From Ashcroft to Incompetence?

Next up for US attorney general Alberto Gonzales (click here for Reuters article). While a minority AG would be welcome, Gonzales is hispanic, there are some serious problems with Gonzales' selection.

Gonzales has been a legal advisor to Bush both as president and as govenor of Texas. In both roles he has been accused of providing bad and sloppy advice.

The better known problem with Gonzales stems from his advice to the Bush Administration over the treatment of so-called non-combatants and terrorists. Gonzales argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners at Guantanamo, and that the US president was not legally subject to either international or US laws prohibiting torture:

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." (click here for the full article)

The lesser know problem has to do with Gonzales' advice to Bush during the latter's tenure as govenor of Texas. Gonzales was Bush's chief source of advice on death penalty cases. In a summary of an article by Alan Berlow, appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, FindLaw's writer John W. Dean provides an unsettling picture of that advice:

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." (click here for the full article)

It would appear Gonzales has remarkably little regard for human rights. In fact, his past actions demonstrate a propensity to try and find legal loopholes to ignore and abuse the very freedoms George W. Bush claims to hold so dear. Well, it's either that, or Gonzales is remarkably incompetent, and has utterly no grasp of the true spirit of human rights legislation.