President George W Bush has picked Alberto Gonzales, the White House lawyer who advised him he could disregard the ”obsolete” Geneva conventions, as the United States’s new attorney general.
News of Gonzales’s nomination to the top job at the Justice Department, replacing John Ashcroft, who resigned on Tuesday, was poorly received by US human rights groups, which said he had shown scant regard for the importance of international human rights law.
Jamie Fellner, the head of the US programme at Human Rights Watch, said: ”The elections did not hand President Bush a blank cheque to carry on as before. It is distressing that his first nominee post-election not only doesn’t have a record of defending human rights but has a record of actively opposing their recognition.”
The White House did not comment on the nomination on Wednesday, but said an announcement was imminent. A senior official was quoted on CNN as saying Gonzales was ”very close to the president and someone he knows can be trusted with major challenges”.
As White House counsel, Gonzales was a central figure in the debate in the Bush administration over how to treat prisoners in the ”global war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks.
In a memorandum to the president in January 2002, he argued that the president had the authority to disregard the Geneva conventions.
Arguing that the US was faced with ”a new kind of war”, in which there was a premium on the ability to obtain information quickly from ”captured terrorists and their sponsors”, Gonzales wrote: ”This new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.”
He also described as ”quaint” provisions in the Geneva conventions requiring that enemy captives be given monthly pay, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments.
Gonzales later claimed he was simply outlining the president’s options and that Bush subsequently decided that all captives should be humanely treated, even if not by the letter of the Geneva conventions.
Administration critics, however, said the Gonzales memo, and a subsequent Justice Department memo that he approved, ultimately paved the way for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.
Gonzales, who would be the country’s first Hispanic attorney general if confirmed by Congress, is part of the close circle of advisers who came with Bush from Texas. As the chief legal adviser, one of his jobs was to summarise death-row cases for the governor, who had the power to grant a stay of execution. Bush never did, and Gonzales’s case summaries were criticised as being breezy and skewed against the prisoner.
Legal observers said he was less ideological and more self-effacing than the outgoing Ashcroft, who claimed in his resignation letter that ”the objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved”.
According to some reports the infamous January 2002 memorandum on the Geneva conventions was actually drafted not by Gonzales but by Vice-President Dick Cheney’s hardline chief legal adviser, David Addington.
Newsweek magazine reported that, in the wake of the row, Addington became dispirited in Washington and eager to return to Texas. — Â