According to media reports, President Bush is strongly considering replacing outgoing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales with Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff. While bloggers and media outlets have reviewed Chertoff’s failures before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina to demonstrate why he is unfit to become Attorney General, his role in covering up the torture of John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, has been overlooked.

In June 2002, Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, offered to drop conspiracy, terrorism, and attempted murder charges if Lindh would plead guilty to “providing assistance” to an “enemy of the U.S.” and to “carrying a weapon.” Chertoff dramatically reduced the charges in order to prevent Lindh from testifying in court and disclosing the president’s policy of torturing “Afghan and Al Qaeda captives at Bagram Air Base and other locations.”

To further ensure that Lindh wouldn’t disclose “weeks of torture at the hands of American forces,” Chertoff required Lindh to sign a statement “swearing he had ‘not been intentionally mistreated’ by his US captors and waiving any future right to claim mistreatment or torture.” In addition, Chertoff attached a “special administrative measure,” essentially a gag order, barring Lindh from talking about his experience for the duration of his sentence.”

During his confirmation hearings to the United States Court of Appeals and later as head of the Department of Homeland Security, Chertoff misled Congress about his involvement in the Lindh case. According to Jesselyn Radack, a former attorney in the ethics department of the Justice Department, Chertoff contradicted the public record and erroneously claimed that “the Ethics unit had never given an opinion about the interrogation of John Walker Lindh.”

In light of the consequences of Gonzales’ cronyism, “the DOJ and the country desperately need a completely outside figure who will ensure that the prosecutorial machinery operates independently.” Yet, Chertoff’s track record of covering up Bush’s abuse of power show he would simply be more of the same.

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