Nashville’s Belmont University has a new law school, one that opened last summer. It also has a new Distinguished Professor of Law, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The Distinguished Professor is also distinguished by his official endorsement of government torture and kidnapping during his time at the White House and in the Justice Department.
A few years ago, U.S. agents tortured people and videotaped these “enhanced interrogations.” They also made people disappear at “black sites” around the world. When investigators started poking around, the recordings disappeared, too.
Why destroy the tapes? Despite assurances from the Department of Justice and the White House, waterboarding and similar practices are torture, against federal, military, and international law. The cover-up shows the interrogators knew this.
In his memoir to be released next Tuesday, George W. Bush admits that he personally approved the use of waterboarding in the “enhanced interrogation” of prisoners while he was president. The coercive technique of intentional drowning meets the definition of torture under the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Treaty on Human Rights, the U.S. Army Field Manual and Title 18 of the U.S. legal code.
