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Senator Robert Byrd Blasts Gonzales

Submitted February 2, 2005 - 7:50 pm by Benjamin Melançon
United States Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia  made a speech on the floor of the Senate against making White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzalez the next Attorney General— and against the imperial powers Gonzalez approved Bush taking for himself.

Judge Gonzales was asked whether he had chaired meetings in which he discussed with Justice Department attorneys such interrogation techniques as strapping detainees to boards and holding them under water as if to drown them.  He testified that there were such meetings, and he did remember having had some “discussions” with Justice Department attorneys, but he cannot recall what he told them in those meetings.

Byrd reminds us it's not just Gonzales:

I note in passing that the “torture” memo [approved by Gonzales] was written in 2002 by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, who is now a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. God help the Ninth Circuit. I would like the record to reflect that 18 other Senators and I voted to reject the nomination of Jay Bybee to be a federal judge, a decision I, for one, do not regret.

Sometimes I wonder if Byrd is the one good man that keeps our Congress from being consumed by God's justice-loving wrath.  Byrd is about the only proof left that there's something about my country's system of government worth saving, but what incredible proof.  He continued:

The second but equally shocking and erroneous legal conclusion reached in the so-called “torture” memorandum states, “We find that in the circumstances of the current war against al Queda and its allies, prosecution under Section 2340A – the relevant provision of U.S. law prohibiting torture – may be barred because enforcement of the statute would represent an unconstitutional infringement of the President’s authority to conduct war” as the Commander-in-Chief. This means the White House believed that a President can simply “override” the U.S. law prohibiting torture, just because he disagrees with it. He can ignore the law by proclaiming, in his own mind, that the law is unconstitutional. Not because a court of the United States has found the law to be unconstitutional, but because a war-time President decides he simply does not want to be bound by it.

What an astounding assertion! Think of it! A President placing himself above the law, in effect, crowning himself King.

Please,
read his whole speech.

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