This article, by Mike Silva, was published by the Chicago Tribune, August 11, 2009
This just in from Lubbock, Texas, where former U.S. Att'y Gen. Alberto Gonzales poses the perennial question: "Where do you draw the line?''
And allows that anyone who thinks that anyone who operates at the level that he did, or at the presidential level, will not make mistakes "is living in fairy-tale land.''
Gonzales, who ran the Justice Department for former President George W. Bush, warned today against the current Justice Department's inclination to investigate the CIA interrogations of detainees captured in "the war on terror'' on Bush's watch.
This could "discourage'' CIA operatives from "engaging in conduct that even comes close" to meeting the government's guidelines, Gonzales said in an interview with the Associated Press today. "So where do you draw the line?" he asked. "What is allowed, what's not allowed?"
The Bush Justice Department had told the CIA what was allowed - and "water-boarding'' was. The Obama Justice Department, which considers the simulated drowning used in interrogations and other tactics approved by its predecessors as torture, is weighing a probe to see if any CIA agents exceeded the authority that Justice had given them.
Att'y Gen. Eric Holder is poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, current and former U.S. government officials have said, as reported by the Tribune Washington Bureau. A senior Justice Department official has said that Holder envisions an inquiry narrow in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.
Gonzales, who served as attorney general until resigning in 2007, has spoken with current CIA lawyers, who have spoken with CIA operatives. "They're very, very concerned about the legal liability and legal exposure," Gonzales told the AP. "And that's the danger with launching some kind of investigation.''
Gonzales has been hired by Texas Tech University to recruit and retain minority students. He will also teach a 15-student political science class, Contemporary Issue of the Executive Branch. He is classified as a visiting professor and has agreed to teach one year. His salary for both positions is $100,000, school officials have said.
Gonzales acknowledged wishing that he could "do some things over" during his time in Washington. He erred in using the words "quaint" and "the Geneva Convention" in the same sentence in a memo he wrote about the privileges that suspected terrorists should have in incarceration, he said.
"Now looking at it...I would not have done that," he allowed. "At this level you make mistakes. And if you think this president, this attorney general, this administration isn't going to make mistakes, you're living in a fairy-tale land."
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