Human Rights Watch 2007
News and Releases
Compiled by Kandy Ringer
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Human Rights Watch 2007 News and Releases Compiled by Kandy Ringer |
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Gonzales Leaves Shameful Human Rights Legacy
BBSNews August 27, 2007 -- New York (HRW) The resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should galvanize an investigation into US detention policies during his tenure both at the Justice Department and as White House Counsel from 2002 to 2005, Human Rights Watch urged today.
"The most important responsibility of the attorney general is to say no when government officials -- including the president -- are tempted to cross legal boundaries," said Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "History will remember Gonzales as the man who never said no to torture and detention policies that violated US and international law."
As attorney general and White House counsel, Gonzales signed off on CIA interrogation techniques such as "water boarding" that the United States has long considered to be torture, and consistently refused to rule out the use of even the most extreme methods. Recently, in answers to questions submitted by US Senator Richard Durbin, the judge advocates general of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps said that many of the techniques Gonzales approved, including water boarding and painful stress positions, violated laws that criminalize torture. Yet, when asked at a Senate hearing on June 24, 2007 whether an American citizen could lawfully be subjected to such methods, Gonzales refused, stating: "You're asking me to answer a question which, I think, may provide insight into activities that the CIA may be involved with in the future."
Over the last seven years, Gonzales was also in a position to approve policies such as secret detention, the "extraordinary rendition" of prisoners to countries that systematically practice torture, and the use of military commissions that deny basic due process. He reviewed and did not object to the Justice Department's infamous "torture memo," which argued that the president of the United States could not be bound in wartime by laws prohibiting torture. Gonzales also opposed efforts by other officials in the Bush administration, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
In a January 25, 2002 memorandum to President Bush, Gonzales urged the president to declare the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales wrote that the war against terrorism "in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." The memo drew a strong rebuke from then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, but would become administration policy.
Human Rights Watch called on the US Congress to investigate the detention policies approved under Gonzales's watch, and to determine whether specific interrogation practices violated the law. It also urged the Congress not to confirm a successor to Gonzales unless he or she repudiates the notion that the president may ignore laws against torture and rules out the use of the abusive interrogation techniques employed by the Bush administration in the past.
A Human Rights Watch thematic page on US counterterrorism post-September 11 is available online.
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