Ethically Challenged
Paper trail shows Gonzales’ ethical compass off base
By Peter Gelzinis
Boston Herald Columnist
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Alberto Gonzales was always George Bush’s lawyer. The select qualifier of United States attorney general never changed that. His career has been all about serving the interests of one client . . . and it’s never been the country.To watch him inch deeper into that pit of ethical quicksand is to be hit with flashbacks of such infamous predecessors as pipe-smoking rogue John Mitchell and the Gipper’s spineless acolyte, Ed Meese. Like little Al, they too were shameless mouthpieces for the respective pols who created them.
It is no small irony that Alberto Gonzales now finds himself dying the death of a thousand documents. The latest batch, released Friday night, don’t jibe with Al’s insistence that he was not involved in talks about whacking eight U.S. attorneys who committed the mortal sin of straying off the political reservation.
But then, documents have always been a real problem for Al. Two years ago, before the Senate committee that ultimately confirmed him, Gonzales spent the better part of a day trying to soft soap documents he wrote while official White House mouthpiece.
Specifically, the ones where he called the Geneva Convention regulations on the treatment of POWs “quaint and obsolete.” They were the pieces of paper that gave flimsy approval for what went on at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Yet, well before we stormed Baghdad, and even before a fateful September day changed the world, Al Gonzales was dutifully providing George Bush with cover in a far more parochial episode of domestic terrorism.
Back in the spring of 2001, when the House Committee on Government Reform, chaired by an incendiary Republican from Indiana named Dan Burton, asked the Justice Department for documents in the rancid matter of FBI treachery in Boston, it was Alberto Gonzales who stonewalled Congress by putting the words “executive privilege” in George Bush’s mouth.
The House committee had officially pulled back the rock on the wrongful imprisonment of four Boston men at the hands of the FBI. The legislators listened in stunned amazement as H. Paul Rico, the decrepit former G-Man who engineered the frame, admitted his guilt with a sneer: “So, whaddya want, tears?”
Alberto Gonzales’ response to this scandal was to have George Bush reply in a letter: “Because I believe that access to these documents would be contrary to the national interest, I have decided to assert executive privilege.”
Today, Bushco is sending Trent Lott out to defend Gonzales on Fox TV. Trent Lott? Mr. "Senate Republican leader Trent Lott after he said that his state of Mississippi was proud to have voted for Thurmond in 1948. "If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either," ? Bushco must be desperate.