Alberto Gonzales Backs Off Implication He Endorses Torture Investigation
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who served in the Bush 43 administration, showed support in a Washington Times interview for current Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to investigate torture. Gonzales gave a second interview to the Washington Times to “clarify” what he said during the first interview. In the first encounter, he said it was “legitimate to question and examine” charges of CIA abuses.
“Contrary to press reporting and based on the information that’s available to me,” Mr. Gonzales said during an interview Thursday with The Washington Times, “I don’t support the investigation by the department because this is a matter that has already been reviewed thoroughly and because I believe that another investigation is going to harm our intelligence gathering capabilities and that’s a concern that’s shared by career intelligence officials and so for those reasons I respectfully disagree with the decision.”
Gonzales says he endorses Holder’s “right to exercise his discretion”, but that he would have made a different choice.
Oh my Goddess, the mud is slinging now or is he trying not to be on the hot seat?
average james Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Seems kinda fishy, doesn’t it ?
I wonder what the Cheney goons threatened him with.
Celticwitch Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
To be waterboarded himself.
libpatriot Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Yeah, somebody got to him, all right.
September 4th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Well, some guys you give them a living, but never include them in family business.
Gonzales is one of those guys.
Just like Connie’s first husband Carlo.
September 4th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Has anyone hear any of the Bush People when they come and talk, they have to tap dance around, stating that is not what they meant. Are we EVER going to get the truth what had happen during the last 7 1/2 years?
Rocky the Liberal Rottweiler Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
The Bush regime never dealt in truth. The truth was their enemy. And in any case Gonzales had such memory problems that he likely needed a chauffeur or he could never have found his way home at the end of the day.
September 4th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
So…
In other words he spoke the truth before and now that someone put the screws to him in private about how they all tote the ‘party line’ even at the cost of their own credibility and their own value to the nation of laws that they supposedly served.
I think this is the very nature of the beast.
People try to be honest, but the crushing power of the GOP establishment whips people back into telling lies and turning our proud national history on it’s head so we can become communist terrorist nation of hateful insanity against anyone who stands up for justice and freedom.
Rocky the Liberal Rottweiler Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Actually, it’s kind of amusing that Gonzales is doing this so closely on the heels of Tom Ridge doing this that they’re practically tripping over each other to reveal the terrible outrages and abuses, and then turn around and say, “Oh I was just kidding.”
Gee, does Gonzales have a book in the works, too?
EricG Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I’m sure he does.
I mean … if your going to tear apart the country and everything we stand for … you might as well wet your whistle while you are at it…
Celticwitch Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I heard Ridge talking about his book and saying that he was told to raise the level of terror threats and that video of Bin Laden could have been out months before and they shown it RIGHT before the elections. I think it is bogus and they back peddling all the way to the Oval Office once again.
September 4th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I didn’t think he’d be able to back up what he said. I knew he’d back down. What a weenie.
September 4th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Say one thing you because you are in acadamia then say the other thing so you don’t burn bridges with your former employer. MAN-PLEASER!!
September 4th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
the question now becomes what to do about it and just who owns the media 20 company’s dont mean 20 owners ????
EricG Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Want to know who owns the media?
Corporate America.
End of story.
If it’s bad for the corporations, any of them, then it gets kept silent.
September 4th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
You keep posting these companies. Whats your point? Are you saying these are bad companies? Do you have a purpose in this?
September 4th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
I got this from my Verizon page, for anyone interested, it is just the beginning.
By REBECCA BOONE
BOISE, Idaho – A federal appeals court delivered a stinging rebuke Friday to the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 detention policies, ruling that former Attorney General John Ashcroft can be held liable for people who were wrongfully detained as material witnesses after 9/11.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the government’s improper use of material witnesses after Sept. 11 was “repugnant to the Constitution and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history.”
The court found that a man who was detained as a witness in a federal terrorism case can sue Ashcroft for allegedly violating his constitutional rights. Abdullah al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen and former University of Idaho student, filed the lawsuit against Ashcroft and other officials in 2005, claiming his civil rights were violated when he was detained as a material witness for two weeks in 2003.
al-Kidd said the investigation and detention not only caused him to lose a scholarship to study in Saudi Arabia, but cost him employment opportunities and caused his marriage to fall apart.
He argued that his detention exemplified an illegal government policy created by Ashcroft to arrest and detain people – particularly Muslim men and those of Arab decent – as material witnesses if the government suspected them of a crime but had no evidence to charge them.
Ashcroft had asked the judge to dismiss the matter, saying that because his position at the Department of Justice was prosecutorial he was entitled to absolute immunity from the lawsuit.
al-Kidd’s attorney, Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the ruling by the three-judge panel had implications reaching far beyond the government’s actions in detaining material witnesses post-Sept. 11.
“The use of the material witness statute as a post-9/11 detention tool is one of the least understood parts of the post 9/11 landscape, but it has enormous implications because it was done in secret and the government has never renounced the policy,” Gelernt said. “Our hope is that we can now begin the process of uncovering the full contours of this illegal national policy.”
The 9th Circuit judges said Al-Kidd’s claims plausibly suggest that Ashcroft purposely used the material witness statute to detain suspects whom he wished to investigate and detain preventively.
“Sadly, however, even now, more than 217 years after the ratification of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, some confidently assert that the government has the power to arrest and detain or restrict American citizens for months on end, in sometimes primitive conditions, not because there is evidence that they have committed a crime, but merely because the government wishes to investigate them for possible wrongdoing, or to prevent them from having contact with others in the outside world,” Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., for the majority. “We find this to be repugnant to the Constitution and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history.”
The Department of Justice may now ask the full 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the ruling by the three-judge panel, may appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, or it could allow the lawsuit to revert back to Boise’s U.S. District Court.
If the case goes back to the lower court, the government will likely have to comply with al-Kidd’s discovery requests – releasing documents and files that it has previously maintained were highly confidential and that could pose a threat to national security.
The ruling was the latest legal development in a saga dating back to 2003, when al-Kidd was standing in the Dulles International Airport and surrounded by federal agents as he prepared to study in Saudi Arabia on a scholarship.
The Kansas-born husband and father of two was held for two weeks before being extradited to Idaho and released to the custody of his wife by a federal court judge. The government thought al-Kidd had crucial testimony in a computer terrorism case against fellow Idaho student Sami Omar Al-Hussayen.
Al-Kidd and Al-Hussayen both worked on behalf of the Islamic Assembly of North America, a Michigan-based charitable organization that federal investigators alleged funneled money to activities supporting terrorism and published material advocating suicide attacks on the United States.
A jury eventually acquitted Al-Hussayen of using his computer skills to foster terrorism and of three immigration violations after an eight-week federal trial. Al-Hussayen was eventually deported to Saudi Arabia.
al-Kidd, who had played football for the University of Idaho under the name Lavoni Kidd, was never charged with a crime.
In his lawsuit, al-Kidd says he still suffers from the fallout of his arrest and confinement. He says he was jailed for 16 days in high-security cells that were lit 24 hours a day, and that he was strip searched several times.
When a court ordered that he be released, he was required to live with his wife and in-laws in Nevada, limit his travel to Nevada and three other states, surrender his passport and other travel documents, report to a probation officer and submit to home visits. The confinement and supervision lasted 15 months, and by the time it ended he had separated from his wife and had been fired from his job as an employee of a government contractor because the arrest left him unable to get the necessary security clearance.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that another former Sept. 11 detainee, Javaid Iqbal, couldn’t sue Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller for abuse he suffered while detained because Iqbal couldn’t show there was anything linking the top government officials to the abuses.
The 9th U.S. Circuit judges said al-Kidd’s case was different, however, because he was able to offer as evidence specific statements that Ashcroft himself made regarding the post-Sept. 11 use of the material witness statute.
A service of YellowBrix, Inc. .
September 4th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
wait…did I just say something sane and normal….umm that was a mistake.
libpatriot Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
lol….Good evening to you, Guido!
And I think you more often than not say things that are sane and normal…..but maybe my memeory’s just slipping.
libpatriot Reply:
September 4th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
For one thing, I seem to have forgotten how to spell “memory”.
GuidoVanHorn Reply:
September 6th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I was speaking for Mr. Gonzales.
September 4th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
here’s a man in way way way over his head. It’s almost surreal that these people are crawling out from under the rocks to make fools out of themselves. Like Ridge, they throw out juicy tidbits
and then tell you what they really mean when interviewed which contridicts what was previously said or written. It’s stupid. It’s politics as usual for republicans
September 4th, 2009 at 10:25 pm