After months without finding work, former attorney general Alberto Gonzales landed a teaching job at Texas Tech University earlier this year, where he is now leading a political science class on the Executive Branch. When Gonzales’ hiring was announced, Texas Tech chancellor Kent Hance said that the former Bush appointee would “help Texas Tech and ASU prepare our students for success and to be future leaders in the State of Texas and beyond.” In an interview with the Daily Toreador, Gonzales gave an example of some of the inspirational wisdom he is providing to his students:

Gonzales said he wants to encourage Tech students to have high aspirations but to realize that success doesn’t come overnight.

“Dream big but be patient,” he said. “You never know when the next George W. Bush is going to come along and give you a once in a lifetime opportunity like he gave me, but you have to be patient.”

Former Bush attorney general Alberto Gonzales recently spoke at the University of Tennessee at Martin about “Living Legal History: Working with the White House, the Department of Justice and the Supreme Court.” Gonzales received a “mixed” response from students and residents, and he had a Joe-Wilson moment when a student interrupted his speech and shouted out “You lie!”:

At one point, Gonzales referred to America’s war on terrorism.

“President Wilson and Roosevelt engaged in massive collections of electronic communications during the first and second world war,” Gonzales said. “The collection performed by President Bush was much more narrow.”

At this moment, a student in the crowd interjected with: “You lie!” After some quiet applause the speech continued.

Gonzales is currently a political science professor at Texas Tech, where students and faculty have protested his appointment. (HT: TPM)

On Tuesday, former attorney general Alberto Gonzales surprised everyone by defending Attorney General Eric Holder’s investigation into interrogation abuses during the Bush administration:

We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists. And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it’s action in prosecuting the war on terror.

Today, however, Gonzales is backpedaling. In a new interview with the Washington Times, he said that just because he thinks it’s “legitimate to question and examine” the interrogators’ conduct, he doesn’t endorse an investigation:

I don’t support the investigation by the department because this is a matter that has already been reviewed thoroughly and because I believe that another investigation is going to harm our intelligence gathering capabilities and that’s a concern that’s shared by career intelligence officials and so for those reasons I respectfully disagree with the decision.

In an interview with the Washington Times today, former attorney general Alberto Gonzales defended Eric Holder’s decision to investigate CIA interrogation abuses, despite claims by Vice President Cheney that it is an “outrageous political act.” “As chief prosecutor of the United States, he should make the decision on his own, based on the facts, then inform the White House,” said Gonzales, whose tenure was marked by intense political meddling on the part of White House officials. More from the interview:

We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists. And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it’s action in prosecuting the war on terror.

Listen here:

Of course, Gonzales said he was reassured that Holder was interested the “one percent of actors” who went beyond the legal authorization and not the 99 percent who “are heroes and and should be treated like heroes for the most part.” No doubt that Gonzales puts himself in that 99-percent group.

In an interview with Law.com, disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales attempts to walk back pro-torture arguments he made to President Bush, claiming that he was only criticizing isolated provisions such as “a requirement that you provide athletic uniforms, commissary privileges, scientific instruments, [and] a monthly allowance” to detainees. According to Gonzales, “I didn’t mean to say that the provisions of the Geneva Conventions requiring basic humane treatment were outdated. No, I didn’t say that.”

Gonzales’ attempt to whitewash his previous statement, however, does not jibe with the facts. Here’s what Gonzales actually wrote in a 2002 memo to President Bush:

The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments.

So while Gonzales did indeed criticize provisions which supposedly require the United States to provide detainees with athletic uniforms and scientific instruments, he also clearly rejects the Geneva Conventions’ limits on torture and other abusive interrogation techniques as “obsolete.”

Moreover even if Gonzales’ defense of his prior views could be taken at face value, they, at best, reveal him to be a completely incompetent attorney. Many of the provisions Gonzales labels as “quaint” simply do not exist. For example, nothing in the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War requires a detaining power to provide detainees with “athletic uniforms” or “scientific instruments.” The only provisions which even vaguely resemble such a requirement are Article 27, which mandates that detainees must be given appropriate “[c]lothing, underwear and footwear,” and Article 72, which provides that detention guards cannot seize mail sent to detainees which contains harmless items such as “scientific instruments” and “sports outfits.”

Similarly, while the Geneva Convention does include provisions requiring that detainees be given access to a kind of store, such provisions exist solely to ensure that the detainees most basic needs are met. Under the heading of “QUARTERS FOOD AND CLOTHING OF PRISONERS OF WAR,” Article 28 provides that a “canteen” must be set up in prisoner of war camps which provides necessities such as “foodstuffs” and “soap” (possibly because many prisoners of war are addicted to cigarettes when they are captured, the convention also provides for access to tobacco). To enable detainees to obtain food and soap from the canteen, Article 60 provides for prisoners to receive a modest “advance of pay.”

In other words, the “commissary” and “scrip” provided for under the Convention are really just a way of ensuring that the detainees basic needs are provided for. It is a mechanism to feed and clean detainees, not a requirement that detainee camps house their very own Wal-Mart.

Despite his attempts to whitewash the past, the meaning of Gonzales’ 2002 memo is clear. Gonzales believed that Geneva’s ban on detainee mistreatment is “render[ed] obsolete” by modern day terrorism; and he affirmatively misrepesented the contents of the Geneva Convention in a memo to the President of the United States.