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NEW YORK, Aug 29 (OneWorld) - The White House is coming under increasing pressure from a number of Congressional leaders and rights watchdog groups to replace Attorney General Alberto Gonzales with someone who can restore faith in the U.S. justice system.

The calls for the appointment of a "credible" attorney general come just a day after Gonzales tendered his resignation. Gonzales stepped down this weekend in the wake of increased criticism of his conduct of office by the Congress and rights advocacy groups.

Gonzales, a close confidante of President George W. Bush, was accused of promoting the use of torture against prisoners in violation of the U.S. Constitution and of sacking a number of federal prosecutors for political reasons.

Upon his resignation, Gonzales defended his actions, saying that he had done nothing wrong. But many senators, including some of those from his own Republican party, remained unconvinced until the end.

On Tuesday, Democrat Patrick Leahy, who led an inquiry into Gonzales' sacking of eight U.S. attorneys, said the Justice Department under his rein was "corrupted by political influence."

Republican John Sununu, who first called for Bush to sack Gonzales several months ago, said now "a credible and effective" candidate was needed.

Human rights groups that had opposed Gonzales' appointment from the beginning in 2005 have welcomed his resignation, but are demanding that the next choice for attorney general be someone who abides by the constitutional provisions on the treatment of prisoners.

"[This] offers President Bush the opportunity to name a new attorney general who equivocally rejects the use of torture and safeguards the values for which this country stands," said Maureen Byrnes, director of Human Rights First, a prominent rights advocacy group that opposed Gonzales' appointment in 2005.

Byrnes, who said it was under Gonzales that the Justice Department gave "legal cover" to a policy of "official cruelty" to prisoners, urged Congress to investigate the abuses that occurred on his watch.

"With his resignation, this policy must end," she stressed in a statement.

Human Rights Watch's executive director Kenneth Roth offered a similar reaction.

"The most important responsibility of the attorney general is so say no when government officials -- including the president -- are tempted to cross legal boundaries," he said.

In Roth's words, "history will remember Gonzales as the man who never said no to torture and detention policies that violated U.S. and international law."

Like other critics, Roth recalled the fact that, as attorney general and White House Counsel, Gonzales fully endorsed CIA interrogation techniques such as "water boarding" that the United States has long considered to be torture.

"He reviewed and did not object to the Justice Department's infamous 'torture memo', which argued that the president of the United States could not be bound in war times by laws prohibiting torture," Roth said.

Gonzales' critics also refer to the fact that he consistently opposed efforts by other officials in the Bush administration, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to close the notorious detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

In a January 2002 memorandum to Bush, Gonzales suggested that the president declare the Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan outside the coverage of the Geneva Convention. "In my judgment," he wrote, the war against terrorism, "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners."

However, the memo drew strong objections from Colin Powell, the secretary of state at the time.

Both Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First are trying to build pressure on Congress to probe detention policies approved by Gonzales, and to determine whether specific interrogation practices under his watch violated the law.

The rights organizations are also urging lawmakers to not confirm a successor to Gonzales unless he or she rejects the notion that the president may ignore laws against torture and rules out the use of abusive interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration in the past.

At the international level, numerous rights groups, including those working with the UN system, have repeatedly raised concerns over U.S. justification of the use of coercive methods to extract information from prisoners.

In January, Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, urged the United States to close its military prison complex in Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of foreign citizens remain incarcerated on suspicion of links to terrorism.

"The prison at Guantanamo should be closed,'' Ban said at the fifth anniversary of the first transfer of prisoners to Guantanamo.

More than 400 inmates remain locked up there amid questions as to whether or when any will receive a fair trial according to U.S. and international law.

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