Reply #9: Perspective

[Martin Eden]

There are several issues here, the most important of which is whether Alberto Gonzales is a good choice for our nation's top law enforcement officer. Today's editorial in the Chicago Tribune (which endorsed Bush and consistently supported him on Iraq) had some worthy observations:

This is not the sort of office that should be given to someone whose prime qualification is a close personal relationship with, and a record of loyalty to, the president. As the most important law-enforcement officer in the country, the attorney general should be a model of independence--as well as the executive branch's conscience on such matters as individual rights, privacy and the rule of law.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0501090551jan09,1,3345594.story?coll=chi-newsopinion-hed

Alberto Gonzales most certainly played a role in the legal aspects of sanctioning what the Red Cross described as "tantamount to torture", and his appointment as AG sends a message to the world that the United States stands by this policy rather than rejects it. It may or may not be unfair to closely associate Gonzales with what happened at Abu Ghraib, but perceptions are paramount in politics and the U.S. should be doing everything it can to regain some of the moral high ground we lost.

I read your article How to Interrogate Terrorists and found it less convincing than The Gray Zone by Seymour Hersh.
http://newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact
(whom your author dismissed as a "left-wing journalist)

Resistance by the FBI, the State Department, and many in the military to Bush's officially sanctioned interrogation techniques and the "migration" of these methods to Iraq in the person of General Geoffrey Miller suggests a policy that deviated from the Geneva Conventions considerably more than Heather Mac Donald (the author of your article) would have us believe. She reveals her ideological viewpoint at the end of the article in her rant against "evil" and I suspect her journalism is more biased than Hersh's.

Alberto Gonzales will be our next Attorney General, but Democrat Senators would be derelict in their duty to "advise and consent" if they hadn't vigorously questioned Gonzales on the torture issue.

We need to step back and look at the larger picture, and from this perspective I see Gonzales as a very poor choice for these times and circumstances.