As someone who served from March 2003 through October 2003 in Iraq with the U.S. Army, I have strong feelings about how national policies affect the troops in the field. Alberto Gonzales, who has recommended a policy that has allowed the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, is now being considered as the new attorney general.
His recommendations have led to the brutalization of prisoners in our own custody. In this way, we may be putting our own servicemen and women in danger if they are captured.
One blisteringly hot afternoon in June 2003, outside Balad, Iraq, I saw a farmer working in a field. He was a short, weathered man in his mid- to late forties, and he was holding the reins of oxen. He said he was angry over the mistreatment of women in his village at the hands of American servicemen during a recent early-morning raid. On that morning, the women were rounded up in a room at gunpoint. Soldiers yelled at them, and they were physically searched and kind of roughed up. Several women were shoved and knocked to the ground. Local insurgents had told him, the farmer said, that they were going to kidnap female American service personnel and treat them in the same way that Iraqi women had been handled -- and even worse. It would be payback, he said.
And in late August, I was having chai tea with an Iraqi shiek at his home in Ad Dujayal, Iraq. The sheik, who had once served as an agent for the mokhabarat -- the Iraqi intelligence service -- was disheartened at the treatment Iraqi women were receiving at the hands of Americans. He said he had thought that when Americans first entered Iraq, things would be very different. "I always held the Americans in very high regard," he told me. But what he'd seen since the invasion in March 2003 had changed his opinion. Specifically, he told me he was disgusted and appalled at the way American soldiers would physically abuse Iraqi women. He warned me that American soldiers were in greater danger than ever before.
It is strange that a nation as strongly rooted in democratic ideals would consider placing such a person as Alberto Gonzales as the head of the agency responsible for enforcing human and civil rights. Gonzales is not responsible for every mistake made in Iraq; he's not responsible for every soldier who stepped out of line or every once-receptive Iraqi who has turned against the United States. But he is responsible for -- and more importantly, associated with -- determining that the United States could and even should take a harsher, less restrained, more bare-knuckled approach to our ongoing wars. And by reaffirming and promoting him, we are abandoning any effort to repair the damage to our reputation and the anger we have incurred by the abuse that arose from that policy.
I'm not the only veteran who has serious doubts about Gonzales. On Wednesday, January 5, I spoke at a press conference organized by Veterans for Common Sense. According to the group's executive director, Charles Sheehan, "Our primary concerns are Judge Gonzales' positions on U.S. adherence to the Geneva Conventions and protections from torture for military personnel under international and U.S. laws."
The speakers included Colonel Richard Klass, USAF (Ret.), a former White House fellow, Rhodes scholar, and former instructor at the National WarCollege who has been decorated with the Silver Star, Legion of Merit, DistinguishedFlying Cross, Purple Heart, and 11 Air medals; Robert K. Musil, executivedirector and CEO of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a former Army captain, and a former instructor at the Defense Information School; Ray McGovern,co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a former U.S.Army military intelligence officer, winner of the Intelligence Commendation Medal, and a 27-year CIA intelligence analyst; and Erik Gustafson,executive director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center and a 1991 Gulf Warveteran.
As a veteran of the Iraq War, I believe it is inconceivable that a nation rooted in democratic ideals would consider placing Gonzales as the head of the agency responsible for enforcing human and civil rights. He has made it clear that he has no desire to enforce such rights or be a beacon of hope to the oppressed -- or even to citizens of his own country.
David DeBatto, who writes for Salon and other publications, is a freelance journalist living in Massachusetts.
