Both Sens. Snowe and Collins voted for Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general. Sen. Collins even made an impassioned plea on the Senate floor for the nominee. She described how he grew up poor, worked hard and put himself through school.

But how Alberto Gonzales grew up and his ethnic background are irrelevant to his qualifications for attorney general. Heinrich Himmler was a chicken farmer when he first got started, but through hard work and due diligence he became the man we know of today.

Mr. Gonzales is now the top law enforcement agent of the United States of America.

When historians look back at this time period, this is going to be acknowledged as a turning point. As a nation, a civilized people, we can never go back again. The United States of America is now forever linked to torturing people. What we allowed to happen, by confirming such a man to this post, is to show the world that when the going gets tough, the U.S. tortures people.

This nation is now smeared with the same muck as Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and Saddam’s Iraq.

The journey from the unthinkable to the mundane has been a very brief one. As secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld said the world should “judge us by our actions” and “watch how a democracy deals with the wrongdoing and with scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes.”

The world is indeed watching. And unfortunately, learning.

Bill Baker DiGiulio, Bowdoin

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