Unqualified Gonzales as architect of Pres. power, consequential policies

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT book review | ‘President’s Counselor,’ by Bill Minutaglio
Gonzales as an Architect of Presidential Power
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: July 11, 2006

Before assuming his current job as attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales was President Bush’s White House counsel, and during his tenure in that job he worked with a small circle of conservative lawyers to help build an expansive — and highly controversial — legal framework for the administration’s war on terror. Their initiatives tried to broadly amplify presidential authority even as they raised troubling questions about due process, violations of international law and infringements on Americans’ civil liberties.

Mr. Gonzales worked on a directive that effectively set up an alternative legal system, authorizing the use of military tribunals to prosecute noncitizens accused of terrorism and permitting the detention of detainees for an indefinite period. (The Supreme Court just ruled that such military commissions were not authorized by federal law and ran afoul of the Geneva Conventions.)

He prepared an executive order that gave presidents expanded powers to keep their White House papers sealed after they left office. He signed a January 2002 draft memorandum that stated that the “new paradigm” of the war on terror “renders obsolete” the Geneva Conventions’ “strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” He participated in a series of discussions dealing with the definition of torture that would arguably lay the groundwork for abuses committed at Abu Ghraib and other American military prisons. And he played an important role in Mr. Bush’s decision secretly to authorize the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans in search of evi- dence of terrorist activity, without obtaining a court-approved warrant.

As the reporter Bill Minutaglio points out in his new book, “The President’s Counselor,” Mr. Gonzales became an architect of these consequential policies (as well as becoming attorney general and a possible Bush nominee to the Supreme Court), without having a lot of background in criminal justice, military justice or international law, and without having “the diplomatic portfolio to adequately measure what the creation of an all-encompassing tribunal aimed at citizens of other countries might mean for relations between the United States and its allies.”...The chief usefulness of this book is in reminding the reader just how dependent Mr. Gonzales was on the patronage of Mr. Bush....(Mr. Minutaglio writes), "It was, in the end, very easy for Gonzales to plot the controversial courses he designed inside the White House counsel’s office. It was, in the end, the only thing he could think of doing in order to serve the needs of the one client he had personally served for his entire public life."...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/books/11kaku.html