The Left's Convenient Villain

"Under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chair of the Intelligence Committee who shepherded the report.

CIA officials insist that Feinstein and Senate Democrats were briefed more than three dozen times from 2002 to 2009. Now the senators are acting as if they have clean hands. The CIA meets CYA.

But what does alleged misbehavior by the CIA have to do with Gonzales? Not much.

The legal justification for what critics call "torture" came from the Justice Department, but Gonzales didn't take the reins there until 2005. Most of the dispatches justifying enhanced interrogation -- the so-called "torture memos" -- were written from 2002 to 2004. And while some have tried to accuse Gonzales of authoring those memos, they were, according to news reports, written by Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury -- all of whom worked for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.

Gonzales did write an infamous 2002 memo dismissing as "quaint" some provisions of the Geneva Conventions.

Those are the facts. Just don't expect them to deter leftist groups such as Code Pink from claiming that Gonzales is a war criminal.

His alleged crime? Gonzales told me that, while acting as White House counsel from 2001 to 2005, he provided President George W. Bush with advice on the legality and efficacy of enhanced interrogation.

And yet, Gonzales said, when decisions were made about how to treat detainees, there were a whole roomful of lawyers participating -- from the CIA, the Defense Department, State Department, Justice Department and the White House counsel's office.

I was curious as to why Gonzales thought he had become, for some critics, a convenient villain.

"We've been trying to figure that out for years, you and me," he said. "I have no idea."

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