Abu Al Gonzales, An American Embarassment, No, Criminal

Holden over at First Draft, turns us on to the following blog posts in the Washington Post.

From the first entry:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is the 80th attorney general of the United States and if recent events in the law and at the Justice Department are any indication, he is rapidly staking a claim to being among the worst.
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Gonzales has been charged, over and over again and both before and during his current tenure, as being President's Bush's in-house and in-court "yes" man, a lawyer whose main role has been to try to justify legally, at least on its face, what his boss already has decided for political or moral reasons to do anyway. This indeed, sometimes anyway, is one of the roles of attorney general. But it is wholly at odds with the other role, that of hands-off protector of the Constitution against both internal and external threats to its viability.
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But he believes that Gonzales "falls short of any ideal I can think of" and says that Gonzales has inappropriately balanced his "loyalties to the President" with his "responsibilities as a lawyer." Gonzales, says Katz, "doesn't seem to see past the relationship with his boss" and has been "a willing accessory" to some of what Katz sees as the "worst excesses" of the administration's policies.

& here we go with Part II.

The Attorney General's record at the Justice Department strongly suggests that he has still acted as a docile and dogged "facilitator" for White House initiatives rather than as a wise, high-minded legal counselor willing and able on occasion to exercise independent judgment and power.
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...Gonzales' appallingly unprofessional work on death penalty cases when he was counsel for Gov. Bush. According to Berlow, Gonzales "repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of the most salient issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence" (emphasis in original) in a series of memoranda Gonzales prepared for the governor's review as part of the state's clemency process. Berlow believes that this was not mere negligence on the part of Gonzales -- that would have been bad enough -- but rather part of a concerted effort by both men to ensure for both political and ideological reasons that there would be no clemency petitions granted. The dice were loaded, you might say, by the man who now is the nation's top lawyer.
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...he cited two examples wherein Gonzales legal advice to Gov. Bush ran afoul both of constitutional law and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In one case, involving a Mexican national name Irineo Tristan Montoya, Berlow writes that Gonzales told Mexican officials that since Texas had not signed the Vienna Convention the state was not bound to determine whether local police had violated it when they arrested Montoya for murder. Problem is, as Berlow noted, Article 6 of the Constitution states that federal treaties are the "supreme law of the land" and cannot be trumped by state laws or policies. That's first-year law school stuff, by the way.
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"His priority has always been to do his boss's bidding." Berlow also told me that Gonzales' pre-Justice record shows a cavalier pattern of carelessly justifying policy decisions.
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"Sycophant" is just one of many uncomplimentary but pointed words used by my sources for this series to describe Gonzales' work and attitude toward his role as counselor.

I know this is hard to take, & that we've all known what an awful man Gonzales was & is, but we must proceed to Part III.

Brought into the President's cabinet amid oft-stated concerns that he was a mere crony and "facilitator" for the President, and with a controversial record as White House counsel and counsel to then-Texas Governor Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales' record since he took office as Attorney General is a dismal one. In fact, whether it is the legal war on terrorism or garden-variety issues of crime and punishment, it is hard to identify a single area of unchallenged success. And even where the current team at the Justice Department has enjoyed good news-- say, for example, in the area of increased sexual assault prosecutions or solid white-collar convictions-- the wheels for such victories already were in motion before Gonzales took on the job.
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...we have on our hands an Attorney General who still shills for the President as if he were working out of the White House or the Governor's mansion in Austin.
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Now, an Attorney General with this sort of a hapless record no doubt would like to be able to say to the American people: "in spite of all of this, I have helped make you safer where you live." But, here, too, Gonzales has failed. According to the National Association of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, big-city murder rates have risen 10 percent over the last two years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation itself puts the violent crime increase at 3.7 percent for January-June 2006. Also, drug use apparently in increasing in the nation's heartland. What does the Justice Department intend to do about this disturbing trend? Here is what the press release said last December: "Attorney General Gonzales in October announced the Initiative for Safer Communities. Through this initiative, DOJ teams are visiting 18 cities around the country to meet with state and local law enforcement agencies to find out what is causing this increase and to determine which crime-fighting efforts are most effective." In other words, it intends to study the matter.

Emphasis added. Oh, & feeling any safer? Didn't think so.