Gonzales wants to be the next attorney general, the nation's chief enforcer of the Constitution, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment" clearly enough. He wants his confirmation hearing to be a formality, not a showcase for contradictions.

He'll likely get his wish. Expect Gonzales to provide the paint, the committee to provide the brushes, and Thursday's hearing to be the inaugural whitewash of the second Bush administration.

The committee's membership, Republican or Democrat, has yet to raise much of a fuss about the administration's taste for gulag justice -- at Guantanamo Bay, at Abu Ghraib prison, at home through the USA Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security's thickening rulebook. The committee's members aren't about to fuss now, even though one of the chief architects of those gulag ways will be sitting in front of them for two hours.

In that sense, the committee is representative of the public's staggering apathy regarding this administration's grave and chronic abuse of basic human and civil rights. For the past several months hardly a week has gone by without new revelations of the extent and savageness of prisoner abuse in Iraq. The public reaction has been mute. Over the weekend The Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon and the CIA are looking for the means to keep hundreds of so-called terrorist suspects locked up for life, without charge, getting around obvious constitutional barriers by outsourcing the prisoners to jailers abroad. The public's reaction has been nonexistent. At the same time reports leaked to The New York Times revealed that the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo has included forced enemas, sensory abuse, fake trips to made-up interrogation cells abroad, indefinite shackling (to force prisoners to soil themselves) and other abusive interrogation methods that are anything but the "humane" treatment the Bush administration says it has been meting out to Guantanamo's prisoners. The public's reaction has been nil.

Fear of another Sept. 11 and assumptions of the prisoners' guilt are overriding the most fundamental principles of justice. Evidence has been made subordinate to circumstance. Prisoners are presumed guilty. It is up to them to prove their innocence (without lawyers in many cases, without a trial, without so much as a judge's intervention). The very government that ought to be upholding and protecting the rules of civilized society is rewriting those rules for those it deems suspect enough to dehumanize.

Gonzales didn't write the torture memo as an exercise in possibilities, but as an affirmation of policies then ongoing. Last week the Justice Department posted a 17-page memo on its Web site professing to refute the Gonzales memo, and calling all torture unacceptable. Yet it also concludes that none of the interrogation methods approved by the Justice Department have amounted to torture. It's another word game, a whitewash to facilitate Gonzales' confirmation and make Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and lesser-known scandals seem like nothing more complicated, or less reasonable, than Taking Care of Business