The post has an article I agree with entirely: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48628-2005Jan4.html
When the government and it's prosecutors who are the ones committing the crimes, then who can prosecute? Even the House of Representatives seems to have lost it's moral compass. The "Right to a Presumption of Innocence" rules are newspeak for "The right to cover up high crimes and misdemeaners if the majority concurs". But then they are likely to approve Gonzales' nomination. What a shame.
As Richard Cohen says:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45936-2005Jan3.html
In case this stuff disapears:
"THOUGH IT has yet to acknowledge any error, the Bush administration appears to understand that its handling of foreign detainees has caused enormous damage to America's standing around the world, and even to relations with close allies. In the past week, two measures it has devised to alleviate the problem have become public. The Justice Department has repudiated a 2002 legal opinion that authorized the use of torture, and it has issued a brief that returns U.S. policy closer to international standards. The Defense Department, in turn, has developed plans for new facilities and procedures at the Guantanamo Bay prison that will allow long-term detainees to be held in more humane conditions. Both steps are welcome. However, by themselves they are not sufficient to end the systematic violations of domestic and international human rights laws that the administration has committed since 2001."
No wonder this administration has been seeking exemptions from war crimes prosecutions by the international court!
And this stuff originated with the CIA. For more on this the post has another article:
As the editorialist Anne Applebaum says in "Does the Right Remember Abu Ghraib?:"
"By nominating Gonzales to his Cabinet, the president has demonstrated not only that he is undisturbed by these aberrations, but that he still doesn't understand the nature of the international conflict which he says he is fighting. Like communism, radical Islam is an ideology that people will die for. To fight it, the United States needs not just to show off its fancy weapons systems but also to prove to the Islamic world that democratic values, in some moderate Islamic form, will give them better lives. The Cold War ended because Eastern Europeans were clamoring to join the West; the war on terrorism will be over when moderate Muslims abandon the radicals and join us. They will not do so if our system promotes people who support legal arguments for human rights abuse."
And back to Cohen (earlier citation);
"The term "Orwellian" is much abused, and back in the actual year 1984 I thought Orwell himself overrated. The essential novelist of the 20th century, I thought then, was Kafka, who realized that there is no more efficient murder weapon than what the critic George Steiner called "the lunatic logic of the bureaucracy."
"The Bush administration has fused Orwell with Kafka in the same way someone fused the cry of an infant with that of a cat from the Meow Mix television commercial. The upshot is Gonzales, ticketed maybe for the Supreme Court because he winked at torture and yessed the president. He's Kafka's man, Orwell's boy and Bush's pussycat. Know him for his roar."