Out plugging his forthcoming CYA memoir in the Wall Street Journal, Gonzales lets loose with this steaming load of dissembling nonsense:
"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?"Jon Perr at C&L sums up how supremely ridiculous this is:
"For some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."
Read MoreOf course, that self-described "casualty of the war on terror" blessed the torture regime best articulated by then-head of the DOJ's Office of Special Counsel, John Yoo. As Jane Mayer describes in her book, The Dark Side, Gonzales as White House counsel stood by as the Bush administration wiped away Geneva Convention protections and blessed Yoo's definition of torture as necessarily "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
In his interview with the Journal, Gonzales blames Yoo for the legal basis for waterboarding and other so-called "enhanced interrogation" tactics, asserting "in the end it was the Justice Department's call." Of course, during his January 2005 confirmation hearings for the Attorney General role, Gonzales lied under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee about President Bush's torture policy. Calling Senator Feingold's questions about Bush's commander-in-chief powers "hypothetical," Gonzales claimed the infamous Yoo memo "has been withdrawn." But as the New York Times subsequently revealed, while the Justice Department in December 2004 publicly proclaimed that torture was "abhorrent," the new Attorney General in February 2005 and again later that same year issued secret memos which "provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures."
Gonzales' lies to Congress didn't end there. No doubt, the man who pioneered the Sgt. Schultz defense ("I know nothing. Nothing!") will claim in his memoir "I don't recall" lying to Congress about his role in the Bush administration's purge of U.S. prosecutors.
