GONZALES THE PRESIDENT'S MAN

Ever since Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fell under George Bush’s spell his professional life has been riddled with controversy and history may credit him with expanding the presidency in a way that threatened the powers of Congress.
But his career did not start out that way. His grandparents were illegal Mexican immigrants and his father was a construction worker with eight children. Alberto was born near Houston in 1955 and by the time his father died in 1982 he had been awarded a degree from Harvard Law School. A Roman Catholic, he remained a churchgoer after he divorced his first wife and remarried in 1985. Most observers agree he was a quiet, successful and effective Houston lawyer in the firm of Vinson and Elkins until he aligned his star with the ambitious Texas Governor called George Bush. It was 1994 and Bush persuaded him to be his general counsel.
No one quite knows what Bush saw in Gonzales though history may show he recognized a person who would give him unquestioning loyalty. During his time as general counsel in Texas, Gonzales was credited with actively promoting the death penalty and ensuring there were more death row inmates in Texas than elsewhere in the nation. Some of his critics allege he deliberately blocked clemency petitions and furthered George Bush’s agenda to have the toughest criminal justice system of any state. His signature appeared on 57 documents of people sentenced to death and 56 were executed. The Atlantic Monthly accused him of not providing detailed enough death penalty briefs for his boss and of ignoring pleas for clemency in some cases where death row inmates were considered mentally incompetent. In 2000, he launched a successful campaign for the Texas Supreme Court and the energy industry in Texas was his biggest donor, with Enron donating $34,500.
When George Bush entered the White House no one was surprised that he appointed the ever smiling Gonzales to the role of White House Counsel. By then, Gonzales was Bush’s legal guardian and oracle and it was not long before he showed he was a tough, no- nonsense adviser. One of his first controversial moves was the drafting of an Executive Order that restricted access to the personal records of former presidents. It was a devious way of ensuring that documentation on George Bush’s past would not be available to anyone. It was a serious blow to the Freedom of Information Act and was an indication that Gonzales and the Bush White House were prepared to draw a veil of secrecy over anything that could shed light on the past and president activities of the president and his vice- president.
Though Gonzales was willing to restrict information about Bush and Cheney, no one imagined he would question whether the United States of America should adhere to the Geneva Conventions. But he did just that in January 2002 in a memo that questioned the validity of the Conventions, especially Article III, for dealing with detainees arrested in the war on terrorism. Some experts now see that memo as the start of a process that weakened America’s commitment to the treatment of the prisoners of war and led to a legal void in which abuses began, starting with the brutal interrogation of prisoners and followed by the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison. That was followed by secret CIA prisons, the rendition of suspects for interrogation ton countries that used torture and the use of interrogation techniques like water boarding.
Gonzales argued that the Geneva protocols were “quaint,” a description that shocked our allies and held the US up to ridicule across the globe. He also declared that the war on terrorism rendered “obsolete” Geneva's strict limitations on the questioning of enemy prisoners. Two years later when the White House tried to distance itself from his view on Geneva, he remained resolute that he had acted correctly in his reasoning about torture. In fact, he even proposed that it would be unconstitutional for Congress to attempt to prohibit an act of torture ordered by the president.
George Bush was not the only person Gonzales was prepared to go to any lengths to protect. He made sure no one got access to documents that would have revealed what Vice-President Dick Cheney had been up to when he held secret meetings of his Energy Task Force. For come commentators it was evidence that Gonzales’ energy industry donors from his days in Texas had finally got their money’s worth.
Of course all of these issues were not hot topics in 2004 when he was privately touted by the White House as a future Supreme Court Justice. When word of that reached highly placed conservatives they became alarmed because they viewed Gonzales with deep suspicion, convinced he was pro-choice. They told Karl Rove and the president they would vigorously campaign against any effort to nominate Gonzales to the Court. Their opposition may have encouraged the president the rethink his plans for his favorite lawyer because he abandoned the Supreme Court possibility and in November 2004 nominated him to replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General.
With some irony one can point to the fact that in 2004 leading democrats like Charles Schummer and Patrick Leahy, who are now calling for Gonzales head, thought he would make a better attorney general than his predecessor. It is clear they saw him then as a smiling, affable attorney, not realizing he was not only tough and dedicated to the president but was anxious to expand the powers of the presidency, even if it meant eroding Congressional oversight. At the time, Sen. P. Leahy, D-Vermont, said he liked and respected Gonzales and looked forward as a member of the Judiciary Committee to considering his nomination. Sen. C. Schummer, D-New York gushed enthusiasm for Gonzales and in a press release remarked that “it is encouraging to see the president has chosen someone less polarizing……I can tell you he is a better candidate than Ashcroft.”
If Schummer and Leahy could take back those 2004 comments they would in a heart beat. They had mistaken believed Gonzales as Attorney General would represent the American people as the country’s leading law officer. But that was never going to be the case. His loyalty was to George Bush and he exploited his new role to further the agendas of the president and vice-president. That became apparent at the end of 2005 when it was revealed that as White Counsel he had authorized NASA to eavesdrop on US citizens without seeking appropriate warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Act. He had then continued to oversee and provide legal cover the program in his attorney general role. In doing so he undermined FISA and the Fourth Amendment. When Congress demanded answers and threatened an inquiry the White House shut down the program but in the process some critics accused Gonzales of advising the president on how to ensure Congress was unable to investigate it. The president did that by denying investigators the necessary security clearances to analyze the history of the NASA program.
It was Gonzales who also provided legal cover for Guantanamo and made the legal arguments for military commissions. Some retired generals accused him of preventing military legal experts from participating in Justice Department discussions about detention and interrogation practices because he knew that JAGS’ lawyers – Judge Advocate Generals Corps – would not have backed his assault on the Geneva Conventions.
Until recently, his main critics were democrats, human rights organizations, retired generals and international lawyers. A German court indicted him in absentia last year for what it regarded as his role in authorizing the rendition of a German citizen. That case may well end up in the International Criminal Court in the Hague, thereby making it impossible for Gonzales to travel freely at any time in the future to countries that have signed up to the Hague court.
The clamor for him to resign over the questionable sacking of eight prosecutors may lead to even greater scrutiny of his role in the Bush administration over the past six years. A Democratic Congress has him in its sights and it is unlikely to allow him to feel comfortable, even if the president stands by him. On the other hand, Gonzales has shown such unquestioning loyalty he would probably fall on his sword tomorrow if his biggest client, George Bush, asked him to take a hit for the team. Some critics have speculated that it would easier anyway for the president to sacrifice his personal lawyer than his brain – Karl Rove.

IRAQ WAR ENTERS ITS FIFTH YEAR

As the Iraq war goes into fifth year, those pundits who believed on March 20, 2003 that a new dawn had begun for Iraq should now admit they were living in cloud cuckoo land.
No one should be more willing to do that than President Bush who strode onto the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 dressed as a combat pilot, convinced victory was in his grasp. With a banner behind him announcing “Mission Accomplished,” he declared that after only five weeks of occupation major combat operations in Iraq were over. How naïve that must now seem to him when, after four years of fighting, the lives of American service personnel and innocent civilians are still being lost and the Iraqi death toll is being counted in the hundreds of thousands.
For the US military things have only got worse and a new troop surge promotes an ever revolving service door for enlisted personnel shuttling between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers of American wounded are now in the tens of thousands with many scarred forever, and too many doomed to hospital treatment for life for the loss of a limb, head trauma or psychiatric illness. And the cost in dollars mounts every day, climbing into hundreds of billions and making a mockery of the 2003 White House promise that Iraqi oil would pay for the Occupation. There has been so much wasted spending of US taxpayer dollars that billions are untraceable and may have been appropriated by crooked Iraqi politicians, insurgents and greedy corporations. The war has also created the largest ever number of “mercenaries,” possibly 100,000, hired by the Pentagon to inflate the ranks of US personnel on the battlefield. Many of those hired guns are being paid inflated salaries and there has been no oversight of their activities. Worse still, they are not bound by US military law or by the laws of Iraq because they are considered part of the occupying force.
If all that is not a terrible indictment of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, consider also the critical misjudgments of the Bush Administration that included the bogus case it made for going to war in the first place. Who can forget General Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN and the world of what he claimed were mobile biological weapons labs. They turned out to be agricultural trailers. And why did Powell tell the world they were something else? Well, the German government had an Iraqi defector codenamed “Curveball” who claimed he had seen those same trailers outfitted as weapons labs. The CIA never interviewed “Curveball” but just handed his information to Colin Powell to present to the world. It turns out “Curveball” was a fake. He just wanted a better life in the West and was happy to tell American intelligence what it wanted to hear. Believe it or not, it was not until the war was in full swing that the CIA went to Germany to speak to “Curveball.” It was only then he admitted he had conned them. And who can forget the warnings by Condoleezza Rice of the danger of a mushroom cloud over an American city. She probably got that nonsense from another “Curveball.” It seems there were plenty of Iraqis willing to lie, knowing their lies were just what some people in Washington wanted to hear.
Let us also not forget that the Iraq invasion has unleashed a bloody civil war and encouraged Iraq’s Shiites to move closer to Iran. It has left America’s standing in the world at an all time low. The US has lost so much of its moral authority that anti–Americanism has taken hold among our allies in Europe. A recent survey showed that anti-US feeling was now as high in Britain as it had been traditionally in France. Rarely has an American president drawn so much vitriol from so many across the globe and all because of Iraq and events like the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and belligerent White House rhetoric. Even leading British judges who generally remain silent on political issues have condemned the Bush administration for its tactics, especially in its treatment of detainees at Guantanamo.
The war in Iraq has changed many of the diplomatic dynamics of the international scene with American influence weakened by growing hostility towards it. In Britain, America’s closest ally, there is a growing consensus that with the departure this year of Tony Blair as Prime Minister, Britain’s relationship with the US will change and the British will never again give unquestioning support to Washington’s foreign policy. Tony Blair has been weakened by his support for the war and the general belief is he lied to the British public about the case for war.
Recently, Hans Blix, the former UN chief weapons inspector said Tony Blair and George Bush lost the confidence of their own electorates because the Iraq war was illegal. He didn’t go so far as to say they lied. Instead he used more diplomatic language.
“They put exclamation marks where there should have been question marks,” he told a reporter, adding that the Bush administration was full of “witch hunters” in the run up to the war. In his view “they were prepared to see anything as evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction when it was clear he had none.”
One of the startling effects of the Iraq war is that the American public has slowly turned against it, realizing it was launched on the basis of bogus evidence and that it has left the US military at the mercy of two sides in a bitter civil war. Part of the growing disillusionment with the war can also be attributed to the fact there has been no exit plan and the White House has constantly sugar coated a terrible reality by refusing to admit that things have been steadily getting worse.
Now the war is about to enter its fifth year, it is worth looking back at what was being said this time last year when the war was entering its fourth year. President Bush was telling us that there would be only victory and no compromise. Donald Rumsfeld was warning those who said we should pull out of Iraq that it would be tantamount to handing post war Germany back to the Nazis. No one quite knew what he meant other than the fact that there appeared to be no one but the US military capable of running Iraq. Dick Cheney was busy denying there was a civil war and was continuing to hint at victory. In contrast, former Iraqi Prime Minister, Allawi viewed things differently. He said: “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”
Sen. Chuck Hagel, Rep., Nebraska, was blunt in his assessment of the realities. He believed the American people were beyond believing in Bush administration public relations offensives. For him it was about “cold hard realities and the facts on the ground.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former National Security Adviser under President Carter was one of the few public speakers who appeared to have his finger on the pulse. He clearly sensed a changing mood in the American heartland and across the nation and made his feelings known in an NPR interview on March 20, 2006:
“We have destroyed our credibility. No one believes anything the president says anymore. We have tarnished our morality with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. These are phenomenal costs. And there’s of course blood and money and tens of thousands of Iraqi dead. So, in my view the time has come to face all of this and to realize that staying for a prolonged period of time until some ephemeral victory is not the solution. It is time to leave.”

One wonders what will be said this time next year as the Iraq war enters its sixth year. Will people still be talking about a pull out or about a new Vietnam, or will the war have widened to include Shiites and Sunnis in neighboring countries? One thing is for sure. President Bush will not be standing in front of a banner with “Mission Accomplished” emblazoned on it. Even if the violence subsidies, the words of Colin Powell will still ring true. Before the war, he reminded President Bush of the pottery barn rule. “When you break it you own it,” he warned the president. How long he US will “own” the problem that is Iraq is the question that really troubles most Americans.