- Feb 18, 2001
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Change at Justice?
(Original publication: November 11, 2004)
Anyone cheering John Ashcroft's departure from the Justice Department might do well to hold the applause: Given a chance to pick a successor who might heal wounds inflicted by the polarizing attorney general, President Bush selected tarnished goods in White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, an architect of some of the administration's major blunders in fairness and civil protections.
Gonzales, who is Mexican American, rose from humble roots to attend Harvard Law School and become a confidant of the president. If confirmed, he would become the first Hispanic to hold the nation's top law enforcement job ? another distinction for a White House that also named the nation's first African-American secretary of state and the first black national security adviser. But in other important respects, Gonzales would offer more of the same.
While lacking the public profile of Ashcroft, Gonzales has been at the forefront of two of the major assaults on fairness and civil liberties perpetrated by the White House in the post-9/11 era. It was Gonzales who publicly defended the indefensible ? the since-discredited administration policy denying certain alleged terror suspects from receiving assistance of counsel, being apprised even of the allegations against them, or even having their cases heard by a U.S. court.
This position has been repudiated by the U.S. Supreme Court, which chided the White House for retreating on fairness ? one in a series of federal court decisions reversing ill-advised government efforts to deny the barest due process to alleged terror detainees, scores of whom never faced terror charges, but were deported for immigration violations. Additionally, it was attorney Gonzales who wrote an internal memorandum in February 2002, subsequently made public, that, in effect, argued that torture could be used against terror detainees.
The memorandum was the precursor to the lawlessness and rampant abuses later uncovered at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The Gonzales memo asserted that the president claimed the right to waive anti-torture law and international conventions ? common-sense measures aimed at protecting prisoners of war, including captured Americans, from barbarism. Gonzales called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and nonapplicable to the war on terrorism.
He should expound upon these views when the Senate takes up his nomination. Americans need to know whether they are getting another attorney general who plays loose with fairness and civil rights protections. That, in a nutshell, sums up the four-year tenure of John Ashcroft, the public face of an administration's domestic anti-terror apparatus, one that has often struggled to balance security with due process.
During the 9/11 commission hearings, Ashcroft came under criticism for discouraging action on terrorism before the attacks. Afterward, he was chief proponent of the Patriot Act, which granted government more tools to address domestic security ? tools that some fear conflict with settled due-process rights. But these criticisms were forever lost on Ashcroft, who regarded dissenters as dupes or coddlers of terrorists.
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," he told a Senate committee hearing. He did not get the criticism. He did not seem to understand the stakes in a free society. Accordingly, he will not be missed.
"We need an attorney general who recognizes that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive and who recognizes that we can ? and must ? be both safe and free," said Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director.
It remains to be seen whether that person is Alberto Gonzales.
http://www.thejournalnews.com/...1104/11edashcroft.html
(Original publication: November 11, 2004)
Anyone cheering John Ashcroft's departure from the Justice Department might do well to hold the applause: Given a chance to pick a successor who might heal wounds inflicted by the polarizing attorney general, President Bush selected tarnished goods in White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, an architect of some of the administration's major blunders in fairness and civil protections.
Gonzales, who is Mexican American, rose from humble roots to attend Harvard Law School and become a confidant of the president. If confirmed, he would become the first Hispanic to hold the nation's top law enforcement job ? another distinction for a White House that also named the nation's first African-American secretary of state and the first black national security adviser. But in other important respects, Gonzales would offer more of the same.
While lacking the public profile of Ashcroft, Gonzales has been at the forefront of two of the major assaults on fairness and civil liberties perpetrated by the White House in the post-9/11 era. It was Gonzales who publicly defended the indefensible ? the since-discredited administration policy denying certain alleged terror suspects from receiving assistance of counsel, being apprised even of the allegations against them, or even having their cases heard by a U.S. court.
This position has been repudiated by the U.S. Supreme Court, which chided the White House for retreating on fairness ? one in a series of federal court decisions reversing ill-advised government efforts to deny the barest due process to alleged terror detainees, scores of whom never faced terror charges, but were deported for immigration violations. Additionally, it was attorney Gonzales who wrote an internal memorandum in February 2002, subsequently made public, that, in effect, argued that torture could be used against terror detainees.
The memorandum was the precursor to the lawlessness and rampant abuses later uncovered at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The Gonzales memo asserted that the president claimed the right to waive anti-torture law and international conventions ? common-sense measures aimed at protecting prisoners of war, including captured Americans, from barbarism. Gonzales called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and nonapplicable to the war on terrorism.
He should expound upon these views when the Senate takes up his nomination. Americans need to know whether they are getting another attorney general who plays loose with fairness and civil rights protections. That, in a nutshell, sums up the four-year tenure of John Ashcroft, the public face of an administration's domestic anti-terror apparatus, one that has often struggled to balance security with due process.
During the 9/11 commission hearings, Ashcroft came under criticism for discouraging action on terrorism before the attacks. Afterward, he was chief proponent of the Patriot Act, which granted government more tools to address domestic security ? tools that some fear conflict with settled due-process rights. But these criticisms were forever lost on Ashcroft, who regarded dissenters as dupes or coddlers of terrorists.
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," he told a Senate committee hearing. He did not get the criticism. He did not seem to understand the stakes in a free society. Accordingly, he will not be missed.
"We need an attorney general who recognizes that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive and who recognizes that we can ? and must ? be both safe and free," said Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director.
It remains to be seen whether that person is Alberto Gonzales.
http://www.thejournalnews.com/...1104/11edashcroft.html
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