Alberto Gonzales

Alberto R. Gonzales (born August 4, 1955 in San Antonio, Texas, USA) is the current Attorney General of the United States, and the first Hispanic United States Attorney General. He was formerly U.S. President George W. Bush's White House Counsel.

Personal background

Gonzales was raised in Houston, the second of eight children born to Pablo and Maria Gonzales. His father, who died in 1982, was a construction worker, and both his parents were children of immigrants from Mexico with less than a high-school education themselves. An honors student at MacArthur High School in Houston, Gonzales enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1973, serving for two years at Fort Yukon, Alaska before being accepted to the United States Air Force Academy in 1975. In 1977 he transferred to Rice University, where he was a member of Lovett College and earned a degree in political science in 1979; he then earned a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1982. He was the only one of his siblings to finish college. He has been married twice: he and his first wife, Diane Clemens, divorced in 1985; he and his second wife, Rebecca Turner, have three sons.

Texas career

Gonzales was an attorney in private practice from 1982 until 1994 with the Houston law firm Vinson and Elkins, where he became a partner. In 1994, he was named general counsel to then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, rising to become Texas Secretary of State in 1997 and finally to be named to the Texas Supreme Court in 1999, both appointments made by Governor Bush.

Outside of his political and legal career, Gonzales was active in the community. He was a board director of the United Way of the Texas Gulf Coast from 1993 to 1994, and President of Leadership Houston during this same period. In 1994, Gonzales served as Chair of the Commission for District Decentralization of the Houston Independent School District, and as a member of the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions for Rice University. He was chosen as one of the Five Outstanding Young Texans by the Texas Jaycees in 1994. He was a member of delegations sent by the American Council of Young Political Leaders to Mexico in 1996 and to the People's Republic of China in 1995. He received the Presidential Citation from the State Bar of Texas in 1997 for his dedication to addressing basic legal needs of the indigent. In 1999, he was named Latino Lawyer of the Year by the Hispanic National Bar Association.

As counsel to Governor Bush, Gonzales helped Bush be excused from jury duty when he was called in a 1996 Travis County drunk driving case. The case led to a minor controversy during Bush's 2000 presidential campaign because Bush's answers to the potential juror questionnaire did not disclose Bush's own 1976 misdemeanor drunk driving conviction.[1] Gonzales' formal request for Bush to be excused from jury duty hinged upon the fact that, as Governor of Texas, he might be called upon to pardon the accused in the case. Upon learning of the 1976 conviction, the prosecutor in the 1996 case (a Democrat) felt he had been "directly deceived". The defense attorney in the case called Gonzales' arguments "laughable".[2].

As Governor Bush's counsel in Texas, Gonzales also reviewed all clemency requests. A 2003 article in The Atlantic Monthly alleged that Gonzales gave insufficient counsel, failed to take into consideration a wide array of factors, and actively worked against clemency in a number of borderline cases. (The state of Texas executed more prisoners during Gonzales' term, and still has more prisoners on death row, than any other state.) Texas[3] [4]

Gonzales has been also accused of having connections with the former energy company Enron, which collapsed amid financial scandals in 2002; the law firm Gonzales worked for in Texas, Vinson and Elkins, represented Enron, and the company gave Gonzales $6,500 in campaign contributions for his 2000 run for re-election to the Texas Supreme Court, in which he defeated Libertarian Lance Smith with 81% of the popular vote.

When Bush was sworn in as President of the United States in 2001, he appointed Gonzales White House Counsel. In this position, Gonzales has been party to controversial legal matters involving the Bush administration. As a result, he has often been a lightning rod for criticism of the administration's actions in these affairs.

War on Terror

The Executive Order 13233, drafted by Gonzales and issued by George W. Bush on November 1, 2001 shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, placed limitations on the Freedom of Information Act by restricting access to the records of former presidents.

Gonzales authored a memo in January of 2002 that explored whether Article III of the Geneva Convention applied to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan and held in facilities around the world, including Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The memo made several arguments both for and against providing Article III protection to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Gonzales concluded that Article III was outdated and ill-suited for dealing with captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. He called such provisions as providing captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters "commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments" "quaint". Gonzales also argued that existing military regulations and instructions from the President were more than adequate to ensure that the principles of the Geneva Convention would be applied. He also argued that undefined language in the Geneva Convention, such as "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment", could make officials and military leaders subject to the War Crimes Act of 1996 if mistreatment was alleged.[5]

Because of this memo, Gonzales (among others in the Bush administration) has received criticism for contributing to "creating a climate" in which the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison took place. Notable critics of U.S. foreign policy in the War on Terror have claimed that these abuses were formed under the influence of Gonzales' legal counsel. In the memo, Gonzales claimed that the value of intelligence which could be obtained during interrogation "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners". This advice faced some dissent from then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who felt that all captives should be considered prisoners of war.[6] Some reports, however, suggest that the disagreement between Powell and Gonzales is slight.[7]

A controversial 2002 Justice Department memorandum cleared by Gonzales argued that laws prohibiting torture do "not apply to the president's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants", and that the pain caused by interrogation must include "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions — in order to constitute torture".

In 2004, when this memo was leaked to the press, Gonzales said about the memo in Senate confirmation hearings that "...I don't recall today whether or not I was in agreement with all of the analysis, but I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached by the department." This indicates that, despite the Bush administration's withdrawal from the memo, Gonzales still believes that the Justice Department was correct in its reasoning about torture.

Gonzales faced further controversy when he authored the Presidential Order which authorized the use of military tribunals to try terrorist suspects. He fought with Congress to keep vice-president Dick Cheney's Energy task force documents from being reviewed. Gonzales was also an early advocate of the USA PATRIOT Act. He was accused of being involved in the decision to allow foreign combatants in U.S. custody to be deported to nations that allow torture, in order to extract further information from them; Gonzales denies that he supported this measure, however.

Attorney General nomination and confirmation

Gonzales' name was sometimes floated as a potential appointment to the United States Supreme Court during Bush's first presidential term, although this rumor was heard much less often once his name had become linked to the "torture memos" and other controversies. On November 10, 2004, it was announced that he would be nominated to replace United States Attorney General John Ashcroft for Bush's second term. He was often regarded as moderate compared to Ashcroft – unlike many in the Bush administration, Gonzales did not oppose abortion or affirmative action.

These controversies were the grounds for a strong degree of opposition to Gonzales during his Senate confirmation proceedings at the beginning of President Bush's second term. The New York Times quoted anonymous Republican officials as saying that Gonzales's appointment to Attorney General was a way to "bolster Mr. Gonzales's credentials" en route to a later Supreme Court appointment. The appointment to Attorney General, in a maneuver designed by Karl Rove, would "get out of the way" the above controversies and allow Gonzales to demonstrate his positions on issues such as affirmative action and abortion. Others believe that Bush chose him as Attorney General because the pro-life base of the party would never allow a pro-choice Republican to be appointed to the Supreme Court.[8]

Gonzales was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 60-36 on February 3, 2005. He was sworn in on February 14, 2005, becoming the highest-placed Hispanic ever in the U.S. Government.

Quotes

"I would respectfully disagree with your statement that we're becoming more like our enemy. We are nothing like our enemy, Senator. While we are struggling, mightily, trying to find out what happened at Abu Ghraib, they are beheading people like Danny Pearl and Nick Berg. We are nothing like our enemies, Senator." -- Alberto Gonzales, during confirmation hearings before Congress, January 6, 2005

External links

• Official biography from whitehouse.gov
• Announcement of his nomination on CNN
• Current Law Office in Thomson Legal Record
• Vinson and Elkins, Lawyers
• A second biography from ABC News
• "Death in Texas by Sister Helen Prejean in The New York Review of Books
• "A Poor Choice" — Human Rights Watch
• Letter to 9/11 Commission from FindLaw
• The Geneva Convention is "obsolete" memo in PDF from Washington in Depth, AP
• Bush Admin. policy memos re: torture, interrogations, and POW status from FindLaw
• Progression of memos and decisions from lawofwar.org
• Alberto R. Gonzales from Disinfopedia.org
• Dear Mr. Gonzales from truthout.org
• Kennedy urges Senate to deny Gonzales nomination over torture policies from Senator Edward M. Kennedy
• "Torture and Gonzales: An Exchange" from The New York Review of Books
• Bush Pick of Gonzales Signals His Abandoment of Conservatives
• Serious Questions Need to Be Answered About Gonzales
• Gonzales Grilled Over Drowning Torture
• LaRaza Confirms Gonzales Is a Member
• Support of Torture Not Gonzales' Greatest Sin

See also: Alberto Gonzales, 1955, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977