The Left's Convenient Villain
SAN DIEGO -- Alberto Gonzales is hounded by a single word. It starts with "t".
"I'm known as the architect of torture," Gonzales told me by phone from Nashville, where the former U.S. attorney general is now a lawyer in private practice and dean of the College of Law at Belmont University.
Anyone saddled with that title must be evil and sadistic. Gonzales is neither. Still, architect is a promotion over what snarky liberals on left-leaning websites such as Democratic Underground and the Daily Kos call the first Latino attorney general -- "torture boy." If you think this insult doesn't have a racial component to it, you're dreaming.
I contacted Gonzales after Democratic staffers with the Senate Intelligence Committee put out a 499-page executive summary (of a 6,700-page report, which is still classified) containing graphic details of CIA interrogation tactics after the attacks of Sept.11, 2001.
Gonzales is skeptical of the final product.
"Some of the details, if true, are troubling," he said. "There is bad stuff in there. I just don't trust the validity of the report."
Nor should the rest of us. Not a single former CIA director was interviewed. No one accused of torture was contacted.
Having resigned in 2007 amid a dustup involving the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales knows that truth can be a casualty of politics.
"I have painful experience of dealing with Senate Democrats who are not above saying things that are completely untrue if it serves their agenda," he said.
The torture report -- which took nearly six years to write -- insists the agency went too far.
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