Alberto R. Gonzales

[NousDefionsDoc]

New AG? What do you guys think?

http://www.lasculturas.com/aa/bio/bioAlGonzales.htm

[Gypsy]

The libs certainly don't like him.

Al Gonzales has a record of fighting for Hispanic interests and equality in general. But, equality in the workplace and public begin to have a diminished meaning when we have a better work environment, but now have to wonder whether or enemy will treat the Geneva Convention as "quaint" when we are captured and then whether or not our government will give us a trial if we are suspected of a crime.

That whole point re the GC is ridiculous to me. I haven't seen the BGs following the GC when they have gotten hold of our Troops or civilian contractors.

[Roguish Lawyer]

I really don't know enough about him to have an opinion, but my instinct is that I don't like it.

[vsvo]

There are rumblings that the AG post might be just a pit stop on the road to a Supreme Court nomination....

***********************************

Gonzales's Journey: From the Stands to the Heights
Migrant Workers' Son Worked Way to Air Force Academy, Harvard, a Top Law Firm -- and Government
By Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 28, 2004; Page A03

One Saturday afternoon this May, Alberto R. Gonzales addressed the 2004 graduating class of Rice University and talked about growing up in an impoverished household on the north edge of Houston. His parents, former migrant workers, had only eight years of schooling between them and barely spoke English. The family of 10 lived in a small two-bedroom house with no hot water and no telephone. There was no tradition of education in the family, only of working hard to scrape by.

Gonzales took his first job at 12 to help support the family, and as he carried trays of soft drinks in the upper deck of Rice Stadium on football Saturdays he aspired to a better life. "I would stare over the stadium walls and watch the Rice students stroll back to the colleges, and I wondered what it would be like to be one of you, a Rice student," Gonzales said.

He went on to be one of them and much more. "In many ways, Al embodies the American dream," says President Bush, who often talks about the real-life Horatio Alger aspects of Gonzales's life.

Today, Gonzales is Bush's nominee for attorney general, the nation's top law enforcement officer. He is the first Hispanic named to the post. The journey reflects a life of extraordinary achievement for this child of migrants. Gonzales is a Rice alumnus; a graduate of Harvard Law School; a former partner in Houston's largest law firm, Vinson & Elkins; a top appointee in Bush's gubernatorial administration in Texas; and, for the past four years, the White House counsel to Bush.

Ahead are confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, scheduled to begin early next month, and Gonzales, 49, is likely to face tough questions regarding his role as White House counsel, particularly his memos that, critics believe, sanctioned the torture of terrorism suspects in Iraq and encouraged the detention of others at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

The attorney general's job would be Gonzales's fifth top-level assignment from Bush in a decade. As newly elected governor, Bush asked Gonzales to be his general counsel in 1995, and he subsequently appointed him to be Texas secretary of state and to the bench on the Texas Supreme Court. In 2001, Gonzales followed Bush to Washington as White House counsel.

Like many of the president's inner circle who went to Washington, Gonzales is known for his loyalty to Bush. As general counsel to the then-governor, Gonzales went so far as to get Bush out of jury duty on a drunken-driving case in Austin to prevent him from being forced to answer under oath whether he had ever been convicted of driving while intoxicated.

"Gonzales said they had concluded it would be improper for the governor to sit in a case where he might be later asked to consider a pardon," said David Wahlberg, the attorney for the defendant. "I remember thinking, 'This is bogus.' But it was one of those arguments that had just enough legal merit. . . . He made a professional kind of presentation; he's obviously a bright guy. But the end result was that he snookered us."

Bush's 1976 drunken-driving conviction eventually became public the week before the 2000 presidential election, and Gonzales has since acknowledged in published reports that he knew about the record and found a way to keep Bush from being forced to disclose it in the courtroom.

Above the Arctic Circle

For a young man from humble beginnings, Gonzales has come a long way. He lovingly talks about his mother's homemade meals of beans and tortillas and how his father and uncles, unable to afford help, built the family house. But now, he told Rice's Class of 2004 in his commencement speech, he gets to enjoy "steak dinners or rides on Air Force One or weekends at Camp David."

Even his siblings -- three of the eight never finished high school, and Gonzales is the only one who went to college -- can hardly believe his life today.
"It's an amazing story. It's almost unbelievable for us, his brothers and sisters," said Gonzales's brother Antonio, a SWAT officer with the Houston Police Department.

"Getting to Rice, then getting to Harvard, then being hired on by Vinson & Elkins," Antonio Gonzales said of his brother. ". . . Once he and Governor Bush hooked up, the sky's really the limit for him."

Gonzales attended MacArthur Senior High School in the Aldine Independent School District not long after schools were desegregated in Houston in the mid-1960s, as the Hispanic population was just beginning to grow. MacArthur had only a small percentage of black and Hispanic students.

He was known as "Al" in school and was a member of the National Honor Society, the Christian Student Union, the International Club, and the football and baseball teams. He was remembered by his high school counselor as respectful and self-motivated, pleasant but not particularly outgoing. But at a time when ethnic and racial groups did not mix much, she said, Gonzales crossed those lines.
"We hadn't really been integrated that long, and a lot of the kids stayed within their group. They were reluctant to socialize with other groups, but he didn't have that problem," said Marine Jones, the former counselor and the first African American professional hired at MacArthur in the late 1960s. "He didn't align himself with just Hispanics. He was just that kind of person."

Gonzales was one of the few minority students who took college preparatory classes at the time, even though "there was no money in sight of his parents being able to pay for college," Jones said. "It just wasn't to be."
Given Gonzales's scholastic achievement and interests then and the abilities he has exhibited since, Jones said, "you would think . . . he would have been class president and president of the honor society. But minorities just didn't have that many leadership roles then. They were just there . . . doing the best that they could."

Like many poor black and Hispanic students at the time, Gonzales chose the military when he graduated from MacArthur in 1973, enlisting in the Air Force. In his commencement address to the Class of 2004 at Rice, Gonzales said that if he thought he could have attended college he would not have enlisted.
He was assigned with 100 other airmen north of the Arctic Circle at Fort Yukon, Alaska, a radar station, and within two years, with the encouragement of his officers, Gonzales finally applied to a college: the U.S. Air Force Academy.

He entered in the fall of 1975, but he told the Rice graduates in his 2004 commencement that he tired of the engineering and science curriculum and became interested in politics and law. So he finally applied to Rice. "Ultimately I simply put it in God's hands by applying for a transfer to the school I once dreamed about attending as a boy," he told the graduates. "If accepted at Rice, I would leave and pursue a legal career. If denied, I would stay and fulfill my military obligations. This was my prayer."

An acceptance letter to Rice, dated May 13, 1977, Gonzales said, was "my answer, ending the journey that began as a daydream during those Saturday afternoon football games." Gonzales entered Rice in the fall of 1977, just after turning 22 and exactly one decade after he sold soft drinks at Rice Stadium.
Gilbert Cuthbertson, a political science professor at Rice for 41 years, remembers Gonzales well. Cuthbertson had Gonzales in his American constitutional law class and still uses a legal brief that Gonzales wrote in the class as a model for students to follow. The brief was written about a hypothetical case.

"It is a model of scholarship, organization and argumentation that I certainly use as a model or a standard for current students," Cuthbertson said. "It's one of the most professional jobs that I can remember any of my students having submitted."

Gonzales entered Harvard Law School in the fall of 1979, at a time when the political atmosphere on campus "was still modestly raucous," said a former classmate. But Gonzales was a "solid, sensible, even-keeled person," said Howell Jackson, now a law professor at Harvard.

"Not all the law students were stable and sensible," he said. "It was the late '70s; there were protests and comings and goings. . . . I don't remember him being overtly political. He was judicious as a young law student when a lot of students weren't. His current boss would have been proud of him."
Recruited out of Harvard in 1982 by Vinson & Elkins, Gonzales went to work as a business transaction lawyer with the firm's business, real estate and energy group.

"He had a stellar record at Harvard," said V&E's managing partner, Joseph C. Dilg, who was head of the group when Gonzales was hired.
Dilg said that Gonzales worked on several major merger and acquisition and real estate development transactions, including the Houston center project in which a 15-to-20-square-block area in the heart of downtown was redeveloped over several years into new high-rise office buildings and hotels.
Dilg described Gonzales as "extremely thoughtful and careful in his thought processes" and a lawyer who made "very careful and reasoned decisions."

[vsvo]

Coming to Bush's Attention

By several accounts, Gonzales became known to the Bush family while he was at V&E. Gonzales served as special legal counsel to the Houston Host Committee for the 1990 Summit of Industrialized Nations, held at Rice University when George H.W. Bush was president. Dilg said that Bush subsequently offered Gonzales a job in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But Gonzales turned it down.

"He had a great career in front of him at V&E, and the timing was such that he had not been considered for partner here," Dilg said. A year later, in 1991, Gonzales was admitted to the V&E partnership along with a Hispanic woman, the firm's first two Latino law partners.

In the next few years after that, Gonzales also made another key connection to the Bush family when he was serving on the board of the Texas Bar Association. He met Harriet Miers, formerly George W. Bush's personal lawyer and former president of the Texas Bar. (Miers is deputy chief of staff for Bush, who has named her White House counsel pending Gonzales's confirmation as attorney general.)

Gonzales's longtime friend Roland Garcia, who formerly worked at V&E and served on several boards with Gonzales, said Miers recommended Gonzales, active in Republican politics locally, to Bush when he was elected governor and was looking for a counsel. "He interviewed him, and they hit it off and they've been fast friends ever since," said Garcia, a lawyer and longtime Democratic activist in Houston. "Al was a Republican before it was popular for the Republicans to recruit Hispanics."

Bush offered Gonzales the job of general counsel to the governor and Gonzales did not hesitate, Dilg said. Dilg said that Gonzales already had a strong interest in community and public service, and that he saw joining the Bush administration in Austin "as a way to give back to the larger community."

"It takes a special type of person to forgo the income level he could have here for public service," Dilg said. James Daniel Thompson III, a V&E partner who has been friends with Gonzales for 18 years and still plays golf with him when he returns to Houston, said "he kind of surprised all of us when he . . . resigned his partnership at the law firm to commit himself to public service."

"But I think Al had really sort of thought about it and deliberated over the decision . . . ," Thompson said. "He's got a very strong work ethic, and balance that with very good judgment and a pretty quiet demeanor. He's a person that is destined for success."

[Airbornelawyer]

Originally Posted by Gypsy

The libs certainly don't like him.

That whole point re the GC is ridiculous to me. I haven't seen the BGs following the GC when they have gotten hold of our Troops or civilian contractors.

Their ignorance of the Convention is only matched by their ignorance of the enemy.

As you note, it is irrational to expect people whose modus operandi is the car bomb, the suicide belt and the beheading of aid workers to respect the Geneva Convention.

The concept of reciprocity is an important consideration in the Geneva Convention (and, indeed, in any international agreement), but in their fuzzy-headedness they have unknowingly turned it on its head. We do not accord unlawful combatants the protections of the Convention precisely to encourage combatants to act lawfully. Of course, we have let our fuzzy-headedness and softness get to us, too, since despite all of the rhetoric, U.S. policy is in fact to accord unlawful combatants the same protections as lawful ones, even if not formal GC status as POWs.

[NousDefionsDoc]

The concept of reciprocity is an important consideration in the Geneva Convention (and, indeed, in any international agreement), but in their fuzzy-headedness they have unknowingly turned it on its head. We do not accord unlawful combatants the protections of the Convention precisely to encourage combatants to act lawfully.

DAMN! I wish I had said that.

[Gypsy]

Originally Posted by Airbornelawyer

Their ignorance of the Convention is only matched by their ignorance of the enemy.

As you note, it is irrational to expect people whose modus operandi is the car bomb, the suicide belt and the beheading of aid workers to respect the Geneva Convention.

The concept of reciprocity is an important consideration in the Geneva Convention (and, indeed, in any international agreement), but in their fuzzy-headedness they have unknowingly turned it on its head. We do not accord unlawful combatants the protections of the Convention precisely to encourage combatants to act lawfully. Of course, we have let our fuzzy-headedness and softness get to us, too, since despite all of the rhetoric, U.S. policy is in fact to accord unlawful combatants the same protections as lawful ones, even if not formal GC status as POWs.

Precisely. I suppose on one hand our own fuzzy-headedness shows our "humane side", but since the radicals and insurgents only seem to respect force they probably see it as weakness. I've often thought about what they'd think of Patton and his kick ass ways. Ahhh for the "olden" days.

[Roguish Lawyer]

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110006118

Wise Counsel
Putting Alberto Gonzales's "torture memo" in perspective.

BY DOUGLAS W. KMIEC
Wednesday, January 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

As the confirmation hearing of attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales gets under way tomorrow, it appears certain members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will dwell on his role as adviser to the White House on the legality of interrogating terror suspects in the wake of 9/11. Whether this is politically motivated is not for me to say. What I will say, however, is that Mr. Gonzales has provided wise counsel to the president--and has had the courage to correct missteps--under very trying circumstances. Mr. Gonzales fully merits confirmation, but first some background:

Late last week, the Department of Justice withdrew an earlier legal analysis that had been interpreted by some as authorizing the torture of war detainees. Rejecting that notion categorically, the department's Office of Legal Counsel wrote anew: "Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms."

In reaffirming this basic statement of human rights, the OLC was following up on the re-examination of a now much criticized August 2002 memo that had been promised by Mr. Gonzales last June in his role as White House counsel. Unlike that initial memorandum, the re-examination avoids speculating about hypothetical cases or the outer limits of presidential power. There has been much recrimination over the earlier advice, and there is little question that it was surprisingly expansive in scope.

Yet, let us not forget the context in which the earlier memorandum had been authored. The world in early 2005 looks very different from the gloomy picture immediately after 9/11. We now better comprehend the highly unusual, non-nation-state nature of the world-wide radical Islamist foe that has declared, and is making, war on the U.S. Today, it is possible to say, as the OLC has, that torture is no less "abhorrent or unlawful" even when premised upon protecting national security. But this realization has been made possible more by heroic battlefield sacrifice than by legal acumen.

That said, one of the reasons the OLC retains a reputation for objectivity, accuracy and thoroughness is its willingness to clarify and even overrule itself when previous legal advice is superseded by new facts or changes in law. In the present case, there is the unfortunate subsequent fact that some service personnel have sought to justify shameful treatment of detainees by claiming that previous legal advice somehow invited or sanctioned their misbehavior. As the OLC re-examination forthrightly states: "Consideration of the bounds of any such authority [to disregard international or domestic law] would be inconsistent with the president's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture." That has to be the unambiguous standard of the U.S., even when facing the most treacherous of enemies.


On the eve of Mr. Gonzales's Senate confirmation hearings, the new memo helpfully corrects an insidious misimpression about Justice Department lawyering. No attorney general can ever permit the OLC to be perceived as a band of lawyers engaged in sharp practice looking for legal loopholes. Known as the "attorney general's lawyer," the OLC must always be guided by the highest ethical standard answering specific questions in the most objective manner possible. This includes even the ability to say "no" to the president when the law so directs. President Reagan dearly wanted the power to line-item-veto excessive spending matters, and a popular theory in his second term was that he could claim that as an inherent power. The OLC canvassed legal history and practice and concluded otherwise, and while the Gipper was not pleased by the OLC's determination, he respected it.
Thankfully, it is rare for the OLC to need to re-examine or overrule earlier advice; but it is not unprecedented. Again, in Reagan's second term, a previous OLC opinion had concluded that individuals with AIDS were outside the protections of federal civil-rights laws. Two years later, the OLC reconsidered and concluded that the law did, in fact, protect individuals with AIDS against unreasoned discrimination. As with the torture memo, the AIDS re-examination had the benefit of subsequent events--a later Supreme Court opinion, better scientific information, a more clearly manifested intent of Congress as well as the specific circumstances in which those with AIDS were being wrongfully excluded from federally supported programs.

Prompted by the overstatement of the initial torture memos, some who have served in the OLC--mostly in past Democratic administrations--have been circulating "guidelines" to govern the OLC's future decision-making. Given the timing, there is some suspicion that these suggestions may be partisan, inviting opposition to Mr. Gonzales. However, even taking the guidelines at face value, and also acknowledging the integrity of their drafters, adopting them would be a mistake of the same nature as the original torture memo. The guidelines attempt to answer the unknowable by speaking in wide generalities that necessarily must be refined in future application.

Take, for example, proposed guideline No. 6, calling for general public disclosure of legal advice. In politics, transparency is a virtue; the same cannot be said for legal advice, as longstanding ethical and evidentiary rules protecting lawyer-client work-product and conversations make clear.

Moreover, creating an unrefined presumption in favor of disclosure gives little consideration to the preservation of the president's unique constitutional privilege acknowledged by the Supreme Court. Guideline No. 8 pronounces that the "OLC should seek the views of all affected agencies and components of the Department of Justice before rendering final advice." Seemingly benign, this would invite "affected agencies" to lobby for their desired policy over the restraints of existing law. This is hardly constructive since it confuses the OLC's role as legal interpreter for that of policy maker. OLC legal opinions are not notice-and-comment rule-making, they are expositions of the law as written.


To the extent that the guidelines are motivated by the desire to avoid another torture memo misstep, it is worth remembering Thomas Hobbes's observation that "no man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it." Even before confirmation, Mr. Gonzales has demonstrated that no presidential or personal friendship will oblige him to persist in the errors of others. He deserves substantial credit for returning the whole torture memo matter to the Department of Justice for rethinking. It is the hallmark of a wise counselor who has the courage--even in the face of national embarrassment--to see error, and to correct it in a fashion that does not undermine the necessary authority of the president to engage in the humane interrogation of those captured in the war on terror.
That is what the OLC, at the direction of Judge Gonzales, has sought to do. He is a sound choice for attorney general and his ability to apply the law to our unknown future ought not to be hamstrung by even the best-intentioned advice of those who served well in their time, but who cannot possibly know the hazards that must yet be faced and guarded against.

Mr. Kmiec, head of the OLC in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, is a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University.

[Gypsy]

White House Questioned on Gonzales Memos
By Bobby Eberle
Talon News
January 5, 2005

http://www.gopusa.com/news/2005/janu...mination.shtml

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- The nomination of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to become the next U.S. attorney general continues to draw scrutiny from Democrats and members of the media. At Tuesday's White House press briefing, Press Secretary Scott McClellan was asked why the White House hasn't released opinions drafted by Gonzales regarding detainees in the war on terror.

A reporter questioned McClellan on a statement issued on Tuesday by a group of former officers which called on the White House "to release documents regarding the decisions that Mr. Gonzales has made in his role as legal counsel of the president, especially with regard to the detainees and to the period going into the Iraq war."

"Is the White House willing to release these documents to give the Senate the ability to judge Mr. Gonzales' attitude towards the law [and] toward [the] Constitution," the reporter asked.

"First of all, I saw a number of these individuals are people that supported the campaign of the president's opponent," McClellan noted. "So let's keep that in mind when we're talking about these individuals."

McClellan added, "[A] number of the documents that I think you might be referring to have been made available publicly. In fact, Judge Gonzales participated in a briefing with Department of Defense officials to talk about some of those very documents I think you're referring to. And we've also responded to some inquiries from the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well."

The White House press secretary said that Judge Gonzales "looks forward to going before the committee later this week and participating in his hearing."

"[W]e hope the Senate will move forward quickly on his nomination," McClellan said. "He is someone who has done an outstanding job for the President here as White House Counsel, and we know he will make a great Attorney General."

Gonzales is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Gonzales, in working with the Justice Department, aiding in the drafting of several opinions and directives on the handling of terror suspects. As Fox News reports, one directive "argued that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters were exempt from provisions in the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit torture, violence and degrading treatment."

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and chairman of the subcommittee on the Constitution, said Tuesday that critics of the administration this week have "resurrected a familiar straw man in their attack against the nomination of Judge Gonzales to serve as U.S. attorney general."

"Despite a good faith effort by the Bush administration to provide Senate Democrats with all relevant information on the nomination, critics continue to expand the scope of their demands, and then cavil loudly about the administration¹s 'secrecy' and 'refusals' when the goal posts are moved," Cornyn said.

Cornyn agreed with the Bush administration's position on the release of further information and said that preserving the confidentiality of war memoranda -- such as those that some Senate Democrats are asking to be made public -- is critical, "as unwarranted disclosure can be particularly dangerous." Cornyn added that many of the memos in question involve "some of the most sensitive and important aspects of the war against terrorism."

"It would be dangerous and unthinkable to demand that the United States government announce publicly its military strategy for targeting enemies and enemy locations in wartime," Cornyn said. "Such a disclosure would give the enemy a roadmap for predicting, preventing, and thwarting an attack, and would dramatically increase the risk of injury and death to members of our military."

Sen. Cornyn added. "It is equally dangerous to demand that the United States government announce publicly its military strategy for conducting interrogations of enemy combatants, as it would undermine our efforts to obtain actionable military intelligence from enemy combatant detainees."

[CPTAUSRET]

I think he will be confirmed, but not without some bruises.

I don't know enough about him, but I like what I have seen so far.

Terry

[Sigi]

Originally Posted by Airbornelawyer

. Of course, we have let our fuzzy-headedness and softness get to us, too, since despite all of the rhetoric, U.S. policy is in fact to accord unlawful combatants the same protections as lawful ones, even if not formal GC status as POWs.

And this is why I am confused. Why would people in this country demand GC status to indivuduals who take advantage of our adherance to the GC? Why do we defend terrorists under the GC?

Bush. That is why.

[Gypsy]

Originally Posted by Sigi

And this is why I am confused. Why would people in this country demand GC status to indivuduals who take advantage of our adherance to the GC? Why do we defend terrorists under the GC?

Bush. That is why.

Huh? Surely you jest. Try the myriad of organizations to include the ACLU, the left leaning libs et al who are more concerned with the "rights" of the terrorists instead of the safety of the US and her citizens. I have this secret thought of POTUS floating in my head...that he'd love nothing more than to drop each one of 'em personally.

[Ambush Master]

Originally Posted by Sigi

And this is why I am confused. Why would people in this country demand GC status to indivuduals who take advantage of our adherance to the GC? Why do we defend terrorists under the GC?

Bush. That is why.

You MUST reside in one of the VERY SMALL BLUE sections of Ohio !!!

Hell, it's the Dems and ACLU Liberals that are pumping this Crap !!!

[Razor]

He entered in the fall of 1975, but he told the Rice graduates in his 2004 commencement that he tired of the engineering and science curriculum and became interested in politics and law. So he finally applied to Rice. "Ultimately I simply put it in God's hands by applying for a transfer to the school I once dreamed about attending as a boy," he told the graduates.

So he's a quitter and doesn't take control of his own fate?