November 12, 2004

Generally Wrong

The Good News is that John Ashcroft is gone. He was quite possibly the worst Attorney General in recent history (a distinction previously held by Ed Meese in the Reagan administration). The further good news is that we are beginning to see Hispanics moving to higher ranks in the political establishment. The bad news (if there is any, and only time will tell) is that his replacement, Judge Gonzales, while serving as White House Counsel advised this President after 9-11 that he was now above the law when it came to the treatment of those we choose to label as terrorists.

Do we really want as our chief law enforcement officer a man who thinks that the Geneva Conventions that those of us who served in military relied on as the gold standard for the treatment of prisoners somehow do not apply to al-Qaeda or the war in Afghanistan? Some of the Geneva Convention's provisions may indeed be "obsolete" or "quaint," as Judge Gonzales termed them, but as long as the rest of the world seems to think they still have meaning, we unnecessarily jeopardize the lives of our troops now serving at risk of capture by summarily repudiating them. Nor should we be thrilled that Judge Gonzales defended the administration's policy of detaining terrorism suspects indefinitely without access to lawyers or courts until the Supreme Court rejected that imperialist notion. I am afraid that the jury is going to be out, Judge, until we see what you do and how you do it.

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