la commedia comincia

This may be my last post on Gonzales for a while: the title is both a reference to Dante, who would have recognized the current evolving gulag and placed all players accordingly, and to I Pagliacci (The Players), one of the five Italian operas I heard over and over as a child.

So  let it begin, now,  the pathetically short two days of hearings, with a similarly pathetic short list of people actually willing to stand up and testify in opposition. I've been increasingly aware (even before the bracingly cruel comment posted by my baby brother below) that this has shaped up into a depressingly partisan battle, and that it feels ever-more like a rigged game despite the best efforts of so many people I respect deeply.

I write this  about 32 hours after the news conference where I heard testimony from two of the twelve generals who signed the letter raising concerns about Gonzales -- which duly made  a few headlines before bowing to  the late-breaking investigative stories from Dan Eggan at the Washington Post and Neil Lewis at the Times that tell us how  he did it.  They describe how Gonzales actively, methodically sought advice, from selectively convened task forces, that approved a "forward-looking" interpretation of war crimes law,  of the sort that last week's Justice memo was only the latest effort to stamp out.

One could only wish that these fine reporters had got on the job with these stories back in November. Instead, we have a little rerun of October operating on the verge of the hearings.

I have received emails on Gonzales now from most of the organizations I support, many of whom I've referenced on this blog. Some late arrivals: Stop Family Violence, finally recoiling in horror from the concept of Gonzales in charge of enforcing the Violence Against Women Act, and the PEN Campaign for Core Freedoms, whose membership includes writers who have been tortured in their home countries. The latter includes a letter from Salman Rushdie, who ends with a demand both poetically ohrased and politically astute:

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A May  2004 survey by the University of Maryland's Program of International Policy Attitudes confirmed that two-thirds of Americans believe that governments should never use physical torture; 81 percent oppose beatings, submersion, and electric shocks; 89 percent reject sexual humiliation; three in four reject forcing detainees to be naked in any circumstances. Seven in ten Americans agree with the Supreme Court that detainees are entitled to an independent hearing to challenge their detention.     We ask that you treat these hearings not as a pro forma review of a Cabinet appointment, but as an opportunity for Senate to re-ratify the UN Convention Against Torture.  (italics mine - cml)
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Of course, this all amounts to a Casablanca moment: "Round up the usual suspects." I didn't include those who've been in this since that fateful Remembrance Day when Gonzales was nominated (HRF, HRW, Moveon, Amnesty, People for the American Way). Even many the generals on yesterday's letter were familiar to me: Gen. Brahms is now a  military attorney in Southern California to whom I used to refer cases of distressed soldiers, while Gen. Evelyn Foote is familiar from her brave duty on dozens of panels on military abuse. (Some, like Shalikashvili, as pointed out by someone on Kos, were  also among those who stood up for John Kerry, who has been notoriously silent on an issue he knows far too well.)  The media knows this too, and treats the campaign accordingly.

In other words, we've already been marginalized. And here's the kicker: they're doing it, partly, by calling us racist. If you oppose naming as the highest legal officer of the land the legal architect of  a multinational gulag , you're an extremist who opposes the "first Hispanic attorney general."  Even as they lay out more facts to fill in that dizzying flow chart. the major media keeps whispering that mantra: a Google search for Gonzales' full name + "first hispanic" or Latino + "attorney general" generated nearly 20,000 hits since the nomination. On Google News. the number drops, but the larger pool is a sign of how much that trope has governed the governing narrative on Gonzales.

Until the story is about a scrappy young lawyer promising to do better and repeating his calculated plea: "`Just give me a chance to prove myself' - that is a common prayer in my community." His heartwarming struggle against obstacles is applauded by all but the hard-hearted extremists bent on  making Gonzales a "scapegoat." OK, I get it now.  The unfairly targeted scapegoat isn't Lynndie England, whose smart lawyer must undoubtedly have added Gonzales to her list of subpoena requests, or other footsoldiers at Abu Ghraib who had only the dim light of Alberto's echo chamber to guide them, that are being held up as scapegoats. No, the person unfairly scapegoated is the man who, just as, back in Texas, he'd told Governor Bush what he wanted to hear in order to approve  executions -- ignoring evidence that defendants had a first-grade IQ, had been brutally abused, had inadequate counsel, or all of the above-- found a way to make Bush's initial directives  legal. He looked first not to what the Geneva Procotols and the U.S. War Crimes Act, the DOD guidelines on interrogation, offered as guidance - but  to others who could help him devise what to say, if someone else noticed they were being violated.

General Joseph Hoar, who spoke out yesterday, noted that "There's no evidence he ever consulted DoD legal counsel," and that the "working group," which excluded most military lawyers, was convened only after the Navy's general counsel had threatened to go public with his concerns. "Our military lawyers always try to help their commanders stay inside the law," added Brigadier General James Cullen: "They  must inform commanders of upcoming sanctions" if planned actions might divert too much. "Gonzales had the same responsibility," he added. Noting an attorney's responsibility to keep his/her client within the bounds of accepted law (see the ABA's Model Code of Professional Conduct), he said with wonder:  "At no time did Mr. Gonzales say we are going too far: there are problems.He didn’t seek the advice of military lawyers."  He probably didn’t do it, Cullen said, " because he knew what they would say."

Hoar noted that the Army's training manual for interrogation (available as PDF here) has 16 approved methods, and explicit references throughout to the Geneva Conventions. One sample, noted not by him but by me:

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The interrogator must always be in control, he must act quickly and firmly. However, everything that he says and does must be within the limits of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, as well as the standards of conduct outlined in the UCMJ.
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Hoar also made reference to guidance in the same field manual ("We've got field manuals for breathing," he said humorously at the outset) that should the interrogator have a question, he should put himself in ths position of the other: "a sort of Golden Rule." That empathy's not easily come by sometimes in military contexts, which is perhaps one of the reasons written orders, memoranda, cables between generals across oceans, have actual weight. Culllen raised this forcefully when asked if it were possible that Gonzales' memos were simply ruminations:

The FBI documents obtained by the ACLU, he said, describe "FBI agents meeting with General Miller, who said his practices were endorsed by SecDef memos that are not public" and that trace their provenance to Gonzales' directives. "JAGs don’t go far afield," he added, so when there’s a departure this extreme, "it means something happened at the top." Rejecting the scapegoating of low-level GIs, the characterization of torture as  "a bottom-up problem," he asserted:  "When you see a pattern emerging, when you see Gen Miller telling Sanchez you gotta get with the program," with "practices authorized at Guantanamo," those facts on the ground make for far more than abstract legal meditations.

This is the "extremist" position: that a man who convened meetings that led to Abu Ghraib, concerned more with being "forward-thinking" (language borrowed from his former clients at Enron?) than with being just, can't just look into cameras with his dewy brown eyes and pledge he'll do better. That a meritocracy implies actual merit. That a lawyer should uphold the law and an Attorney General the Constitution.

Here's a truly extreme position, suggested by none of these generals: trial in the Hague for the man. Given the recent agreement between the International Criminal Court and Interpol, the Senate should be considering whether two or five or ten years from now, an arrest warrant might go out that accuses Gonzales of crimes similar to those of the radio stations in Rwanda in 1994. Official blessing beyond the bounds of law can have bone-cracking consequences.

I'm exhausted and sad writing this. I'm glad I'll be busy all day tomorrow and know I'll be glued to the radio on Friday. And maybe I'll chime in on Friday with a one-line post, drawn from Pagliacci. In an ending that, like Hamlet, has very few survivoirs, the title character, a dying clown,  calls out: "La commedia e finita!"

Comments

[Dianne]

Send Gonzales to the Hague, by all means. Maybe Bush can join him there. At least they'd get trials, unlike the hapless "suspects" that Bush has decided to lock up forever, innocent or guilty, without even a trial to differentiate between those possibilities.

[Red Wing Work Boots]

This is all very new to me and this article really opened my eyes.Thanks for sharing with us your wisdom.