Gonzales-Bush Loyalty A Two-Way Street

Washington Post Analysis: Examining The Career Of The Attorney General Upon His Resignation

(WASHINGTONPOST.COM) 
Gonzales lacked experience in many federal laws or national security matters, and many of his colleagues described him as a relatively passive participant in the sometimes acrimonious discussions that were driven - and often won in the months after Sept. 11 - by Vice President Richard Cheney's ideologically hard-line legal counsel, David Addington.

Gonzales was "unassuming, pleasant, and quiet," said a former official who sat in interagency meetings on terrorism matters. "He never made an impression on me." The suspicion that Gonzales served as a passive or disconnected figurehead while other, more politically-minded officials decided events would later resurface among lawmakers in the controversy over the prosecutor firings.

But it was Gonzales, as White House counsel and later as Attorney General, whose name appeared at the bottom of some of the most controversial classified documents justifying harsh CIA and Defense Department treatment of U.S. detainees suspected of involvement in terrorism.

Two months after the 2001 terrorist attacks Gonzales and Addington jointly drafted an order authorizing those captured on the battlefield in the counter-terror fight to be tried by military tribunals instead of civilian courts. Under the Pentagon's initial tribunal rules, conviction would come from a two-thirds vote, appeals would be extremely limited, and all facts and legal issues would be adjudicated by the military.

The Supreme Court said last June that the tribunals were neither authorized by Congress nor required by military necessity, and it blocked them from proceeding. The court also repudiated a second Gonzales legal claim, made in a Jan. 2002 memo embraced by Bush, that the president had the authority to exempt detainees captured in Afghanistan from the human rights protections mandated by the Geneva Conventions.

Gonzales had sought to justify his position by claiming the counter-terror effort made the convention's strict limitations on detainee treatment "obsolete," a viewpoint that outraged then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard B. Myers and other senior military officials. A Defense Department panel would later conclude that Bush's decision to accept Gonzales's advice played a key role in the establishment of abusive interrogation practices at for the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

When the Supreme Court ruled this position illegal last June, it affirmed that the Geneva Conventions must be applied to detainees held by the United States anywhere. So Gonzales and his deputies last fall persuaded Congress to raise the threshold for criminal prosecutions for violating the conventions, and allow the military to introduce evidence from confessions obtained through "cruel, unusual, or inhumane" interrogations by the CIA or the military before 2005. Congress is now discussing whether to change that law.

Gonzales also was closely associated with a controversial loosening, in Aug. 2002, of the U.S. definition of what constitutes prohibited torture. The underlying legal opinion was written for the CIA by the Justice Department, but it was briefed twice to Gonzales at the White House before its final adoption. Those sessions included detailed descriptions of the suffering that detainees would experience during CIA interrogations that incorporated such methods as simulated drowning.

Under the new definition, only physically punishing acts "of an extreme nature" were considered prosecutable, and those using torture with express presidential authority or without the intent to commit harm could be considered immune from prosecution. These conclusions were later cited approvingly in a Defense Department memo authorizing "exceptional interrogations" at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where FBI agents claimed that abuses were occurring.

Most legal experts have long said that global torture prohibitions allow no exceptions. But Gonzales expressed no objections to the proposed interrogation methods and did not suggest major changes to the Justice Department memo, according to officials familiar with the briefings.

After the memo's public release sparked an outcry among human rights and legal scholars around the world, former Gonzales deputy Timothy E. Flanigan called the memo "inappropriate in a sort of sophomorish way" and Gonzales himself called its conclusions "unnecessary, overbroad discussions" of abstract legal theories. In Dec. 2004, the administration withdrew its key passages, but without explicitly addressing where the "bounds" of presidential power lie.

Gonzales - who had repeatedly asked, "are we being forward-leaning enough" in policy discussions on interrogations - admitted no personal error in those events. "Sometimes people do things that they shouldn't do," Gonzales said at his confirmation hearing in Jan. 2005. "People are imperfect...and so the fact that abuses occur, they're unfortunate but I'm not sure that they should be viewed as surprising."

As the attorney general, Gonzales continued to serve as a reliable advocate for White House policies. He publicly questioned the reliability of FBI accounts of abusive interrogations at Guantanamo; he also defended the practice of "extraordinary rendition," the process under which the United States sometimes transfers detainees in the war on terrorism to nations where they may undergo harsh interrogation, trial or imprisonment.