Judge Neil Gorsuch of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals makes a point while delivering prepared remarks before a group of attorneys last Friday at a luncheon in a legal firm in lower downtown Denver. (photo: David Zalubowski/AP)
Gorsuch
Emails Reveal a Staunch Bush Era Torture Defender
By Seung Min Kim, Politico
19 March 17
More
than a decade ago as a lawyer in the George W. Bush Justice Department, Neil
Gorsuch recommended that federal judges visit Guantanamo Bay as a way of
becoming “more sympathetic” to the Bush administration’s defense of its
detainee policies.
“If
the DC judges could see what we saw, I believe they would be more sympathetic
to our litigating positions,” Gorsuch wrote to other DOJ officials in
a Nov. 10, 2005 e-mail, included in new documents sent to the Senate Judiciary
Committee on Friday in advance of the Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation
hearing next week.
Gorsuch
continued: “A visit, or even just the offer of a visit, might help dispel myths
and build confidence in our representations to the Court about conditions and
detainee treatment.”
The
e-mails shed further light on Gorsuch’s involvement in the national security
policies of the George W. Bush administration – a major focal point for
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee as they prepare to meticulously scrutinize Gorsuch’s
record in the four-day confirmation hearing kicking off Monday.
Gorsuch
served as principal deputy associate attorney general for about a year, until
he was elevated to the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
California
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, requested
earlier this week that the additional DOJ documents be made public.
Acting
assistant attorney general Sam Ramer wrote to Feinstein in a letter
accompanying the new documents that while nearly 175,000 pages connected to
Gorsuch have been released, and although some of the paperwork has
confidentiality concerns, DOJ was releasing the documents because of the
“extraordinary circumstances involving a Supreme Court nomination.”
“The
department does not anticipate making any further productions regarding this
matter,” Ramer told Feinstein.
The
disclosure of Gorsuch’s 2005 trip to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo
Bay came in a separate trove of Justice Department documents released by the
Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month that detail the Supreme Court
nominee’s time at DOJ. Gorsuch wrote to then-Brigadier Gen. Jay Hood, the U.S.
commander at Guantanamo Bay, that he was “extraordinarily impressed” with the
conditions at Gitmo.
“You
and your colleagues have developed standards and imposed a degree of
professionalism that the nation can be proud of, and being able to see
firsthand all that you have managed to accomplish with such a difficult and
sensitive mission makes my job of helping explain and defend it before the
courts all the easier,” Gorsuch told Hood.
The
120 pages sent to the committee on Friday included more details about Gorsuch’s
visit to the U.S. military facilities at Guantanamo. For instance, Gorsuch also
recommended in the Nov. 10, 2005 email that Camp X-Ray, a temporary detention
facility within Gitmo, “serves no current purpose, is overgrown and decaying.”
“Gen
Hood would understandably like to tear it down,” Gorsuch wrote to other DOJ
officials. “Of course, there may be some evidentiary concerns with this, but
can we at least tee this up for a prompt resolution?”
Separately,
the newly released e-mails show Gorsuch pressed other Bush
administration officials to release a detailed signing
statement when former President George W. Bush signed a hotly debated torture
ban pushed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) into law in late December 2005.
The
anti-torture proposal pitted McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war
during Vietnam, against the Bush White House for months. But when the McCain
measure was about to become law, Gorsuch advised other Bush administration
officials to draft a signing statement to help spin it in their favor, as well
as help lawyers in the “inevitable lawsuits that we all see coming,” according
to a Dec. 29, 2005 e-mail from Gorsuch to other Bush administration officials.
Another
advantage, in Gorsuch’s view, was that a signing statement would make clear the
Bush administration’s view that the anti-torture measure “is best read as
essentially codifying existing interrogation policies.”
Gorsuch
wrote that he saw little downside to making the Bush administration’s positions
known in this way. In the e-mail, he wrote: “While perhaps not common, neither
is it unprecedented to use signing statements in this fashion to advance the
executive’s interests and indeed, some statements have been cited by the courts
as a persuasive sources of authority in efforts to divine statutory intent.”
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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