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Departments National Issues Gonzales is poor choice for U.S. Attorney General by Bernardo Ruiz December 23, 2004 President Bush's nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the top justice post in the country sends the wrong signal, at home and abroad. Gonzales, Bush’s White House legal counsel, would become the first Hispanic to become U.S. attorney general if approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But while a number of groups embrace the nomination as a symbolic acceptance of Latinos, Gonzales’s troubling record should disqualify him. In Texas, as counsel for then-Gov. Bush, he laid the groundwork for a record-breaking number of executions. He prepared more than a third of the case summaries that led to the execution of 150 men and two women in Bush’s six-year tenure -- a number unmatched by any other governor in modern American history. As an elected member of the Texas Supreme Court, he took huge contributions from the energy giant Enron and Enron's law firm, according to the New York Daily News. And he was known to side with the oil industry. In May 2000, he was author of a state Supreme Court opinion that threw out a class-action suit by 885 Corpus Christi homeowners who were harmed by a 1994 refinery tank explosion. Most infamously, as White House counsel, Gonzales helped shape the legal framework that led to the abuses and torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. He devised the Bush administration’s policy of placing detainees captured in the fight against terrorism beyond the protection of any law, opening the door to unfair legal proceedings and brutality against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. In August 2002, he helped draft a memo that said that laws prohibiting torture do “not apply to the president’s detention and interrogation of enemy combatants,” and that torture could be called torture only if an interrogation included “injury such as death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions.” As an adviser to the president, Gonzales has flouted international law by undermining the Geneva Conventions, parts of which he called “quaint.” Gonzales argued that detainees in the war on terror are outside international law, and therefore not subject to standard rights and protections, which he called “obsolete.” In the case of so-called enemy combatants, “you need not provide access to counsel,” Gonzales told National Public Radio this past March, a view the U.S. Supreme Court repudiated in June. With such a troubling record, Gonzales is a poor choice for the nation’s top law enforcement post. And Latinos should not rally behind him. Bernardo Ruiz is a free-lance writer and documentary producer living in New York City. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org. © Bernardo Ruiz |
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