[News] Help us continue the fight against torture.

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 18:14:47 -0600 (CST)
From: center for constitutional rights <investigation at ccr-ny.org>

We are now asking for your help again. Please find below a letter from Ron 
Daniels, our executive director, asking you to take a moment to write your 
legislature and urge them to deny Alberto Gonzales the nomination to 
attorney general. We appreciate your involvement in our work. If you do not 
wish to receive emails from CCR in the future, please respond to this email 
with remove from list in the subject line.



Tough Questions Are Not Enough



Dear Friends and opponents of torture,



President Bush's nomination of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to be 
the next Attorney General would elevate the architect of the 
Administration?s torture policy to the position of the chief law 
enforcement officer in the land.  His confirmation hearing begins on 
January 
5. 
<http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=4445601&url_num=1&url=http://www.ccr-ny.org/actionalert>Please 
help us oppose this travesty of justice, tell your representatives: "tough 
questions are not enough." Send a message to the Bush Administration and 
the world that the American people do not condone torture.



Mr. Gonzales is the author of the infamous ?torture memo? that called the 
Geneva Conventions "obsolete" and "quaint," and he has argued for virtually 
limitless presidential power to evade or circumvent laws and treaties on 
the theory that the Commander-in-Chief is not accountable to the Judiciary 
as it relates to the "war against terrorism."  The memos Gonzales authored 
and commissioned paved the way to the abuse and torture of detainees at 
Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, many of whom are represented by the Center 
for Constitutional Rights.  At CCR, we have seen the terrible effect of the 
evasion of the rule of law on human beings first hand. There is no question 
but that there is a causal link between the memoranda and other directives 
devised by Mr. Gonzales and the horrible infractions committed by officers 
in the field.

As White House counsel, Gonzales consistently treated the law as an 
inconvenient obstacle and ignored the expertise of those who disagreed with 
him. He argued that U.S. citizens could be held incommunicado and stripped 
of the right to counsel and the right to challenge their detention in a 
court of law for as long as the President deemed necessary. He hosted 
meetings where they discussed the use of specific torture techniques, 
including mock burial and ?water boarding,? where the victim is made to 
feel that he is drowning. Gonzales and his circle approved the use of dogs, 
hooding, and extreme sensory deprivation, all forbidden by the Geneva 
Conventions and the International Covenant Against Torture. He redefined 
torture to limit it to only those actions that lead to organ failure, death 
or permanent psychological damage. Gonzales justified this relaxed 
definition of torture on the grounds that in a time of war, 
interrogators   need to extract information from prisoners quickly to save 
American lives.  However, it has long been established by experts in the 
field that torture leads to false confessions and bad intelligence.  The 
policies advocated by Mr. Gonzales will expose our own troops to danger the 
world over for decades to come.



In their scathing editorial on the nomination, The Washington Post linked 
Mr. Gonzales directly to the tortures at Abu Ghraib and called his legal 
positions "damaging and erroneous." Newsweek wrote that "Gonzales 
ultimately signed off on all of the administration's most controversial 
legal moves."



Many members of Congress have said that they will not oppose Mr. Gonzales's 
nomination, that he will only be made to answer tough questions before 
sailing through the confirmation process. We at the Center for 
Constitutional Rights object to giving an architect of torture a promotion. 
We reiterate, tough questions are not enough. Please ask your Congressional 
representatives and the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to stand 
up and oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General.  We 
hope you will join us in declaring that this man and his policies do not 
represent who we are as Americans!



Please circulate this widely and quickly, the hearings begin the first week 
of the New Year!  To send a letter, click 
<http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=4445601&url_num=2&url=http://www.ccr-ny.org/actionalert>here.



  If the hyperlink does not work, cut and paste: 
<http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=4445601&url_num=3&url=http://www.ccr-ny.org/actionalert>http://www.ccr-ny.org/actionalert 
in your browser



Sincerely yours,



Ron Daniels

Executive Director

Center for Constitutional Rights
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The Freedom Archives
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