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A Modest Scheme To Get the Truth Out of Gonzales By PAUL GLUSMAN Commentary

Friday January 28, 2005

Unless U.S. senators have a collective spine transplant (our own Barbara Boxer is thankfully excluded from this group) they will soon confirm Alberto Gonzales as the United States Attorney General. I mention spinelessness because it seems to be the new Democratic policy to “work with” the Bush administration, no matter how outrageous its proposals are. For example, if the Bush administration were to suggest strip mining the entirety of Yosemite National Park (as they probably will) we can be sure that some—if not most—of the Democrats will decry that and, instead, propose that they only strip mine half of Yosemite. Then, when a bill sails through the congress providing that three-quarters of the park be strip mined, the Democrats will trumpet that they got the best deal they were capable of. After all, they wouldn’t want to offend any middle of the road potential voters. 

Anyway, as background on Gonzales, he is a former Texas Supreme Court Justice, with ties to Enron Corporation. When on the court, he accepted $35,000 from that company in campaign contributions— according to the New York Daily News of February 2, 2002. The organization Texans for Public Justice charges that Gonzales accepted campaign contributions from other corporate litigants who were appearing before his court. Others would say this was bribery, but this, apparently, is accepted practice in the judicial offices of Texas. 

When Bush was governor of Texas, Gonzales advised him on death sentence commutation requests. Gonzales apparently supplied Bush with the Classic Comics Illustrated version of the facts. Atlantic Monthly reported that “Gonzales 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.” (July/August 2003.) 

Gonzales has justified torture of prisoners to get information of them. He is the architect of the Abu Ghraib atrocities. Referring to the War on Terror, he wrote in a memo, “This new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” (Do you want an attorney general who writes using the term “paradigm” whatever his views?) 

Now Newsweek reports that when George W. Bush was Texas governor, Gonzales pulled strings to get Bush out of jury duty. It seems that in 1996, Bush was called as a juror to sit on a case involving a stripper who was arrested for driving under the influence. In voir dire—the part of the trial where the lawyers question the biases of the potential jurors—it surely would have come out that Bush himself had been convicted of a DUI. Bush didn’t want that offense to be made public as it would impact his chance of becoming president. Gonzales took the defense attorney and the prosecutor back into the judge’s chambers and argued off the court record that if convicted the stripper could ask for a pardon from the governor (How many strippers convicted of drunk driving go to the governor for a pardon?) and this created a “conflict of interest.” The judge then excused Gov. Bush from the jury on this flimsy argument. The defense attorney, the prosecutor, and the judge all remember Gonzales doing this.  

However, Gonzales himself says he does not remember it. This is a sort of non-denial denial. Gonzales doesn’t say it didn’t happen, just that he “doesn’t remember.” 

Strange. I’ve been practicing law going on 30 years now, and if I ever took a governor back into a judge’s chambers to get the governor out of jury duty, I think I would remember it. Even if the governor for whom I did it was unmemorable, say, like Gray Davis.  

So how can we refresh Gonzales’s memory of this unusual influence peddling and help him to tell the truth? My suggestion: Torture him. I think perhaps some water boarding, or perhaps being made to stand naked in an uncomfortable position, being given minimal food in a cold cell, with strobe lights flashing, with no toilet and with wires attached to his testicles would do wonders for his capacity to recall the facts. 

I think that getting the truth from the man who is about to become the top law enforcement officer in the United States is every bit as important as gaining tidbits of information from Afghan farmers who fought on the losing side of a battle.  

When this little memory refreshment session is finished, someone could then ask Gonzales how “quaint” the prohibitions against torture now seem to him.  

 

Paul Glusman is a Berkeley attorney.