[NYTr] Is Alberto Gonzales god or the devil in a dark blue suit?

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Progreso Weekly - Aug 23, 2007
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=109&Itemid=1

Is Alberto Gonzales god or the devil in a dark blue suit?

By Max J. Castro

>From the Washington Post, August 15, 2007: “Gonzales to get Power in
Death Penalty Cases.”

Add this one to the long string of surreal headlines that have come out
of the Bush administration.

It sounds like a bad joke but it is not. The U.S. Department of
Justice, which Gonzales runs, and which he nearly has run into the
ground, is preparing regulations under which the Attorney General would
have the authority to approve “fast-track” procedures adopted by states
who want to carry out executions at a faster rate and with fewer
appeals.

The man who will be handed such awesome power, thanks to President Bush
and by virtue of one of the many troubling provisions of the Patriot
Act, was the same who thought that the protections against abuse and
torture enshrined in the Geneva Conventions were quaint. He is the man
who oversaw the decimation of the Constitutional rights of Americans.
He is the official who presided over the wholesale firing of U.S.
Attorneys for ideological and political reasons. He is a man who seems
incapable of ever telling “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth” -- even to Congress.

The prospect that Alberto Gonzales will be given expanded powers over
life and death is chilling for a reason beyond the scandals he has
recently being embroiled in and the outrages he has perpetrated in his
current office. That reason is what Alberto Gonzales did the last time
he was given this kind of power. And that was to act as a serial
enabler for Bush and the state of Texas to carry out wholesale
executions -- to the point of disregarding serious questions about due
process, fairness, mercy, or even innocence.

It happened in the late 1990s when Gonzales was the Attorney General of
Texas and George W. Bush was governor of that state. The story is laid
out in an excellent article (“The Texas Clemency Memos)” by Alan Berlow
in the July/August 2003 issue of the Atlantic Monthly
(http://www.theatlantic.com/200307/berlow). The following are verbatim
quotations from Berlow’s piece (quotation marks omitted):


 * During Bush’s six years as governor 150 men and two women were
executed in Texas -- a record unmatched by any governor in modern
American history.

 * Each time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his
legal counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on
the morning of the day scheduled for execution, and was then briefed on
those facts by his counsel.

 * Based on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in
all cases but one.

 * The first fifty-seven of these summaries were prepared by Gonzales.

 * Gonzales’s summaries were Bush’s primary source of information in
deciding on whether someone would live or die… A close examination of
the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved
executions based on the most cursory briefings of the issues in
dispute.

 * I have found no evidence that Gonzales ever sent Bush a clemency
petition -- or any document -- that summarized in a concise and
coherent fashion a condemned defendant’s best argument against
execution in a case involving serious questions of innocence and due
process.


Gonzales and Bush turned the clemency process into a sham. It was a
foregone conclusion that anybody sentenced to death should die, even a
mentally retarded person, or one whose counsel was incompetent, or
someone who suffered from serious abuse during childhood. The one case
in which Bush commuted a death sentence was the case of a man scheduled
to die for a crime committed when the condemned man was not even in the
state.

Berlow points out that turning clemency into a charade is especially
serious in a state such as Texas, where a third of executions taking
place in the United States since 1976 have occurred, and where the
justice system is plagued with bias and incompetence. 

But the point is not due process or even justice. The point, for
Gonzales and for his boss George W. Bush, in Texas then and in the
nation now, is to lubricate and hone the machinery of execution so that
it may function with the speed and power of a NASCAR racing car, the
better to posture as tough on crime, the better to please the
bloodthirsty constituency that, then and now, are the most fervent
supporters of our “compassionate conservative” president.