WASHINGTON — Skirmishing erupted Tuesday over the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales as attorney general, with Democrats complaining that the White House was withholding memos on his views of prisoner torture, and an unlikely collection of generals and military veterans joining human rights groups in opposition.
The White House counsel is expected to win approval from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which on Thursday begins the first of the confirmation hearings for President Bush's second-term Cabinet nominees. Gonzales, 49, a close advisor and confidant of the president since Bush's days as Texas governor, would be the first Latino attorney general.
But Democrats were expected to demand answers about Gonzales' role as a leading architect of the legal underpinnings of the administration's war on terrorism, including policies on military tribunals, enemy combatants and torture that have been rejected by the courts or repudiated by the administration itself.
Last week, the Justice Department, which Gonzales would lead as attorney general, published a toned-down version of a legal opinion on the permissible bounds of torture under international and U.S. law, replacing an August 2002 opinion that torture was permissible so long as it did not result in pain equivalent to that of serious injury such as organ failure or death.
As White House counsel, Gonzales had solicited the original opinion on behalf of the CIA. The revised memo explicitly disavows portions of the earlier document.
As Democrats and the White House sparred over the release of torture-related memos, a dozen retired generals and admirals and a group representing more than 3,000 veterans and their families voiced concern over Gonzales' role in creating policies that, they said, could subject captured American soldiers to retaliatory torture.
And the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org announced plans to debut on Thursday a 30-second television advertisement opposing Gonzales. It said the ad would paint the nominee as the "legal mastermind of torture tactics," which allegedly led to abuses of military prisoners and suspected terrorists in Iraq and at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Gonzales was the author of a January 2002 legal opinion advising Bush that suspected terrorists picked up in Afghanistan did not qualify for prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention -- a view that Bush embraced in an executive order.
