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U.S. SENATOR PATRICK
LEAHY
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CONTACT: Office of Senator
Leahy, 202-224-4242 |
VERMONT |
Statement of Senator Patrick Leahy,
Ranking Member, Senate Judiciary Committee
Executive Business Meeting On The Nomination
Of Alberto R. Gonzales
To Be Attorney General Of The United States
January 26, 2005
An Accountability
Deficit
When this nomination was first announced, I
was hopeful. I noted at the time that I like and respect Judge Gonzales.
I met with him soon after his designation and wrote to him in advance of
the hearing regarding fundamental concerns. I listened carefully to him
during our confirmation hearing.
The road he has traveled from being a
12-year-old boy selling soft drinks at football games, all the way to the
State House in
Texas and to the White House, is a tribute to
him and to his family. In spite of our disagreements on issues, I have
sought to maintain a cordial personal working relationship with Judge
Gonzales during his years as President Bush’s counsel.
It saddened me to tell Judge Gonzales
yesterday that I cannot in good conscience vote to confirm his
nomination.
My reasons for voting against this nomination
arise from the need for accountability and derive from the nominee’s
involvement in the formulation of a number of policies that have tarnished
our country’s moral leadership in the world and put our soldiers and
citizens at greater risk. Anyone who has served in the military, or who
has a son or daughter who served, knows that these actions violate
everything that our soldiers are taught and everything they stand for.
When President Bush announced this nomination he said that he chose Judge
Gonzales because of his “sound judgment” and role in shaping the
Administration’s policies in the war on terrorism. Based on the glimpses
of secret policy formulations and legal rationales that have come to light,
I believe his judgments not to have been sound. Several of this
Administration’s legal policies have been exceedingly harmful to our
national interests.
As Attorney General, the nominee’s judgment
about our laws would be of enormous consequence. Judge Gonzales has
championed policies that are in fundamental conflict with decades of our
laws, sound military practice, international law and human rights. He
remained silent for almost two years about a deeply flawed legalistic
interpretation of our nation’s torture statute. He also accepted a
patently erroneous interpretation of the torture convention and apparently
believes that the President, when acting as Commander in Chief, is above
the law.
When I asked Judge Gonzales if he agreed with
the Bybee
memo’s very narrow reading of the law, he replied: “I don’t recall today
whether or not I was in agreement with all of the analysis, but I don't
have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the Department.”
This is the memo which concludes that “physical pain amounting to torture
must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical
injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even
death.” Even the Justice Department repudiated this legal memorandum, once
it became public.
Under his restrictive redefinition such
practices as threatening a prisoner with a firearm in a mock execution,
“waterboarding” a person to make him experience the suffocating effects of
drowning, and, as Senator Kennedy noted, perhaps even cutting off a
person’s fingers one joint at a time would not amount to “torture.”
But surely we consider these practices torture when done to
a member of the
U.S. military or to an American citizen.
Perhaps most disturbing of all as a legal
matter is the nominee’s positing of the President as above the law.
Nothing is more fundamental about our constitutional democracy than our
basic notion that no one is above the law. Yet at his June 2004 press
conference and again in his testimony before the Judiciary Committee he
indicated that he views the President to have the power to override our
law and, apparently, to immunize others to
perform what would otherwise be unlawful acts. This is
about as extreme a view of Executive power as I have ever heard. I
believe it is not only dead wrong as a constitutional matter but extremely
dangerous. The rule of law applies to the President, even this
President.
Ironically, it was the Administration of this
President’s father that urged the Senate to ratify the torture convention.
It did so to make clear that the
United States condemns torture and to protect
Americans from this barbaric practice. But if the U.S. President does not
feel bound by the torture convention, then neither will other foreign
leaders.
I had hoped that Judge Gonzales would see
these confirmation hearings as an
opportunity to demonstrate a new openness, to provide a
fuller examination of Administration policies and to back away from the
Administration’s extreme views of virtually limitless Executive power. I
had hoped that during the course of the hearing he would demonstrate the
ability to distinguish between his loyalties as President Bush’s counsel
and the responsibility of the Attorney General of the
United States to represent the American
people. I had even hoped that he would make a credible commitment to work
with us to ensure that meaningful oversight and accountability, which have
been thwarted for years, would resume their proper role in our system of
checks and balances. I was greatly disappointed.
Ultimately, the Attorney General’s duty is
to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law — not to work to circumvent
it. Both the President and the nation are best served by an Attorney
General who gives sound legal advice and takes responsible action, without
regard to political considerations — not one who develops legalistic
loopholes to serve the ends of a particular Administration. The Attorney
General appointed by the President’s father remarked: “Nothing would be
so destructive to the rule of law as to permit purely political
considerations to overrun sound legal judgment.” Judge Gonzales
demonstrates a lack of independence from the President, something that we
cannot have in the chief law enforcement officer in the nation. He cannot
interpret our laws to mean whatever the President wants them to mean. To
do so would deny us the constitutional protections upon which this nation
was founded. The Attorney General is supposed to represent all of the
American people, not just one of them.
At a time when the Republican Party has taken
control of all branches of the Federal Government and Republican majorities
in the House and Senate have chosen not to provide the kind of oversight
needed to balance assertions of Government authority, the Attorney
General’s role is all the more critical.
We have seen what happens when the rule of
law plays second fiddle to the President’s political agenda. This
Administration has taken one untenable legal position after another
regarding the rule of law in the war against terror. It will not admit to
making mistakes. It takes action only after mistakes are made public and
become politically indefensible. Given the Republican leadership in
Congress, the Federal courts have provided what little check there has been
on this President’s claims of unfettered Executive power.
Judge Gonzales’ nomination initially seemed
like a breath of fresh air. I have said how much I personally like Judge
Gonzales. But as I told the nominee when we met within days of the
announcement of his nomination, these confirmation proceedings matter.
They matter because it is the responsibility
of this Committee to explore for the Senate and the American people his
judgment and actions in connection with the tragic legal and policy changes
formulated in secret by this Administration and still cloaked from
congressional oversight and public scrutiny.
America’s troops and citizens are at greater
risk because of those actions and the terrible repercussions throughout so
much of the world. America’s moral standing and leadership have been
undercut. The searing photographs from Abu Ghraib have made it harder to
create and maintain the alliances we need to prevail against the vicious
terrorists who threaten us, including those who struck America nine months
into this President’s first term. Those abuses serve as recruiting posters
for the terrorists.
The Army Field Manual reflects our nation’s
long held policies toward prisoners. It says: “The goal of any
interrogation is to obtain reliable information in a lawful manner….
U.S. policy expressly prohibit[s] acts of
violence or intimidation, including physical or mental torture, threats,
insults, or exposure to inhumane treatment as a means of or to aid
interrogation.”
The Field Manual continues: “The use of torture is a poor technique that
yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and
can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to
hear. . . . It also may place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at
greater risk.”
This is with good reason and in the finest
tradition of our Armed Forces. That tradition began when General George
Washington ordered the Continental Army to treat British and Hessian
prisoners decently after the bloody battle of
Trenton. That is the tradition to which
Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham have spoken so forcefully.
Yet senior officials in the Bush White
House, Ashcroft Justice Department and Rumsfeld Pentagon set in motion a
systematic effort to circumvent, distort and even ignore our laws,
policies and agreements on torture and the treatment of prisoners.
What does this all mean in the real world?
Why should we be concerned about this? Yesterday’s Washington Post
provided a vivid, sickening and depressing account of why this matters. We
need to look no further than to the Iraqi security forces we are trying to
train.
Let me quote: “Twenty months after Saddam
Hussein’s government was toppled and its torture chambers unlocked, Iraqis
are being routinely beaten, hung by their wrists and shocked with electric
wires.”
This morning, a column by Anne Applebaum gave
another account from an Iraqi prisoner: “We were blindfolded and our hands
were tied behind our backs . . . they poured cold water over me and applied
electric shocks to my genitals. I was beaten by several people with cables
on my arms and backs.”
I ask my colleagues, what do American
officials say with a straight face to Iraqi security forces who are
responsible for these acts? Use more humane handcuffs when hanging someone
from the ceiling? Please make sure organ failure doesn’t result from any
of these practices?
The fact is we can say anything, and we can
say nothing, and the result is the same. Say anything, and we now will be
mocked as hypocrites. But to say nothing is to concede the heart and the
soul of what we stand for as a nation. We need to climb our way back to
the moral high ground that has distinguished and dignified our great
country.
That is why this matters.
At his recent inaugural address President
Bush spoke eloquent words about the
United States’ historic support for freedom.
To be true to that vision, we need a Government that leads the way in
upholding human rights not one secretly developing legalistic
rationalizations for circumventing them. To reclaim our moral leadership
in the world, to become a true messenger of hope instead of a source of
resentment, we need to acknowledge wrongdoing and show accountability for
mistakes that this Administration has made.
We have seen departures from our country’s
honorable traditions, practices and established law in the use of torture,
originating at the top ranks of authority, and emerging at the bottom. At
the bottom of the chain of command, we have seen a few courts martial.
At the top, we have seen medal ceremonies, pats on the back and
promotions.
Between these two dissonant images there is a
growing accountability gap, and the Administration’s handling of this
confirmation hearing, which could have helped to narrow the gap, has served
to widen it.
I believe in redemption in public life, as in
spiritual life. But to get to redemption, first there has to be
accountability. This Administration has a large and growing accountability
deficit, and as this confirmation process draws to a close, I must conclude
that the stonewalling continues, and that Judge Gonzales, who could have
become a part of the solution, remains a part of the problem. I am
saddened by the choices that he and others have made in refusing to choose
candor.
Now more than ever, the country needs a
person to be Attorney General who will serve all Americans. There is much
that has gone wrong that this Administration has stubbornly refused to
admit or correct. For this democratic republic to work, we need greater
openness and accountability. It is with those critical considerations in
mind that I must vote against this confirmation.
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