The nomination of Mr. Alberto Gonzales as U.S. attorney general in the second Bush administration has focused attention once again on revelations that the United States has used torture on terror suspects. Since the first photographs of those misdeeds were made public last summer, there has been a steady drip of additional incidents. The damage that has been done to the U.S. mission in Iraq, and its image around the world, is incalculable.
Of course, Mr. Gonzales is not directly responsible for those degrading acts, but his legal reasoning made them possible.
The world was shocked by the news that U.S. soldiers had tortured suspects held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, allegations that were backed up with hundreds of photographs. The U.S. government responded to the reports by asserting that they were isolated incidents conducted by ill-trained reservists, that they occurred only at that prison and at a time of extreme confusion during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Since then, a stream of revelations has proven each of the U.S. contentions false.