Alberto Gonzales should go
IT IS customary for newly elected presidents to replace large numbers of US attorneys, especially if the new president is from a different party. It is not customary for presidents to sweep out many of their own appointees to these positions in the middle of their administration.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales caved in to pressure from the White House for such a housecleaning in recent months. Then department officials led Congress to believe that the eight US attorneys in question were forced out for performance problems, not for what now appears to be the real reason in at least some cases -- that the prosecutors were not sufficiently partisan in election and political corruption cases. Gonzales has lost any credibility he had with Congress and the public as the nation's chief law enforcer. He should resign.
This page opposed Gonzales's nomination two years ago when, during his confirmation hearings, he failed to disavow two documents that contributed to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. One was a memo he wrote as White House counsel in 2002; in it, he dismissed Geneva Convention regulations on prisoners of war as "obsolete" and "quaint" and said the United States could operate as though they did not apply to the war in Afghanistan.
The other document was a 2002 administration guide on interrogation techniques. Gonzales did not write it but discussed it with administration officials, including its assertion that the president has the power to authorize torture despite a 1994 law banning it. Through his failure to repudiate this memo and his own views on the Geneva Conventions, Gonzales marked himself as a lawyer who lacked the independence to stand up for the Constitution and the nation's laws and not bend to the will of his boss, George Bush.
As attorney general, Gonzales has also failed to ride herd on the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its use of a powerful tool granted to it in the USA Patriot Act. That 2001 law allowed agents to get information about individuals' banking, phone, and e-mail records without a judicial warrant -- even if the individuals themselves were not suspected of being terrorists. A report last week by the Justice Department's inspector general revealed that agents often failed to justify properly the use of these national security letters and that field offices failed to report accurately on how many such letters they were issuing. Congress should demand an accounting from Justice for both the FBI's sloppiness and the purge of the US attorneys.
It's Gonzales who has the performance problems, not the US attorneys, including one who is being replaced at least temporarily by an assistant to Bush aide Karl Rove. Bush has defended the firings as "appropriate" -- a shameful admission that Bush himself believes in partisan justice. He should admit his own complicity, and replace Gonzales with a respected attorney who can restore some integrity to the badly tarnished Justice Department.
