He then told Dick Durbin, “Senator, I did not-I was not involved and am not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants or-and so I do not have the involvement with that.”
He gave an unqualified “No” when the Judiciary Committee chairman, Arlen Specter, then a Republican, asked if he had had anything to do with issues related to the memos and “allegations of torture,” or to rendition, or, more generally, to “questions relating to detention of inmates at Guantánamo.” (Kavanaugh also said no when Specter asked if he would personally sanction “or participate in” torture.) He told Chuck Schumer that he had not been involved in any discussions about torture, in the context of the memos or otherwise.
Kavanaugh was unequivocal at his confirmation hearings.
TORTURE MEMORANDA FULL
Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, wrote in a Times Op-Ed, posted on Monday, that he believes Kavanaugh provided “a misleading account of his work in the White House,” making a full examination of his paper trail “all the more urgent.” (The memos were recognized as a source of disgrace, in part because of their efforts to come up with an absurdly narrow definition of torture in order to get around laws banning it, and were eventually withdrawn.) His denials are worth quoting at some length, because they raise yet more questions: whether he told senators the truth twelve years ago-and whether, as a result, they can trust him now. In 2006, Kavanaugh told the Senate Judiciary Committee, during his confirmation hearings for the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, that he’d known nothing about any discussions of those issues until the general public did-for example, after the torture memos became public, in 2004. Later, Kavanaugh was a staff secretary for President George W. Some of the most notorious of the “torture memos,” as they became known, had been addressed to his boss, Alberto Gonzales, then White House counsel. If Donald Trump were, at some point in his Presidency, to turn to or even, in some wild way, to expand on some of the more dubious practices of the immediate post-9/11 years-mass surveillance, indefinite detention, torture-how might a Supreme Court that included Brett Kavanaugh react? One way to answer that is to ask how Kavanaugh acted back when he was close to what might be called the scene of the crime: he was an associate White House counsel, from 2001 to 2003, when some of his colleagues were turning out memos effectively allowing torture and throwing together plans for Guantánamo and military commissions that lacked crucial constitutional underpinnings. Photograph By Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call / Getty Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings could become a forum for discussions that Americans never fully had about the post-9/11 years.
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