the foobar zone

So it appears that Alberto Gonzales' term in the office of US Federal Attorney General has come to a close. Ding-dong! Whatever about state-side, the only weeping done on this side of the Atlantic will be crocodile tears.

Whether or not the dismissals in his Office were worthy of his demise is a side issue - an issue of no real importance and paltry substance. His real legacy was his relentless assault on basic human rights, whether codified in the US constitution or expressed in the Geneva Convention, and it is an insult to American values that while these flagrant attempts at establishing state totalitarianism were considered a job well done by his boss, that he was taken down by a mere matter of bureaucratic impropriety.

He dismissed of the idealogy of Habeas Corpus, the fundamental right to have your case be heard by a judge in the case of unwarranted imprisonment. Why? Because otherwise, it would admit the possibility of a trial to the detainees of Guantanamo Bay - maybe even a fair trial, with proper judicial oversight and where the defendents were given adequate means to defend themselves, instead of the kangaroo courts which were eventually set up.

He pushed widespread warrantless communications tapping for non US citizens, a federal offence under the terms of FISA, a gross invasion of these peoples' privacy, and in practice a gross invasion of the privacy  of US citizens whose communications were intercepted as collateral. Why? Because the US federal government wants to believe that it can act with impunity with non residents.

But most notoriously, his distaste for the Geneva Convention invoked the most intense international scorn. Why? Because terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

"Terrorism", that nebulous term which means anything to anyone but in fact means nothing at all. A term which, as Robert Fisk notes, is "a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice".

And this is the irony of it all - that in order to impose its idea of democracy and justice on the world, the US has seen fit to suspend its own ideals and reject its core values.  One set of values for the US, and another set of values for everyone else. Gonzales championed this hypocrisy and this is how he will be remembered.

Good-bye and good riddance.