The Chronicle gets in a cheap attack on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today:
The Bush administration defines torture as the infliction of severe injury resulting in organ failure or death. That leaves out, without explanation, the infliction of terrible but temporary pain, humiliation and anguish — treatment that certainly does not correspond to American values or law.
In one breath, Gonzales states that torture is against administration policy, but in the next he seems to discount or excuse mistreatment that falls short of death or severe injury. The attorney general said mistreatment of prisoners short of torture could not be prosecuted under the laws barring torture. True, but mistreatment can be punished under other laws. Enlisted soldiers who mistreated Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison are serving or face years in prison. Why can’t the attorney general bring himself to speak out strongly against such behavior, whether or not it falls into his narrow definition of torture?
Gonzales has been widely criticized for memos he and his administration colleagues wrote that noted, falsely, that U.S. laws against torture did not apply to enemy combatants who were terrorists.
The Chronicle editorial idealists aren’t going to win over large majorities of Texans with complaints that interrogation techniques short of torture are too mean to detained terror suspects.
It’s not clear that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was torture so much as a complete breakdown in military order. The guilty soldiers are being punished, so it’s even less clear why the editorial idealists are complaining.
Finally, Gonzales’ stance on the Geneva Conventions and their applicability to enemy noncombatants — while aggressive — had a logic to it. Reasonable people can debate that logic, but the editorial idealists simply dismiss it.
At least petty and simplistic editorials are an improvement in this area. Sometimes the idealists get so carried away that they create nonexistent treaties.
