May 18, 2004 - “In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions,"

The passage is from a memorandum written by the man who many think will be the President’s choice to fill the next vacancy on the Supreme Court. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. That attitude toward the treaty obligations under the Geneva Convention goes a long way toward explaining how the Picnic on Copper Green became policy in this White House. When the President’s senior legal advisor refers a portion of a treaty as “obsolete” and “quaint” implicitly inviting him to ignore its obligations it is but a short step to advising him to ignore the quaint, obsolete document that declared it to be the law of the land – The Constitution of the United States. It gives one pause until – that is – one considers that the prevailing legal opinion of this Administration, having come to office on the strength of a Supreme Court decision interpreting it, seems to be that the Constitution is not to be complied with but rather an impediment to be circumvented by waiving the 3000 bloody shirts of 9-11.

Not all of the Bush Administration shares that view. Secretary of State Colin Powell is reported to have exploded in anger when he read that memo. Senator Richard Lugar, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says that he hoped that Gonzales did not write the memo. “If he did he was wrong”, the Indiana Republican said. The White House is back pedaling as fast as it can and issued a statement declaring, “It is the policy of the United States to comply with all of our laws and our treaty obligations." That word has apparently not made its way across town to the Pentagon, much less to Bagram, Baghdad, or Guantanamo.

In the aftermath of 9-11 the Congress overwhelmingly passed the PATRIOT Act, eroding those quaint provisions of the Constitution that provide us with the essential essence of liberty and freedom. We are repeatedly reminded that everything changed on September 11, 2001. Every erosion of the rule of law that makes us American is justified in the name of security, whether it is the security of our homeland or the security of our troops in the field. Have the quaint ideas of liberty and freedom, the ideas we claim we are bringing to Iraq, been rendered obsolete?

It is the attitude espoused by Alberto Gonzales in his memo that set the table for the Picnic on Copper Green.