The Iceman Cometh
Hentoff, Nat
Bill of Rights Watch Nat Hentoff The Iceman Cometh The next four Bush years began with the National Science Foundation havingfinanced the CIA's eager research into the surveillanceof Internet chat...
...Nothing Gonzales said during his Senate confirmation hearing lessens the need for more patriotic dissent...
...And the American Civil Liberties Union warns that the FBI and the 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country (sharing information with local, state, and federal law enforcement) are engaged in an enhanced domestic surveillance campaign to further intimidate "unpatriotic" dissent...
...Four days later, Colin Powell responded that this misguided advice "will reverse over a century of U.S...
...He is the author of "The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance...
...What most frightens me about the Iceman is that while he was counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush (then chief executioner of the United States), Gonzales sent fifty-seven persons on death row to their deaths with summary three-to-seven page memos to Bush that failed to mention incompetent counsel, mitigating evidence (such as mental retardation), and unmistakable evidence of innocence...
...policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions and undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops...
...The Chinese government is already there...
...The Secretary of State was ignored, but in June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that this Gonzales advice, too, was wrong, because even noncitizens in American custody have due process rights...
...And the results of that advice are coming to glaring light-with even the FBI criticizing what happened at Abu Ghraib...
...Here is an index of how dangerous Gonzales is going to be: Someone who worked with both him and Ashcroft at the Justice Department says that Ashcroft at times clashed with Gonzales (then the counsel to the President) because he felt Gonzales was going too far...
...It was Gonzales who told Bush that he didn't have to go to the courts to validate the imprisonment of American citizens as "enemy combatants" indefinitely without charges and access to their lawyers...
...Bill of Rights Watch Nat Hentoff The Iceman Cometh The next four Bush years began with the National Science Foundation havingfinanced the CIA's eager research into the surveillanceof Internet chat rooms...
...Not only because they want to hold their fire for the next Supreme Court nomination but also because they fear being "obstructionist" too soon after John Kerry struck out...
...Soon after Gonzales's nomination to succeed John Ashcroft was announced, I was told by a Democratic source on the Senate Judiciary Committee that although Gonzales would be rather aggressively questioned at his confirmation hearing, the Democrats decided beforehand to give Gonzales a pass...
...Also under way, asThe New York Times reports, isthe creationof"a vast new database of enrollment records of all [individual] college and university students...
...Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Village Voice, Free Inquiry, and The Progressive...
...For the details, based on the actual memos, see Alan Berlow's "The Texas Clemency Memos," The Atlantic Monthly, July-August 2003...
...As Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson warns, with Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, "you should not be shocked if new abuses of civil liberties occur in your school, your library, perhaps even in your home...
...Gonzales was also deeply involved in the 2002 memoranda that instructed Donald Rumsfeld and his lawyers at the Defense Department that torturing detainees was OK so long as it wasn't called torture...
...Watching over this expanded range of the government's all-seeing eye is the very likely new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, the most loyal member of the Bush Praetorian Guard ever, since he was counsel to Governor Bush...
...In June 2004, the Supreme Court struck down that advice 8 to 1.) Then there was the January 25, 2002, Gonzales memorandum to the President informing him that he could ignore the Geneva Conventions with regard to the noncitizen prisoners at Guant?namo...
Vol. 69 • February 2005 • No. 2
