Elizabeth de la Vega: The Problem With Alberto (Truthout)

[marmar]

The Problem With Alberto
By Elizabeth de la Vega
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Sunday 22 April 2007

After a day of testimony that showed Alberto Gonzales to be so self-contradictory, so conveniently vacant and - at times - so simply risible that even radio listeners could feel the disgust that permeated the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, we are all waiting to learn the attorney general's fate: Will he be pushed over the side, take a dive off the plank or simply hang onto the railing of the wreck the Bush administration has made of the Department of Justice?

Certainly, Gonzales is unfit to be the nation's chief law enforcement officer. We knew that before he testified on April 19. We knew that before he was even confirmed. No one who signs off on tortured legal memos authorizing torture, kidnapping and illegal detentions is fit to be the attorney general of the United States. But the departure of Alberto Gonzales will not right the listing ship that is the Justice Department.

Why? Because the problem with Alberto is that Alberto is only part of the problem.

The real problem with the Bush administration's Department of Justice right now is that it is run by the Bush administration. Gonzales's Justice Department is the Bush administration's Justice Department. Therefore, Gonzales's story about the US attorneys scandal is the Bush administration's story. And even though the Bush White House has come up with some fabulous tales over the past six years, this one is a corker: Amazingly - the White House would have you believe - the list of US attorneys who should be "pushed out" was spontaneously generated without the benefit of human agency! Can you believe it??

...(snip)...

It is not just public corruption cases that are negatively impacted by the Bush administration's promotion of loyalty to the president and to individual US attorneys as the highest values in the Department of Justice at the expense of integrity and the prudent exercise of independent judgment on the part of its lawyers. This distorted ethos affects all of the cases, because what happens to career prosecutors under such circumstances? They leave. Indeed, that is precisely what happened in the Northern District of California. There, the US attorney, Kevin Ryan, was decidedly a "company man" who, like those in the inner circle of the Bush administration's Department of Justice, equated dissent with disloyalty. During Ryan's four-year tenure, 50 of the office's 100 lawyers - including myself - left, taking with them a total of approximately 500 years of experience. In the end, because of the intervention of the district's chief judge, Ryan himself was asked to resign, but the office will take a very long time to recover.

So no one should be fooled by the White House's current attempt, through Gonzales's Congressional testimony, to suggest that its unprecedented firing of US attorneys for partisan political reasons was a trifling matter with no real consequences. No one should be fooled by their current attempt to save themselves from drowning by suddenly grabbing onto the very career prosecutors they've been throwing overboard in droves during the past six years.

Most important, however, no one should be fooled into thinking that shoving Alberto Gonzales into the drink will get the Department of Justice back on course. The Department of Justice, like the Department of Defense, the Department of State and every other agency of the federal government, has lost its way because of the motley crew that is commanding the entire fleet: Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, in no particular order. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042207A.shtml

[damntexdem]

1. Yet, as bad as Ashcroft was ...

his Justice Department was not as degraded as Gonzo's is.

Besides, if it comes to impeaching Gonzo, the Congress needs to get into practice, anyway. ;-)

[hedda_foil]

2. More about Lam

For cases involving public figures, the US Attorney's Manual requires that "appropriate officials, including the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division, the associate attorney general, the deputy attorney general and the attorney general" be advised of the initiation of any case "in which public figures or entities are subjects of the investigation." Bottom line? The attorney general is notified immediately, not just when charges are brought in a public corruption case, but when the file is opened and every time that any activity, even procedural, occurs in the case. It was precisely such an Urgent Report that former San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam used to notify the Attorney General's office on May 10, 2006 that search warrants were going to be conducted in the Randy "Duke" Cunningham case. The next day, of course, was when Alberto Gonzales's top aide wrote an email talking about the "very real problem we have right now" with Carol Lam.