According to the New York Times, disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is having a wee bit of trouble finding permanent employment.
Less than three years ago on July 1, 2005 Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired, leaving an open seat on the nation’s highest judicial body. Rampant speculation within conservative circles focused on Alberto Gonzales as the potential top choice to replace Justice O’Connor. That’s right, folks. Perhaps you had forgotten just how close we were to seeing Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers as our newest junior Justices rather than Samuel Alito and John Roberts. In other words, things could be a whole hell of a lot worse.
Shortly before this, Mr. Gonzales had been promoted to Attorney General in a move that top Republicans suggested was “a political strategy to bolster Mr. Gonzales’ credentials with conservatives and position him for a possible Supreme Court appointment.” The confirmation battle in the Senate was far from bloody as he gained 60 votes of support, including 6 Democrats. This rising star of the Republican party was a brilliant, Harvard educated lawyer with experience as a Justice on the Texas Supreme Court and he was lined up to be the first hispanic Supreme Court Justice in the nation’s history.
What’s that about not counting your chickens before they hatch?
After his appointment as the highest-ranking Attorney in the land, Mr. Gonzales proceeded to continue doing the same thing he had been doing as an underling in the Justice Department: Writing secret memos that authorized the Bush Administration to undertake illegal activities meant to ‘keep America safe’ from terrorism. The aftereffects of Mr. Gonzales’ most famous memos are still with us today. In 2002, he issued a memo in his position as White House Counsel that said the United States did not have to grant Geneva Rights to prisoners in the ‘War on Terror.’ (actual text of Presidental Order here) So, Mr. Gonzales was a crucial cog in developing a justification for the internationally-panned prisons at Guantanamo Bay.
Another one of his memos paved the way for prisoners to be tortured through physical intimidation, psychological abuse and imitated drowning (water-boarding). In other words, Mr. Gonzales worked hard to systematically undermine international conventions regarding treatment of prisoners in times of war, the right of a prisoner to have legal counsel and be made aware of charges against him and basic human decency to not torture somebody else. And if you trust Frontline, Mr. Gonzales was less an activist with an agenda than a robot being controlled by Cheney and his gang.
Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned his role in the partisan firing of US attorneys, warrantless spying on the American public, his horrific and deceptive performance in front of the Senate and the fact that he doesn’t believe the Constitution explicitly protects the our individual right to Habeas Corpus:
GONZALES: The fact that the Constitution—again, there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against taking it away. But it’s never been the case, and I’m not a Supreme—
SPECTER: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. The Constitution says you can’t take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?
No wonder he was so willing to take the right away from prisoners in Guantanamo,.. he doesn’t even believe WE have the right. Using this logic we could rightly say that the Constitution prohibits the government abridging free speech BUT, it never explicitly says that we have the right to free speech. Scary stuff. And this guy was almost a Supreme Court Justice.
Mr. Gonzales’ spectacular descent into political infamy is all the more surprising when one considers that many bastions of conservatism actually opposed him because he was considered a bit of a maverick on key conservative issues. His tenure as a Justice on the Texas Supreme Court displayed a tendency to rule in favor of abortion rights and in favor of affirmative action and organizations like the National Review, People For the American Way and Focus On The Family opposed his potential nomination as a result.
Somewhere along the line the maverick turned into the subservient robot who dutifully twisted the law to fit Mr. Bush’s agenda. It’s not like we didn’t have a fair warning, though. In 2005, a large bipartisan group of clergy, ministers and pastors wrote an open letter citing ‘grave concerns’ with Mr. Gonzales’ record on human rights, torture, the Geneva Conventions and extraordinary rendition. We also probably should’ve been listening when columnist Mark Danner wrote this in an op-ed published on the eve of Mr. Gonzales’ hearing before the Senate regarding his nomination for Attorney General:
At least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate high-level wrongdoing and place it in a carefully constructed narrative, in which crimes are charted, malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as the final step in the journey back to order, justice and propriety.
When Alberto Gonzales takes his seat before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for hearings to confirm whether he will become attorney general of the United States, Americans will bid farewell to that comforting story line. The senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path that the Bush administration set the country on more than three years ago, a path that has transformed the United States from a country that condemned torture and forbade its use to one that practices torture routinely. Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Mr. Gonzales himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land.
Danner continued his argument with a strong case against Mr. Gonzales:
In the next few days we are likely to hear how Mr. Gonzales recommended strongly, against the arguments of the secretary of state and military lawyers, that prisoners in Afghanistan be denied the protection of the Geneva Conventions. We are also likely to hear how, under Mr. Gonzales’ urging, lawyers in the Department of Justice contrived – when confronted with the obstacle that the United States had undertaken, by treaty and statute, to make torture illegal – simply to redefine the word to mean procedures that would produce pain “of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure.” By this act of verbal legerdemain, interrogation techniques like water-boarding that plainly constituted torture suddenly became something less than that.
But what we are unlikely to hear, given the balance of votes in the Senate, are many voices making the obvious argument that with this record, Mr. Gonzales is unfit to serve as attorney general. So let me make it: Mr. Gonzales is unfit because the slow river of litigation is certain to bring before the next attorney general a raft of torture cases that challenge the very policies that he personally helped devise and put into practice. He is unfit because, while the attorney general is charged with upholding the law, the documents show that as White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his client to concoct strategies to circumvent it. And he is unfit, finally, because he has rightly become the symbol of the United States’ fateful departure from a body of settled international law and human rights practice for which the country claims to stand.
And so, here we see the brightest of stars dimmed to the point of unemployment. As much as I try, I just can’t conjure up any sympathy for him.
