The first political battle since United States President George Bush’s re-election begins on Thursday at a Senate hearing to confirm as attorney general the president’s nomination of a lawyer caught up in the scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
Alberto Gonzales, currently his chief legal adviser, told Bush in early 2002 that the White House was not bound by the Geneva conventions in dealing with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
In August that year, he helped orchestrate and approve a Justice Department memorandum arguing that interrogators could use techniques that the Red Cross has since described as ”tantamount to torture”.
His role will come under close scrutiny, but he is expected to survive. Republicans consolidated their hold on the Senate in November and some Democrats are uneasy about blocking the country’s first Hispanic attorney general.
Gonzales is expected to promise to honour US international obligations.
”I pledge that, if I am confirmed as attorney general, I will abide by those commitments,” his testimony says, according to a transcript quoted by The Associated Press.
But the government’s critics will use the hearings to publicise the White House’s role in creating permissive conditions for harsh interrogation.
On the eve of the hearings, a dozen former senior military officers wrote an open letter to the Senate judiciary committee expressing concern about Gonzales’s advice.
It showed ”no respect for decades of military judgements about the importance of the Geneva conventions and the rules of interrogation,” said General Joseph Hoar, a former head of the US central command.
”His opinions, and the actions that followed, not only put our troops at risk, they put our nation’s honour at risk.”
The documents under scrutiny will include a draft letter to the president in January 2002 saying that the ”new paradigm” of the war on terrorism ”renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners”.
An inquiry last year found that the president’s subsequent executive order on interrogations in February paved the way for some of the abuses uncovered at Abu Ghraib jail, outside Baghdad.
Some reports on Wednesday suggested that the letter had been drafted by Vice-President Dick Cheney’s legal adviser, David Addington. His apparently influential role is also likely to come under scrutiny, as an indicator of Cheney’s power in the White House.
Later in 2002, Gonzales convened a group of conservative lawyers to review the interrogation guidelines, after the CIA complained that it was unable to extract possibly life-saving information from a leader of al-Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah. They produced a memorandum giving interrogators greater leeway in using methods involving stress and duress on captives. — Guardian Unlimited Â