From Bad to Worse?

Newsweek has an interview with Georgetown University Law Professor David Cole on the outgoing and probably incoming Attorney Generals which is not very flattering:

After Ashcroft

A critic of the attorney general explains why he thinks the outgoing Bush appointee is the ‘one of the worst we’ve ever had’—and whether the president’s new choice will be any better

On Ashcroft:

I think his legacy is going to be as one of the worst attorney generals we’ve ever had, not only in terms of the constitutional freedoms this country stands for but also in terms of national security.

On Gonzalez:

What we know about Gonzales is not very reassuring. We know that Gonzales is the person who called the Geneva conventions “quaint” and argued very forcefully in favor of refusing to extend its protections to the people being held in Guantanamo—and in part urged that view so that they could be subjected to coercive interrogation tactics. We also know from a New York Times account of the debates that surrounded the development of the military tribunal policy down in Guantanamo that in those debates John Ashcroft was actually the voice of reason and Alberto Gonzales was lined up with the most extreme right-wing voices arguing that there should be virtually no rights to the people who are being tried—in some cases for the death penalty.