La Opinion, Jan. 10, 2005
George A. Lopez

This week the US Senate’s Judiciary Committee held its confirmation hearings on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales, current legal counsel to the President, to be the next Attorney General of the United States. Soon the Senate Foreign Relations committee holds similar hearings on the nomination of Dr. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s National Security Adviser, for Secretary of State.

The Senate should move beyond their usual pro-forma approval process to reject each nominee. Both Gonzales and Rice have failed the nation on critical issues within their purview during the past four years. Moreover, the Senate needs to recognize that each cabinet appointment would send the wrong message to the rest of the world about the US commitment to the rule of law and our competence as a major power.

For Mr. Gonzales, attention has rightly focused on the controversial August 1, 2002 memo written by the Department of Justice at his request after the CIA queried him on what specific actions would be considered culpable behavior in the interrogation of detainees. After hours of testimony we are led to a dismal conclusion. At the most critical moment in the Bush Administration’s consideration of the role and place of torture in US interrogation methods, Mr. Gonzales refused to rule out a grotesque expansion of techniques that clearly exceeded universally acceptable standards of law and existing codes of US military conduct. In short, he signed off on a blatantly incorrect legal opinion.

In appointing the next Attorney General, Senators must consider both current legal controversies and ­ unfortunately ­ the direction of US law enforcement the day after another terrorist attack on US soil. As the architect of the White House’s secrecy strategy regarding the Vice-President’s energy task force and memos detailing Halliburton contracts in Iraq, Mr. Gonzales does not inspire confidence regarding checks and balances, transparency or accountability. He is not the lawyer that the Senate should authorize to define a new the relationship between civil rights and security, to interpret the Patriot Act, or to make decisions about incarceration of enemy combatants including US citizens like Jose Padilla.

Finally, Mr. Gonzales’s appointment would send a shocking signal to the wider global community about US commitments to human rights and the rule of law. Many Americans have mentally filed away the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal as an unfortunate chapter in the on-going saga of the U.S. war in Iraq. We are insensitive to the primacy of this episode in the minds of millions of citizens in the Arab world who wonder whether the US message of rights and freedoms is manipulative and cynical, or actually valid and worth pursuing. To confirm as our highest ranking legal officer the person who labeled the Geneva conventions as quaint and out-dated is to provide those citizens with an answer to their query which is not in the US national interest.

Equally condemning concerns surround the nomination of Condoleezza Rice. Never before has a secretary of state nominee been brought to the Senate with such a consistent track record of being incorrect about both intelligence and substantive matters that dramatically affect U.S. foreign policy. In the former category, Dr. Rice’s own memo controversy dates almost a year before that of Mr. Gonzales. On August 6, 2001, then CIA Director George Tenet delivered to Mr. Bush the daily briefing entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” which led to discussions in which Rice was involved.

As the top national security official in the nation, rather than mobilize various US agencies to deal with this intelligence, Rice indicated in testimony before the 9/11 commission that such coordination was not her job, and that the briefing never provided specifics that an attack on the US was imminent. To add to Senate skepticism should be that Rice saw no reason to believe that her decision in early 2001 to relegate Richard Clarke’s counter-terrorism unit to discussion among deputy secretaries meetings, and no longer to have this unfold at the Cabinet level - as had been the situation under President Clinton - may have contributed to a White House unprepared for 9-11.

Other serious failures of policy advice abound. Dr. Rice signed off on the inclusion of the infamous assertion in the President’s 2002 State of the Union address that Iraq was acquiring uranium from Niger to produce nuclear weapons. In fact, even in 2003 after CIA weapons investigators and other analysts declared such weapons non-existent, Rice continued to assert the prospect that such weapons either had not yet been found, or may have been smuggled out of the country. This pattern raises serious questions as to how United States foreign policy will ever be well served by someone for whom evidence matters relatively little in their policy statements.

Moreover, in her tenure as National Security Advisor, Rice damaged US prestige among allies by advocating extreme positions being floated as potential policy. She argued that the US not only had a right to pre-emptive war against Iraq, but that such action was a moral obligation. In this argument, she claimed that the only option left to a US President was to wait for a mushroom cloud to unfold over an American city. For the brief while it was bantered about on the major TV talk shows, she did nothing to correct assertions that the US was concerned about potential chemical weapons in Cuba. And she asserts that what inspired Libya to give up its weapons program was the US bold military action in Iraq. She provides virtually no recognition that this historic policy change by a long-time foe came as a result of the near decade long carrots and sticks multilateral effort we ourselves engineered with our European allies.

Finally, Senators need assurances that Dr. Rice will be an effective and engaged manager of the Department she would head. A major legacy of Colin Powell is that our professional foreign service continued to be heard, to be challenged to engage in substantive analysis of difficult issues, and they were held in the highest regard by their Secretary. Much of his patience with multiple meetings, and a commitment to keep morale high at State, even under tough circumstances, derived from Mr. Powell’s experience as a commanding military officer. But it also came from his recognition and respect for the life-long expertise within the professional foreign service.

Virtually all of Dr. Rice’s foreign policy experience has been in elite, small group advisory roles. The Senate needs to know Dr. Rice’s plans for managing the large bureaucracy that is the Department of State. She also must indicate how she will generate morale and recommitment of staffers at this critical moment in time. To have resignations and retirements of the kind we have seen in the past few months at the Central Intelligence Agency would be devastating to U.S. foreign policy.

Mr. Gonzales and Dr. Rice each have inspiring personal stories in their rise to their existing positions. They each fully earned the jobs they have occupied during the first Administration. But their respective poor performance in these positions does not merit promotion to Cabinet positions.

For the past three years we have witnessed a dramatic decline in respect for and confidence in the US role in the world. The leaders of our legal and foreign affairs national agencies must be persons whose performance inspires confidence from our allies and clarity in our foes regarding what we stand for as a nation. Senators from both parties must act on this, with Republican Senators carrying a special burden of self-scrutiny at this moment.

To confirm the individual who served as an apologist for torture as the new national defender of civil law and rights, and then appoint the policy advisor who was stubbornly wrong in key national security judgments that led to an ill-conceived war rewards historic incompetence. And it should raise serious questions about the responsibility and competence of the Senate itself.

George A. Lopez is Senior Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

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