Alberto Gonzales named to replace Ashcroft

The Bush Regime named white house counsel Alberto Gonzales to replace
Ashcroft. A quick search of the web brought up the following. (My summary in
caps, with article excerpts in plain text.)--Judy O.

RUMORS SUGGEST BAD BLOOD BETWEEN ASHCROFT AND GONZALES, SOME REPUBLICANS
CONSIDER GONZALES "TOO SOFT ON SOCIAL ISSUES" AND A PRO-FETAL-LIFE GROUP
WORRIES ABOUT HIS LACK OF JUDICIAL ACTIVISM FOR THEIR CAUSE.

HOWEVER, GONZALES' PAPER TRAIL SUPPORTS DEATH AND TORTURE, AND ACCORDING TO
THE GROUP TEXANS FOR JUSTICE, WHILE SITTING ON THE TEXAS SUPREME COURT
GONZALES AND OTHER TEXAS S.CT. JUSTICES TOOK LARGE MONETARY CONTRIBUTIONS
FROM CHENEY-RUN HALLIBURTON JUST BEFORE RULING IN FAVOR OF THE COMPANY IN
PENDING CASES. (NONE OF THE TEXAS JUSTICES RECUSED THEMSELVES FROM ANY OF
THE FOUR HALLIBURTON CASES THAT WERE PENDING AT THE TIME THEY ACCEPTED
DONATIONS FROM CHENEY'S COMPANY.)

SAINT PETERSBERG COLUMNIST ROBYN E. BLUMNER WROTE IN MAY, 2004,
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/05/30/Columns/The_man_behind_all_th.shtml:

"there is perhaps no figure who has his fingerprints on more short-sighted,
backward and counterproductive Bush administration policies than does White
House Counsel Alberto Gonzales.

"The loyalist attorney from Texas, who was general counsel to Bush as
governor and was appointed by him to the Texas Supreme Court, is reportedly
a favorite adviser to the president because he can synthesize complicated
issues down to a sentence or two, fitting neatly within the president's
attention span. Since joining the administration in 2001, Gonzales, 49, has
been a guiding force in a swath of administration decisions that have
hobbled America's commitment to the rule of law and have cost our nation
goodwill and respect around the world....

"There have been many Gonzales missteps but attention has focused recently
on a memorandum he wrote to Bush on Jan. 25, 2002, in which he said that the
Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war should not apply to al-Qaida or
Taliban prisoners. Gonzales said the war on terrorism 'in my judgment
renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy
prisoners.'...

"The memo could be titled "do as we say, not as we do." With unexplained
logic, it states that anyone who mistreats U.S. personnel could still be
charged with war crimes, yet says the Convention - the international law
from which the definition of war crimes is derived - should not apply to the
actions of the United States. This loophole lawyering, from the man whose
former law firm in Houston represented Enron, was an invitation to torture
anyone labeled an enemy combatant. He gave legal cover to ungoverned
interrogations, resulting in the abuse reports that are now streaming out of
Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo."

GONZALES' INTERNAL MEMO SAYS GENEVA CONVENTION "OBSOLETE":
"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict
limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its
provisions." --Alberto Gonzales, 1/25/02 (Memorandum to the President, as
reported in Newsweek 5/16/04)

COMPARE WITH PUBLIC STATEMENT THAT BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS "STRONG SUPPORTER"
OF THE GENEVA CONVENTION:
"President Bush recognized that our nation will continue to be a strong
supporter of the Geneva treaties." --Alberto Gonzales, 5/15/04 (NYT Op-Ed)

ACCORDING TO A SLATE ARTICLE LAST JUNE, "LONE STAR JUSTICE,
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102416/ :

"On June 16, 1997, Gonzales first showcased his proclivity for torturing
international law when he sent a letter to the U.S. State Department in
which he argued that, "Since the State of Texas is not a signatory to the
Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, we believe it is inappropriate to
ask Texas to determine whether a breach . occurred in connection with the
arrest and conviction" of a Mexican national. Or, put another way, he
asserted that an international treaty just didn't apply to Texas."

AN EARLIER FINDLAW COMMENTARY (JUNE 2003) STATES THAT GONZALES'S 57 DEATH
PENALTY MEMOS WRITTEN AS COUNSEL TO THEN TEXAS GOVERNOR BUSH RAISE SERIOUS
AND UGLY QUESTIONS ABOUT GONZALES'S COMPLETE DISREGARD FOR ANY FACTS BEYOND
THE GRUESOME DETAILS OF THE ALLEDGED CRIMES:

June 2003 Findlaw commentary :
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030620.html

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales's Texas Execution Memos:
How They Reflect on the President, And May Affect Gonzales's Supreme Court
Chances
By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, Jun. 20, 2003

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales is said to be on President Bush's short
list of potential nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court. Unlike other
nominees, such as D.C. Circuit nominee Miguel Estrada, it turns out that
Gonzales has left quite a paper trail - in the form of fifty-seven
death-penalty memoranda he prepared for then-Texas Governor George Bush.

The memos were initially confidential, meant for the Governor alone. They
have not themselves been published. But they have been reviewed by writer
Alan Berlow of The Atlantic Monthly, and his report on their contents is
disturbing indeed.

The Gonzales execution memos raise serious - and, unfortunately ugly -
questions, not because of what they say, rather because of what they fail to
say. They also suggest that President Bush's earlier claims about how he, in
fact, handled clemency requests as Governor of Texas are less than accurate.

Berlow's Assessment of the Memos: No Consideration of Crucial Issues

"During Bush's six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed in
Texas," Berlow reports in the Atlantic, "a record unmatched by any other
governor in modern American history."

From 1995 to 1997, Gonzales acted as his legal counsel when the
then-Governor decided whether to grant clemency, or to allow the executions
to go forward. What kind of counsel did Gonzales provide? According to
Berlow, he "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in
the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating
evidence, even actual evidence of innocence."

Berlow writes that the memos reflect "an extraordinarily narrow notion of
clemency." They appear to have excluded, for instance, factors such as
"mental illness or incompetence, childhood physical or sexual abuse,
remorse, rehabilitation, racial discrimination in jury selection, the
competence of the legal defense, or disparities in sentences between
co-defendants or among defendants convicted of similar crimes."

Take the case of Terry Washington, a thirty-three-year-old mentally retarded
man with the communications skills of a seven-year-old executed in 1997.
Gonzales's clemency memo, according to Berlow, did not even mention his
mental retardation, or his lawyer's failure to call, at trial, for the
testimony of a mental health expert on this issue. Nor did it mention that
the jury never heard about Washington's history of child abuse; he was one
of ten children, all of whom "were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses,
extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts."

Execution of the mentally retarded was already under a shadow at that
point - a shadow has only deepened over the ensuing years. In 2002, in
Atkins v. Virginia, a majority of the Supreme Court held - too late for
Washington - that executing the mentally retarded is "cruel and unusual"
punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

And plainly, Washington's counsel had been ineffective: his strongest
argument was never pressed. (Similarly, with respect to death row inmate
Carl Johnson, "Gonzales failed to mention that Johnson's trial lawyer had
literally slept through major portions of the jury selection.")

For these reasons, Gonzales' silence about Terry Washington's retardation is
both inexplicable and stunning.

But according to Berlow, Gonzales went even further: "I have found no
evidence that Gonzales ever sent Bush a clemency petition - or any
document," Berlow writes, "that summarized in a concise and coherent fashion
a condemned defendant's best argument against execution in a case involving
serious questions of innocence...." This suggest that even the crucial issue
of guilt versus innocence was frequently ignored.

What did Gonzales's memos include, then? They focused heavily on repeating
the purported gruesome details of the crime. By doing so, they no doubt made
it easier for the governor to feel he was doing the right thing by denying
clemency.

Gonzales claimed to Berlow that his execution briefings had always provided
Bush a "detailed factual background of what happened," along with "other
outstanding facts or unusual issues." Berlow's review of the memos
themselves, however, belied that claim.

A Possible Conflict with Bush's Own Account of His Clemency Review
Procedures

In his 2000 campaign autobiography, A Charge To Keep, Bush refers to these
"numerous" death penalty cases and says: "Each case [was] major, because
each case [was] life or death."

Bush claims that he "review[ed] every death penalty case thoroughly,"
meeting with his legal counsel on the morning of every execution. And
according to Bush, "In every case, I would ask: Is there any doubt about
this individual's guilt or innocence? And have the courts had ample
opportunity to review all the legal issues in this case?"

These two fundamental questions were apparently the only ones on which Bush
focused. His record indicates, for instance, that he did not see his role as
one of mercy, the traditional reason for clemency. Accordingly, he refused
to grant clemency to born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker, despite the
pleas of death penalty supporters Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.)

Troublingly, the two fundamental questions upon which Bush says he
exclusively focused, were also the very questions that, according to Berlow,
Gonzales routinely declined to address in his memos to Bush.

How can this discrepancy be explained? It seems unlikely that Gonzales
advised Bush only orally, and not on paper, as to these factors. The level
of factual detail in each case, and the sheer number of cases considered,
would have made a tradition of purely oral briefings impracticable.

It also seems unlikely that Gonzales failed in his duty to address Bush's
questions - if so, why didn't Bush advise him that his memos were subpar and
ask for more detail next time?

It's hard to reach any conclusion, after reading Berlow's account of the
memos, except the obvious one: Bush considered only the narrow factors
included in the memos, and not the two more expansive questions he claims in
his autobiography to have raised. And in fact, the Texas clemency
proceedings under Bush were even worse than previously believed.

Long before Berlow's article, Amnesty International had concluded that the
"jurisdiction that executes more people than any other in the Western world,
Texas has turned the final safeguard of executive clemency into nothing more
than an empty gesture."

Indeed, by 1999, Amnesty judged that "the Texas clemency process violates
minimum human rights safeguards, by failing to ... comply with reasonable
concepts of fairness and provide [] protection against arbitrary
decision-making by the court." The Gonzales clemency memos establish that,
in fact, it was even worse than Amnesty knew.
...

FROM NEWSWEEK, MAY 19, 2004:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4999734/
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent
Newsweek

May 17 - The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that
U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and
unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism,
according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants
in the debate over the issue.

The concern about possible future prosecution for war crimes-and that it
might even apply to Bush adminstration officials themselves- is contained
in a crucial portion of an internal January 25, 2002, memo by White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales obtained by NEWSWEEK. It urges President George
Bush declare the war in Afghanistan, including the detention of Taliban and
Al Qaeda fighters, exempt from the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law
passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans
from committing war crimes-defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva
Conventions. Noting that the law applies to "U.S. officials" and that
punishments for violators "include the death penalty," Gonzales told Bush
that "it was difficult to predict with confidence" how Justice Department
prosecutors might apply the law in the future. This was especially the case
given that some of the language in the Geneva Conventions-such as that
outlawing "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" of
prisoners-was "undefined."

One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not
have Geneva Convention protections is that it "substantially reduces the
threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales
wrote.

"It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent
counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on
Section 2441 [the War Crimes Act]," Gonzales wrote.

The best way to guard against such "unwarranted charges," the White House
lawyer concluded, would be for President Bush to stick to his decision-then
being strongly challenged by Secretary of State Powell- to exempt the
treatment of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from Geneva convention
provisions.

"Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that (the War
Crimes Act) does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any
future prosecution," Gonzales wrote.