Gonzales races to bottom

It had been a tossup between Mitchell Palmer and John Ashcroft as the worst attorney general in U.S. history. Now former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is making it a three-way race.
Palmer directed two notorious raids and deportations of radicals in the Wilson administration. His assaults on civil liberties included arrests without warrants, unreasonable searches and seizures, police brutality, solitary confinement, denial of counsel and prolonged detention.
Ashcroft did violence to the Constitution in the Bush II administration, tearing up the Fourth and Sixth amendments. He violated the sacred wall between church and state, hounded people using medical marijuana legally in California, sought to undermine Oregon’s death with dignity law and was so prudish he spent $8,000 of taxpayer money covering the breasts of a statue.
Gonzales also tore up the Constitution. He approved torture. He pooh-poohed Geneva Conventions. He contradicted U.S. military and international law. He supported unconstitutional provisions of the Patriot Act. He was responsible for prisoner abuse at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And he drapped imperial robes on Bush by expansive interpretation of presidential power.
Gonzales resigned recently under furious fusilades from leading Democrats and many Republicans, including Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, ranking GOP member on the judiciary committee.
An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle aptly put it: Gonzales leaves an “ethical miasma. He was the legal enabler for the White House’s worst legal thinking: invasions of personal rights and politicization of government service.”
Gonzales signed off on CIA waterboarding and other torture techniques that had long been contemptible for America. Sleep deprivation of prisoners? OK. Assailing their eardrums with blaring music? OK. Stress positions? OK. Beating prisoners with chains? OK.
A year ago he helped stampede Congress into passing the Military Commissions Act endorsing illegal CIA prisons in “extraordinary rendition” for torture abroad and establishing kangaroo courts at Guantánano detaining foreigners for life.
He earned the appellations of torturer in chief and enabler general of the imperial Bush presidency.
Like President Nixon, who said that if the president does it, it isn’t breaking the law, Gonzales advised Bush on how to evade the law. War Crimes Act? Bush was not bound to observe it.
When Bush’s secret eavesdropping program was revealed in 2005, Gonzales asserted that “the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander in chief, to engage in this kind of activity.” Gonzales interpreted the Constitution to place President Bush above the law.
Gonzales directed the firing of nine U.S. attorneys who followed the law instead of Bush zealotry. He shattered the morale of the Justice Department, high-ranking members resigning in disgust. He clamped the reign of secrecy on the Bush administration.
As White House counsel in 2001, he drafted an executive order giving an incumbent or a former president the right to withhold the former president’s papers from the public. If the president’s business isn’t public business than nothing government does is public business.
Gonzales trashed habeas corpus, the Great Writ established by Magna Carta in 1215. He told an incredulous Senator Specter: “There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution.” Article 1, Section 9 makes it plain that habeas “shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion.
Habeas corpus establishes the sacred U.S. legal right of due process. The Sixth Amendment demands a fair trial, right to counsel and confrontation by witnesses.
As presidential counsel, Gonzales’ nighttime visit to a groggy Ashcroft in a hospital was shameful, a shabby effort to authorize an extension of domestic spying without a warrant. Even Ashcroft had scruples about breaking the law.
Among other terrible Gonzales misdeeds were violations of the Hatch Act barring the injection of politics into government and defiance of congressional subpoenas. With another fugitive from the Bush camp and justice, Karl Rove, Gonzales foisted on America a reactionary Supreme Court with justices who can rule à la Bush ideology long after Bush leaves office.
When Gonzales testified before Congress his statements were intentionally false, misleading and evasive. His “memory lapses” were extraordinary about recent events, not something that happened decades ago.
Gonzales betrayed the ideals of America. He served Bush rather than the Constitution and justice.