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Fri 24 Dec, 2004 04:55 pm
Is Alberto Gonzales the right man for the position of Attorney General of the US ?
All the President's Lawyers
Should the attorney general be the president's yes man?
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2004, at 1:32 PM PT
Rich clients aren't like you and me.
One of the most striking legacies of my brief foray into the wonderful world of divorce law was the observation of this difference between wealthy clients and normal ones: The wealthy clients, particularly CEOs and business owners, tended to believe that the role of a divorce lawyer is to deliver precisely the legal outcome they desire, regardless of what the law itself demands. Whether it was an issue of custody, child-support payments, or Christmas visits, these clients would instruct us on precisely what they wanted and wait to have it implemented.
This is the "plumber" model of an attorney; they are expected to arrange the pipes to dump water where the client wants it. Divorce law doesn't always work that way, though. Counsel is constrained by precise child- and spousal-support formulae, and family law judges have almost limitless discretion to do what they deem to be in the best interest of the children. First comes the child, then comes the statute, and only then come the wishes of the client.
I spent many, many hours trying to explain to rich men that while they may want to pay $200 per month in support and have visitation only on alternating golf days, the law just could not be wrestled into compliance. This is the "judge" model of an attorney. One offers best guesses about what the law will permit, then tries to persuade the client to live with it.
In a sense, President Bush is the quintessential rich divorce client. It's not just that he's wealthy; it's that he's accustomed to having cadres of lawyers flitting to and fro, waving their sparkly lawyer's wands and making his every dream come true. And this is why soon-to-be Attorney General Alberto Gonzales really is any president's dream come true. His prevailing legal principle appears to be to deliver whatever the client wants, whenever the client wants it. And one of the questions we need to contemplate is whether that's the kind of lawyer we want for the next attorney general.
Gonzales is in a little bit of trouble just now. Democrats are threatening to muck up his confirmation hearings with a clutch of memos that have him either offering or ferrying along some shockingly bad legal advice to the president. A troubling piece by Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, and Michael Hirsh in this week's Newsweek describes the legal process that animated the now notorious Aug. 1, 2002, "torture memo"—a document drafted by DoJ lawyer John Yoo, (now teaching at Berkeley Law School) and signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee (now a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals). The memo, among other things, argued that torture isn't really torture unless it was "specifically intended" to cause harm and that only physical damage rising to the level of "death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a bodily function" actually meets the legal definition of torture.
Gonzales similarly played the role of master plumber to Bush's CEO in another notorious memo, this one authored by him, a Jan. 25, 2002, document arguing to the president—against the explicit urgings of Colin Powell—that the protections of the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the conflict with al-Qaida. Dismissing the Geneva protections as "obsolete" and "quaint," Gonzales helped the administration stake out a legal position that was far more extreme than necessary, a style of advocacy Gonzales himself labels "leaning forward."
And this loaded legal "advice" perfectly mirrors the kind of plumber-style lawyering for which Gonzales was known back when he advised then-Gov. George Bush on grants of clemency to death row inmates in Texas. As writer Alan Berlow chronicled in this now famous Atlantic Monthly piece, Gonzales failed to give the governor highly relevant legal advice in memos regarding imminent executions. Gov. Bush ended up signing off on all but one of the 152 executions that crossed his desk in his six years as governor, in part because his "lawyer" did not see fit to advise him of possibly crucial mitigating circumstances—including ineffectiveness of counsel and claims of actual innocence.
In some senses, the clemency memos are a more egregious example of the dangers of yes-man, plumber-style lawyering than the torture memos. When Gov. Bush was charged with making last-minute determinations about sparing the lives of those sentenced to death, he was acting as de facto judge. He ought never to have been in an adversarial position with regard to the accused in the first place. His job, and therefore Gonzales' job as his adviser, was to weigh all the mitigating evidence and determine whether there was any basis on which to spare a human life. By failing to meet even minimal standards of legal objectivity, Gonzales offered substandard legal advice.
The torture memos—specifically, Gonzales' January memo opining that Bush need not answer to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions—are a closer call. For one thing, Gonzales does lay out arguments on both sides, which he failed to do in the clemency memos. For another, the memos were part of the larger information-gathering process regarding U.S. executive power during wartime, rather than a summary of all relevant legal arguments—as the clemency memos ought to have been.
Next month the Senate will face the difficult task of winnowing out which of these memos, if any, represent Gonzales' views and whether this strident and often one-sided legal advocacy represented any kind of ethical lapse.
Yesterday, a memorandum from a group of former Office of Legal Counsel attorneys was sent to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel B. Levin. Its stated purpose was to clarify the practices and principles of the OLC going forward, especially in light of the August 2002 torture memo. The OLC is directed by the attorney general, and one of the concerns underlying this memo is that what passed for legal "advice" when Gonzales acted as White House counsel can have no place in the OLC. Gonzales' plumber style of advocacy, while problematic in a lawyer for the White House, would be disastrous if it were implemented by OLC. Pointing out that the role of the OLC is to advise and guide the president and the executive agencies, the memo argues that the main task of this office is to provide "reliable legal advice" as opposed to adopting "[t]he advocacy model of lawyering, in which lawyers craft merely plausible legal arguments to support their clients' desired actions."
Advice to the president cannot, these lawyers continue, ignore whatever inconvenient legal constraints might impede the desired course of the executive branch, particularly because the president is charged with protecting the entire Constitution and not just executive power. The authors urge the president's legal advisers to show respect for the courts and Congress, as well as deference to the president. Finally, the memo seeks a lot more transparency from the president's lawyers with respect to what they are advising and why. In sum, the former OLC lawyers are asking Gonzales to adopt the model of lawyer-as-judge, as opposed to lawyer-as-plumber, in his role as the next attorney general.
Of course the distinction between these two models of lawyering is never that simple. Most attorneys weave back and forth between acting as hired gun and wise counselor 20 times a day. And despite a haze of repression, even I can recall that whole legal-ethics classes were devoted to the question of when an attorney should answer solely to her client and when she is obligated to act according to the greater good. Particularly in the context of the criminal law, these lines are often blurry at best. But the OLC memo provides a pretty good template for the Senate to use in assessing Gonzales' suitability to become a judge type of lawyer.
On the one hand, Gonzales has already proven, when he sat on the Texas Supreme Court, that he is perfectly capable of principled legal thinking and that he needn't be anyone's yes guy. In that sense, he may have been a better choice for the U.S. Supreme Court than for attorney general. The question posed yesterday by the OLC's former lawyers, and the question that needs to be resolved next month, is whether Gonzales is capable of representing Congress, the courts, and the Constitution rather than just carrying water for his boss.
Gonzales Is Likely to Face Hard Questions in Hearings
By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: January 3, 2005
WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 - When the Senate Judiciary Committee begins hearings on Thursday to consider President Bush's nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be attorney general, two starkly different portraits of Mr. Gonzales will be on display.
His supporters are expected to emphasize the one depicting the nominee as an exquisitely American success story: one of eight children of Mexican immigrants who spoke little English and raised their family in a home with no hot water or telephone, Mr. Gonzales eventually graduated from Harvard Law School. He then became a legal adviser to Mr. Bush when he was governor of Texas, a member of that state's supreme court and now White House counsel.
His critics, both on the committee and among witnesses testifying after Mr. Gonzales's own appearance on Thursday, will portray him as a lawyer who made colossal misjudgments in supervising the administration's legal strategy for dealing with Al Qaeda and other terrorist threats.
Mr. Gonzales will be the first of Mr. Bush's second-term cabinet nominees to face a confirmation test.
Although few believe Mr. Gonzales is in danger of being denied confirmation, he may nonetheless face the most vigorous interrogation because of his role in overseeing internal legal memorandums that appeared to condone mistreatment, perhaps even torture, of detainees.
The timing of the hearings has proven especially awkward for the administration. They are coming just after a new round of disclosures about the treatment of detainees held by the United States military in Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and reports that the administration may hold detainees in Cuba indefinitely.
Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/03/politics/03gonzales.html?th
Gonzales Helped Set the Course for Detainees
Justice Nominee's Hearings Likely to Focus on Interrogation Policies
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 5, 2005; Page A01
In March 2002, U.S. elation at the capture of al Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaida was turning to frustration as he refused to bend to CIA interrogation. But the agency's officers, determined to wring more from Abu Zubaida through threatening interrogations, worried about being charged with violating domestic and international proscriptions on torture.
They asked for a legal review -- the first ever by the government -- of how much pain and suffering a U.S. intelligence officer could inflict on a prisoner without violating a 1994 law that imposes severe penalties, including life imprisonment and execution, on convicted torturers. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel took up the task, and at least twice during the drafting, top administration officials were briefed on the results.
White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales chaired the meetings on this issue, which included detailed descriptions of interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding," a tactic intended to make detainees feel as if they are drowning. He raised no objections and, without consulting military and State Department experts in the laws of torture and war, approved an August 2002 memo that gave CIA interrogators the legal blessings they sought.
Gonzales, working closely with a small group of conservative legal officials at the White House, the Justice Department and the Defense Department -- and overseeing deliberations that generally excluded potential dissenters -- helped chart other legal paths in the handling and imprisonment of suspected terrorists and the applicability of international conventions to U.S. military and law enforcement activities.
His former colleagues say that throughout this period, Gonzales -- a confidant of George W. Bush's from Texas and the president's nominee to be the next attorney general -- often repeated a phrase used by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to spur tougher anti-terrorism policies: "Are we being forward-leaning enough?"
But one of the mysteries that surround Gonzales is the extent to which these new legal approaches are his own handiwork rather than the work of others, particularly Vice President Cheney's influential legal counsel, David S. Addington.
Gonzales's involvement in the crafting of the torture memo, and his work on two presidential orders on detainee policy that provoked controversy or judicial censure during Bush's first term, is expected to take center stage at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings tomorrow on Gonzales's nomination to become attorney general. The outlines of Gonzales's actions are known, but new details emerged in interviews with colleagues and other officials, some of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they were involved in confidential government policy deliberations.
Link
should AG be "yes man"
Should the United States Attorney General be the president's "yes" man?
Answer: NO
The Attorney General should work for the PEOPLE of the United States and serve the best interests of the nation rather than serve the interests of one man.
I found an interesting brief written by the Attorney General of Montana. Attorney General Mike McGrath filed an application for a writ of prohibition in the Montana Supreme Court, charging that Governor Judy Martz has violated the Montana Constitution and exceeded the authority given to her under state law. In his application, AG McGrath wrote:
"First, the authority of the Attorney General to act as the legal officer for the State presents a constitutional issue of major statewide importance. A clearly defined authority to bring and defend lawsuits on behalf of the State, and not to do so when a lawsuit is not in the State’s legal interests, proves critical to the protection of State interests in the innumerable legal controversies that the State faces. . .
"The Attorney General must put the interests of the public ahead of all other legal interests. “Paramount to all of his duties, of course, is his duty to protect the interest of the general public.” Superintendent of Ins. v. Attorney Gen., 558 A.2d 1197, 1202 (Me. 1989). The Attorney General must not yield to the directives of other government agencies or officials if he does not believe those directives to be in the public interest. The Attorney General thus has both the right and the responsibility to promote the interests of all the citizens of the state, not just of certain segments of government. . . ."
http://doj.state.mt.us/news/releases2004/applicationforwrit.pdf
I think the same should be true of the United States Attorney General. The AG should put the interests of the public ahead of all other interests. The AG should not yield to the directives of the President or other officials if the AG believes those directives are not in the public interest.
After all the political rhetoric the Senate will confirm this Mr Gonzoles. I(s he the right person for the job?
Last week, the Bush administration put another spin on the twisted legal reasoning behind the brutalization of prisoners at military jails, apparently in hopes of smoothing the promotion of Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. Gonzales, who oversaw earlier memos condoning what amounts to torture and scoffed at the Geneva conventions, is being rewarded with the job of attorney general..
But the document only underscored the poor choice President George W. Bush made when he decided to elevate a man so closely identified with the scandal of Abu Ghraib, the contempt for due process at Guantánamo Bay and the seemingly unending revelations of the abuse of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. Like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the other chief architect of these policies, Gonzales shamed the United States and endangered American soldiers who may be taken prisoner in the future by condoning the sort of atrocious acts the United States has always condemned..
The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to question Gonzales on Thursday, even though the White House has not released documents that are essential to a serious hearing. The committee has an obligation to demand these documents, and to compel Gonzales to account for administration policies, before giving him the top law-enforcement job..
After Sept. 11, 2001, with Americans intent on punishing those behind the terrorist attacks and preventing another calamity at home, the Bush administration had its lawyers review the legal status of Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners, with an eye to getting around the Geneva conventions, other international accords and U.S. law on the treatment of prisoners..
Gonzales was the center of this effort. On Jan. 25, 2002, he sent Bush a letter assuring him that the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." That August, Gonzales got a legal opinion from Jay Bybee, then the assistant attorney general, arguing that the president could suspend the Geneva conventions at will and that some forms of torture "may be justified." Rumsfeld's lawyers produced documents justifying the abuse of prisoners sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay. Gonzales approved those memos or didn't object. .
On Thursday, more than eight months after the rotten fruits of those legal briefs were shown to the world at Abu Ghraib, the Justice Department issued yet another legal opinion. This time it rejected Bybee's bizarre notions that the president could be given the legal go-ahead to authorize torture, simply by defining the word so narrowly as to exclude almost anything short of mortal injury. We were glad to see that turnaround, although it was three years too late. Prisoners have already been systematically hurt, degraded, tortured and even killed. The international reputation of the United States is deeply scarred..
The new memo said that "torture is abhorrent," but it still goes beyond the limits of American values and international conventions. The administration now recognizes that the antitorture accord forbids the deliberate use of severe physical or mental pain and suffering to compel a prisoner to divulge information or cooperate in some other way - but it continues to draw fine lines about what that means..
For instance, the Geneva conventions say that it is torture when a prisoner suffers mentally from the use of mind-altering drugs or the threat of imminent death. But the administration's lawyers have decided that temporary trauma doesn't count, and that mental suffering is real only if it lasts for years. More than once, American soldiers have taken an Iraqi teenager and compelled him to dig his grave, then forced him to kneel, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger in a mock execution. Is that not torture unless he's still upset about it in five years?.
Even if the new memo could somehow magically sweep away all these deeply troubling aspects of the Gonzales nomination, there are other big questions about his background. He was a primary agent behind unacceptably restrictive secrecy policies, the proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and the excessive authority to abuse civil liberties granted by the Patriot Act. .
Republicans expect an easy confirmation, given their Senate majority. But at the very least, Gonzales should account for his actions. He should unequivocally renounce torture, without any fine-print haggling, as well as the other illegal treatment of prisoners in military jails. And he should explain how he would use his new job to clean up the mess he helped create..
Gonzales's Clemency Memos Criticized
Crucial Facts Were Missing, Lawyers Say
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 6, 2005; Page A04
In 1995, a one-eyed drifter named Henry Lee Lucas was headed for execution by injection in a Texas prison for the murder of an unnamed woman, one of hundreds he confessed to killing in a crime spree lasting more than a decade.
The task of recommending whether then-Gov. George W. Bush should grant a reprieve or commute Lucas's death sentence fell to Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush's counsel. In a memo to Bush dated March 13, 1995, Gonzales marshaled a case for Lucas's guilt. He noted that Lucas had given a sheriff a drawing of the victim, and attached a record of Lucas's eight other Texas murder convictions, each of which led to lengthy or life prison sentences.
Left out of Gonzales's summary was any mention of a 1986 investigation by the Texas attorney general's office that concluded that Lucas had not killed the woman, and that he had falsely confessed to numerous killings in an effort to undermine the veracity of his confessions to the crimes he did commit.
While the six-page memo factually summarizes Lucas's court appeals, "it does not really address in any way . . . all the questions that were raised about his guilt," said Jim Mattox, the Texas attorney general from 1983 to 1991, who instigated an investigation of police conduct in the case. He said that if the memo had been prepared for him, he would have chastised the author "for allowing me to make a decision on partial information."
Senate hearings today on Gonzales's nomination to become the next U.S. attorney general are expected to focus on his work as White House counsel. But his memos for Bush on Texas clemency matters illustrate how Gonzales approached another momentous task: endorsing the taking of a life.
Several other attorneys for convicts executed in Texas during Bush's tenure -- who recently reviewed the memos for the first time at the request of The Washington Post -- complained that Gonzales provided unfair or incomplete summaries of evidence and mitigating circumstances. They said the missing information might have influenced Bush's decisions had he been aware of it.
Jim Marcus, an attorney for convicted murderer Kenneth Ray Ransom, said, for example, that Gonzales's memo does not correctly state the basis for the clemency request he filed in 1997. "Had I known that the 40-page petition I filed would be boiled down to one slipshod sentence in Mr. Gonzales's memo, I would simply have filed a one-sentence petition," he said.
White House spokesman Brian R. Besanceney said in response to the complaints yesterday that Gonzales and his colleagues in the Texas counsel's office "treated each clemency petition with careful scrutiny and sensitivity." He also said the summaries Gonzales prepared represented "a small fraction of the information provided to the governor" and sought only to document "the governor's final decision" rather than recommend a course of action.
Pete Wassdorf, head of the general counsel's office for the Texas attorney general, who served as Gonzales's deputy at the time, also said additional information about some of the cases was provided to Bush in other documents. But only a few of the 62 clemency memos Gonzales prepared for Bush between January 1995 and November 1997 make any reference to additional documentation.
The Gonzales memos were first released to journalist Alan Berlow, who wrote about them in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, and later provided to The Post by the Texas archives.
Gonzales's staff in the Texas counsel's office drafted the memos. He edited and approved about one every two months during the first three years of Bush's governorship. Gonzales acted under a provision of the state constitution that required him to "review and make recommendations on applications for pardons, commutations and reprieves."
Each of the memos included a line at the end where Bush could check off "deny" or "grant." Most were three to four pages long, although one -- for female ax-murderer Karla Faye Tucker, who gained wide attention by embracing Christianity in prison -- included a letter and videotape from Tucker to Bush.
Gonzales's habit in the memos was to present what he listed as a "brief summary of the facts," followed by a family and personal history of the convict, a tally of other crimes, a summary of litigation and a one-paragraph conclusion. In some cases, Gonzales said, "we feel that nothing will be gained by granting a 30-day reprieve" or "no compelling legal or factual reasons support" commutation of the death sentence.
But in other instances, when no clemency petition had been made, it had already been denied by the state board of pardons, or the defendant did not have a lawyer, Gonzales expressed no opinion about guilt or innocence; he merely predicted that the convict "will be executed on the scheduled date," and left room for Bush's check mark.
In the case of David Herman, who was executed in 1997 a few days after an attempted suicide, Herman's lawyer, Jack Strickland, said that Gonzales's memo was "a skeletal attempt to brief Bush on a complex case." He said Gonzales had not given adequate attention to whether Herman was mentally competent, a requirement for executions. Strickland, who both prosecuted and defended death penalty cases, said actions by Gonzales and Bush left a wide impression that "it was a waste of paper" to request a commutation.
Greg Wiercioch, another Texas defense attorney, said in an interview that for two of his death row clients, appellate courts granted stays of execution or ordered additional evidentiary hearings after Gonzales declared in his memos that the case had no worthy pending legal issues.
Bush did eventually commute Lucas's death sentence to life imprisonment -- the only commutation during his five-year tenure -- after Mattox pressed the issue publicly during a 1998 campaign for reelection as attorney general on the Democratic ticket. Gonzales legally witnessed Bush's written "proclamation."
"I take every death-penalty case seriously and review each case carefully," Bush said at a news conference on the day of his decision.
The Alliance for Justice, a coalition of 70 civil rights and other organizations, charged in a statement released yesterday that "the deficiencies in Gonzales' memoranda may have played a role in Bush's failure to grant clemency." They said his record on the issue, along with policies he embraced on the detention of prisoners in the war on terrorism, raised questions about "whether he can properly serve as the nation's chief law enforcement officer."
Besides the sole commutation, Bush granted a single 30-day death penalty reprieve, in a case that arose after Bush had appointed Gonzales to the Texas Supreme Court. In non-death-penalty cases, Bush granted 19 of the 149 pardons "for innocence" or compassion that were urged by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, an official review body for such requests. Scholars at the University of Pittsburgh have said that was the lowest number by any Texas governor since the 1940s.
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Worse Than Fiction
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 7, 2005
Ive been thinking of writing a political novel. It will be a bad novel because there won't be any nuance: the villains won't just espouse an ideology I disagree with - they'll be hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels.
In my bad novel, a famous moralist who demanded national outrage over an affair and writes best-selling books about virtue will turn out to be hiding an expensive gambling habit. A talk radio host who advocates harsh penalties for drug violators will turn out to be hiding his own drug addiction.
In my bad novel, crusaders for moral values will be driven by strange obsessions. One senator's diatribe against gay marriage will link it to "man on dog" sex. Another will rant about the dangers of lesbians in high school bathrooms.
In my bad novel, the president will choose as head of homeland security a "good man" who turns out to have been the subject of an arrest warrant, who turned an apartment set aside for rescue workers into his personal love nest and who stalked at least one of his ex-lovers.
In my bad novel, a TV personality who claims to stand up for regular Americans against the elite will pay a large settlement in a sexual harassment case, in which he used his position of power to - on second thought, that story is too embarrassing even for a bad novel.
In my bad novel, apologists for the administration will charge foreign policy critics with anti-Semitism. But they will be silent when a prominent conservative declares that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular."
In my bad novel the administration will use the slogan "support the troops" to suppress criticism of its war policy. But it will ignore repeated complaints that the troops lack armor.
The secretary of defense - another "good man," according to the president - won't even bother signing letters to the families of soldiers killed in action.
Last but not least, in my bad novel the president, who portrays himself as the defender of good against evil, will preside over the widespread use of torture.
How did we find ourselves living in a bad novel? It was not ever thus. Hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels have always been with us, on both sides of the aisle. But 9/11 created an environment some liberals summarize with the acronym Iokiyar: it's O.K. if you're a Republican.
The public became unwilling to believe bad things about those who claim to be defending the nation against terrorism. And the hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels of the right, empowered by the public's credulity, have come out in unprecedented force.
Apologists for the administration would like us to forget all about the Kerik affair, but Bernard Kerik perfectly symbolizes the times we live in. Like Rudolph Giuliani and, yes, President Bush, he wasn't a hero of 9/11, but he played one on TV. And like Mr. Giuliani, he was quick to cash in, literally, on his undeserved reputation.
Once the New York newspapers began digging, it became clear that Mr. Kerik is, professionally and personally, a real piece of work. But that's not unusual these days among people who successfully pass themselves off as patriots and defenders of moral values. Mr. Kerik must still be wondering why he, unlike so many others, didn't get away with it.
And Alberto Gonzales must be hoping that senators don't bring up the subject.
The principal objection to making Mr. Gonzales attorney general is that doing so will tell the world that America thinks it's acceptable to torture people. But his confirmation will also be a statement about ethics.
As White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales was charged with vetting Mr. Kerik. He must have realized what kind of man he was dealing with - yet he declared Mr. Kerik fit to oversee homeland security.
Did Mr. Gonzales defer to the wishes of a president who wanted Mr. Kerik anyway, or did he decide that his boss wouldn't want to know? (The Nelson Report, a respected newsletter, reports that Mr. Bush has made it clear to his subordinates that he doesn't want to hear bad news about Iraq.)
Either way, when the Senate confirms Mr. Gonzales, it will mean that Iokiyar remains in effect, that the basic rules of ethics don't apply to people aligned with the ruling party. And reality will continue to be worse than any fiction I could write.
No he should not be.
Yes he is and will be.
It's the only way to have a position in the bush camp.
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