A Modest Scheme To Get the Truth Out of Gonzales (Berkeley Daily Planet)

[struggle4progress]

<snip> Now Newsweek reports that when George W. Bush was Texas governor, Gonzales pulled strings to get Bush out of jury duty. It seems that in 1996, Bush was called as a juror to sit on a case involving a stripper who was arrested for driving under the influence. In voir dire—the part of the trial where the lawyers question the biases of the potential jurors—it surely would have come out that Bush himself had been convicted of a DUI. Bush didn’t want that offense to be made public as it would impact his chance of becoming president. Gonzales took the defense attorney and the prosecutor back into the judge’s chambers and argued off the court record that if convicted the stripper could ask for a pardon from the governor (How many strippers convicted of drunk driving go to the governor for a pardon?) and this created a “conflict of interest.” The judge then excused Gov. Bush from the jury on this flimsy argument. The defense attorney, the prosecutor, and the judge all remember Gonzales doing this.

However, Gonzales himself says he does not remember it. This is a sort of non-denial denial. Gonzales doesn’t say it didn’t happen, just that he “doesn’t remember.”

Strange. I’ve been practicing law going on 30 years now, and if I ever took a governor back into a judge’s chambers to get the governor out of jury duty, I think I would remember it. Even if the governor for whom I did it was unmemorable, say, like Gray Davis.

So how can we refresh Gonzales’s memory of this unusual influence peddling and help him to tell the truth? My suggestion: Torture him. I think perhaps some water boarding, or perhaps being made to stand naked in an uncomfortable position, being given minimal food in a cold cell, with strobe lights flashing, with no toilet and with wires attached to his testicles would do wonders for his capacity to recall the facts. <snip>

http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=01-28-05&storyID=20621

[rqstnnlitnmnt]

1. lol interesting

especially after a caller to randi rhodes revealed today that torture al used to teach these techniques at the air force academy as a sargeant in charge of a POW-torture desensitization class

interestingly, the man quit the service after two years -- right before his third year when actual service became mandatory...what a prick :puke:

[matt819]

2. Funny thing coming from Berkeley

On NPR's Fresh Air earlier this week (at least I think it was Fresh Air), there was a guest who was a Deputy Attorney General who recently left to become a professor at Berkeley. I'm sure he was a fine legal mind, but it was sickening to hear him justifying violations of both the Geneva Convention and the First Protocol, which in turn led to torture.

Hey, he says, we didn't argue that torture was okey dokey, only that the Geneva Conventions didn't apply. You can just hear this guy defending serial killers and mob bosses just as easily as sickly grandmothers and orphans. Whoever pays the bills.

Sickening.

[struggle4progress]

3. Was it John C. Yoo? Yoo has been on the talking heads circuit ...

... for several years, always speaking in a "reasonable" tone-of-voice.

Underneath, he's a nasty rightwinger and a loyal Team W player. Here's a fairly recent typical example, from a recent piece supporting Thomas as Chief Justice:

"What really bothers Democrats such as Reid is that Bush might nominate the nation’s first African-American chief justice." http://www.jsonline.com/news/editorials/jan05/295149.asp

[matt819]

4. He was on the show

and he was certainly offensive. But I think it was someone else. I'll check the NPR site later.

[Demeter]

5. Will This Scheme Involve Torture?

I'll bring the popcorn and the whips.