.
Posted by Hannah at January 4, 2005 04:15 AM