Gonzales Helped Set the Course for Detainees
Justice Nominee's Hearings Likely to Focus on Interrogation Policies
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen, Washington Post, January 5, 2005

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In March 2002, U.S. elation at the capture of al Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaida was turning to frustration as he refused to bend to CIA interrogation. But the agency's officers, determined to wring more from Abu Zubaida through threatening interrogations, worried about being charged with violating domestic and international proscriptions on torture.

They asked for a legal review -- the first ever by the government -- of how much pain and suffering a U.S. intelligence officer could inflict on a prisoner without violating a 1994 law that imposes severe penalties, including life imprisonment and execution, on convicted torturers. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel took up the task, and at least twice during the drafting, top administration officials were briefed on the results.

White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales chaired the meetings on this issue, which included detailed descriptions of interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding," a tactic intended to make detainees feel as if they are drowning. He raised no objections and, without consulting military and State Department experts in the laws of torture and war, approved an August 2002 memo that gave CIA interrogators the legal blessings they sought.

Gonzales, working closely with a small group of conservative legal officials at the White House, the Justice Department and the Defense Department -- and overseeing deliberations that generally excluded potential dissenters -- helped chart other legal paths in the handling and imprisonment of suspected terrorists and the applicability of international conventions to U.S. military and law enforcement activities.

His former colleagues say that throughout this period, Gonzales -- a confidant of George W. Bush's from Texas and the president's nominee to be the next attorney general -- often repeated a phrase used by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to spur tougher anti-terrorism policies: "Are we being forward-leaning enough?"

But one of the mysteries that surround Gonzales is the extent to which these new legal approaches are his own handiwork rather than the work of others, particularly Vice President Cheney's influential legal counsel, David S. Addington.

Gonzales's involvement in the crafting of the torture memo, and his work on two presidential orders on detainee policy that provoked controversy or judicial censure during Bush's first term, is expected to take center stage at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings tomorrow on Gonzales's nomination to become attorney general. The outlines of Gonzales's actions are known, but new details emerged in interviews with colleagues and other officials, some of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they were involved in confidential government policy deliberations.

On at least two of the most controversial policies endorsed by Gonzales, officials familiar with the events say the impetus for action came from Addington -- another reflection of Cheney's outsize influence with the president and the rest of the government. Addington, universally described as outspokenly conservative, interviewed candidates for appointment as Gonzales's deputy, spoke at Gonzales's morning meetings and, in at least one instance, drafted an early version of a legal memorandum circulated to other departments in Gonzales's name, several sources said.

Conceding that such ghostwriting might seem irregular, even though Gonzales was aware of it, one former White House official said it was simply "evidence of the closeness of the relationship" between the two men. But another official familiar with the administration's legal policymaking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because such deliberations are supposed to be confidential, said that Gonzales often acquiesced in policymaking by others.

This might not be the best quality for an official nominated to be attorney general, the nation's top law enforcement job, the administration official said. He added that he thinks Gonzales learned from mistakes during Bush's first term.

Supporters of Gonzales depict him as a more pragmatic successor to John D. Ashcroft, and a cautious lawyer who carefully weighs competing points of view while pressing for aggressive anti-terrorism efforts. His critics have expressed alarm at what they regard as his record of excluding dissenting points of view in the development of legal policies that fail to hold up under broader scrutiny and give short shrift to human rights.

His nomination has, in short, become another battleground for the debate over whether the administration has acted prudently to forestall another terrorist attack or overreached by legally sanctioning rights abuses.

One thing is clear: Gonzales, 49, enjoys Bush's trust. He has worked directly with the former Texas governor for more than nine years, advising him on sensitive foreign policy and defense matters that rarely -- if ever -- fell within the purview of previous White House counsels.

For example, when the Justice Department formally repudiated the legal reasoning of the August 2002 interrogation memo last week in another document that Gonzales reviewed, it was overturning a policy with consequences that Gonzales heard discussed in intimate detail -- to the point of learning what the physiological reactions of detainees might be to the suffering the CIA wanted to inflict, those involved in the deliberations said.

The White House said Gonzales and Addington, a former Reagan aide and Pentagon counsel, were unavailable to be interviewed for this article. But asked to comment on whether Gonzales acquiesced too easily on legal policies pushed by others, spokesman Brian Besanceney responded that Gonzales had "served with distinction and with the highest professional standards as a lawyer" in private practice, state government and the White House, and he "will continue to do so as attorney general."

A Success Story

Bush has told people that he was attracted by Gonzales's rags-to-riches life story. A Texas native and the son of Mexican immigrants, Gonzales served for two years in the Air Force before graduating from Rice University and Harvard Law School. He met Bush during his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, while Gonzales was a partner at the politically connected Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins.

Upon election, Bush appointed him as his personal counsel, later as Texas secretary of state and eventually as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court. Within weeks of the 2000 presidential election, Bush tapped Gonzales to be his White House counsel, and Gonzales set about creating what officials there proudly described as one of the most ideologically aligned counsel's offices in years.

Bringing only one associate to Washington from Texas, Gonzales forged his staff instead from a tightknit group of Washington-based former clerks to Supreme Court or appellate judges, all of whom had worked on at least one of three touchstones of the conservative movement: the Whitewater and Monica S. Lewinsky inquiries of former president Bill Clinton, the Bush-Cheney election campaign, and the Florida vote-counting dispute.

"It was an office of like-minded" lawyers and "strong personalities," said Bradford A. Berenson, a criminal defense lawyer appointed as one of eight associate counsels in Gonzales's office. "There was not a shrinking violet in the bunch."

"Federalist Society regulars" is the way another former associate counsel, H. Christopher Bartolomucci, described the Gonzales staff and its ideological allies elsewhere in the government, such as Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes II. All were adherents to the theory that the Constitution gives the president considerably more authority than the Congress and the judiciary.

One of the clearest examples of this ambition was Gonzales's long-running and ultimately futile battle with the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Gonzales's office, acting as the liaison between the White House and the 10-member bipartisan panel, repeatedly resisted commission demands for access to presidential documents and officials such as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, prompting angry and public disputes.

Gonzales is "a good lawyer and a nice guy, and maybe he was a decent judge for a year, but he didn't bring a lot of political judgment or strategic judgment to their dealings with the commission," a senior commission official said. "He hurt the White House politically by antagonizing the commissioners . . . and all of it for no good reason. In the end, the stuff all came out."

Each morning, Gonzales convened round tables at which his staff -- as well as Addington -- related their legal conundrums. Gonzales was "not a domineering personality . . . and he gave us a chance to speak our minds," said Helgi C. Walker, a former clerk for Clarence Thomas who was an associate counsel from 2001 to 2003.

"There was often a lively debate, but at the end it was not clear where Gonzales was," another former colleague said. A second former colleague recalls that in interagency meetings, Gonzales sat in the back and was "unassuming, pleasant and quiet." So discreet was Gonzales about his opinions that one official who worked closely with him for a year said "he never made an impression on me."

But Berenson says Gonzales was hardly pushed around by officials who thought they had a monopoly on wisdom. "I didn't have the sense that he was whipping his horses or that they were dragging him along behind them," he said, adding that Gonzales was "neither the tool of an aggressive staff nor the quarterback of a reluctant team."

Current and former White House officials interviewed for this article listed only a few episodes in which Gonzales forcefully pressed a position at odds with ideological conservatives. None was in the terrorism field.

Walker said she is aware of criticism that Gonzales "should have been saying 'I believe this or that' " about some of the provocative issues presented to him. "He did not see his job as being about him" but about advocating Bush's interests, she explained. "The judge is not consumed with his own importance, unlike some others in Washington."

Detainee Policy

Unlike many of his predecessors since the Reagan era, Gonzales lacked much experience in federal law and national security matters. So when the Pentagon worried about how to handle expected al Qaeda detainees in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks and the Oct. 7 U.S. attack on Afghanistan, Gonzales organized an interagency group to take up the matter under the State Department's war crimes adviser, Pierre-Richard Prosper.

Former attorney general William P. Barr suggested to Gonzales's staff early on that those captured on the battlefield go before military tribunals instead of civil courts. But Ashcroft and Michael Chertoff, his deputy for the criminal division, both adamantly opposed the plan, along with military lawyers at the Pentagon. The result was that the process moved slowly.

Addington was the first to suggest that the issue be taken away from the Prosper group and that a presidential order be drafted authorizing the tribunals that he, Gonzales and Timothy E. Flanigan, then a principal deputy to Gonzales, supported. It was intended for circulation among a much smaller group of like-minded officials. Berenson, Flanigan and Addington helped write the draft, and on Nov. 6, 2001, Gonzales's office secured an opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that the contemplated military tribunals would be legal.

That office, historically the government's principal internal domestic law adviser, was also staffed by advocates of expansive executive powers; it had told the White House in a classified memo five weeks earlier that the president's authority to wage preemptive war against suspected terrorists was virtually unlimited, partly because proving criminal responsibility for terrorist acts was so difficult.

After a final discussion with Cheney, Bush signed the order authorizing military tribunals on Nov. 13, 2001, while standing up, as he was on his way out of the White House to his Texas ranch for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It provided for the military trial of anyone suspected of belonging to al Qaeda or conspiring to conduct or assist acts of terrorism; conviction would come from a two-thirds vote of the tribunal members, who would adjudicate fact and law and decide what evidence was admissible. Decisions could not be appealed.

Cut out in the final decision making were military lawyers, the State Department and Chertoff, as well as Rice, her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, and Rice's legal adviser, John Bellinger. "I don't think Gonzales felt he was acting precipitously, but he realized people would be surprised," Flanigan said. It amounted to a decision that the president could act without "the entire staff's blessing. As it turned out, they [National Security Council officials] just weren't involved in the process."

Berenson, who left the White House for private practice in 2003, said "there were such strong shared assumptions at the time [that]we had a powerful sense of mission." He attributes the haste to worry about another terrorist attack.

But David Bowker, then a State Department lawyer excluded from the process and now in private practice, called the order premature and politically unwise. "The right thing to do would have been an open process inside the government," he said.

The tribunals were halted by U.S. District Judge James Robertson, who ruled on Nov. 24, 2004, that detainees' rights are guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions -- which the administration had argued were irrelevant.

Rebellion at State

Four weeks after Bush's executive order, a similarly limited deliberation provoked more determined rebellion at the State Department and among military lawyers and officers. The issue was whether al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan should be accorded the Geneva Conventions' human rights protections.

Gonzales, after reviewing a legal brief from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, advised Bush verbally on Jan. 18, 2002, that he had authority to exempt the detainees from such protections. Bush agreed, reversing a decades-old policy aimed in part at ensuring equal treatment for U.S. military detainees around the world. Rumsfeld issued an order the next day to commanders that detainees would receive such protections only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- whose legal adviser, William H. Taft IV, had vigorously tried to block the decision -- then met twice with Bush to convince him that the decision would be a public relations debacle and would undermine U.S. military prohibitions on detainee abuse. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, backed Powell, as did the leaders of the U.S. Central Command who were pursuing the war.

The task of summarizing the competing points of view in a draft letter to the president was seized initially by Addington. A memo he wrote and signed with Gonzales's name -- and knowledge -- was circulated to various departments, several sources said. A version of this draft, dated Jan. 25, 2002, was subsequently leaked. It included the eye-catching assertion that a "new paradigm" of a war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners."

In early February 2002, Gonzales reviewed the issue once more with Bush, who reaffirmed his initial decision regarding his legal authority but chose not to invoke it immediately for Taliban members. Flanigan said that Gonzales still disagreed with Powell but "viewed his role as trying to help the president accommodate the views of State."

Thirty months later, a Defense Department panel chaired by James R. Schlesinger concluded that the president's resulting Feb. 7 executive order played a key role in the Central Command's creation of interrogation policies for the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

A former senior military lawyer, who was involved in the deliberations but spoke on the condition of anonymity, complained that Gonzales's counsel's office had ignored the language and history of the conventions, treating the question "as if they wanted to look at the rules to see how to justify what they wanted to do."

"It was not an open and honest discussion," the lawyer said.

For Gonzales's aides, however, the experience only reinforced a concern that the State Department and the military legal community should not be trusted with information about such policymaking. State "saw its mission as representing the interests of the rest of the world to the president, instead of the president's interests to the world," one aide said.

The Debate Over Torture

This schism created additional problems when Gonzales approved in August 2002 -- after limited consultation -- an Office of Legal Counsel memo suggesting various stratagems that officials could use to defend themselves against criminal prosecution for torture.

Drafted at the request of the CIA, which sought legal blessing for aggressive interrogation methods for Abu Zubaida and other al Qaeda detainees, the memo contended that only physically punishing acts "of an extreme nature" would be prosecutable. It also said that those committing torture with express presidential authority or without the intent to commit harm were probably immune from prosecution.

The memo was signed by Jay S. Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal appellate judge, but written with significant input from Yoo, whom Gonzales had tried to hire at the White House and later endorsed to head Justice's legal counsel office. During the drafting of the memo, Yoo briefed Gonzales several times on its contents. He also briefed Ashcroft, Bellinger, Addington, Haynes and the CIA's acting general counsel, John A. Rizzo, several officials said.

At least one of the meetings during this period included a detailed description of the interrogation methods the CIA wanted to use, such as open-handed slapping, the threat of live burial and "waterboarding" -- a procedure that involves strapping a detainee to a board, raising the feet above the head, wrapping the face and nose in a wet towel, and dripping water onto the head. Tested repeatedly on U.S. military personnel as part of interrogation resistance training, the technique proved to produce an unbearable sensation of drowning.

State Department officials and military lawyers were intentionally excluded from these deliberations, officials said. Gonzales and his staff had no reservations about the legal draft or the proposed interrogation methods and did not suggest major changes during the editing of Yoo's memo, two officials involved in the deliberations said.

The memo defined torture in extreme terms, said the president had inherent powers to allow it and gave the CIA permission to do what it wished. Seven months later, its conclusions were cited approvingly in a Defense Department memo that spelled out the Pentagon's policy for "exceptional interrogations" of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

When the text was leaked to the public last summer, it attracted scorn from military lawyers and human rights experts worldwide. Nigel Rodley, a British lawyer who served as the special U.N. rapporteur on torture and inhumane treatment from 1993 to 2001, remarked that its underlying doctrine "sounds like the discredited legal theories used by Latin American countries" to justify repression.

After two weeks of damaging publicity, Gonzales distanced himself, Bush and other senior officials from its language, calling the conclusions "unnecessary, over-broad discussions" of abstract legal theories ignored by policymakers. Another six months passed before the Office of Legal Counsel, under new direction, repudiated its reasoning publicly, one week before Gonzales's confirmation hearing.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

New ACLU Report Highlights Gonzales Role in Detainee Abuse; Calls Civil Liberties Record Mixed, But Not Encouraging

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Media@dcaclu.org
January 3, 2005

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WASHINGTON - In anticipation of this week's expected confirmation hearings, the American Civil Liberties Union today released a new report on attorney general nominee and current White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales.

Although as a matter of policy the ACLU cannot endorse or oppose nominees for any office other than on the Supreme Court, it can examine and publicize nominees' civil liberties records.

"There are too many questions swirling around Mr. Gonzales's role in developing the legal framework that may have led to the torture and abuse we all saw in those Abu Ghraib photographs," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "The Senate has a duty not to soft-pedal in its questioning."

Arguably the most pressing question for the ACLU is whether a document it received from the FBI as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit is in fact true. In it, an FBI agent describes highly aggressive interrogation tactics, including the use of military dogs, that he says were approved by executive order.

The ACLU report also calls on the Senate to examine a number of different potential blemishes on Gonzales's civil liberties record, including:

His role in developing legal arguments that permitted aggressive interrogation tactics in the months after 9/11, and denying detainees in the "war on terror" any formal legal protections (through which truly innocent captives could at least have some avenue to clear their names). In particular, the ACLU asks the White House to preemptively waive executive privilege for a raft of documents relating to these matters that currently remain withheld.

Whether the White House counsel's office played the leading role in creating the system by which the president could move American citizens from the criminal justice system into detention as "enemy combatants," without any formal due process protections.

Gonzales's role as the chief administration cheerleader for the system of military tribunals for detainees in the war on terrorism, without the due process protections of the regular military justice system, which was recently halted after a federal court decision questioning its constitutionality.

Whether the White House Counsel's office supported the Musgrave-Allard version of the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have banned not only same-sex marriage rights, but civil union status as well.

The now infamous Texas "clemency memos" drafted by Gonzales for then-Governor Bush, which almost uniformly fail to mention key factors in each case, including evidence of innocence, that supported granting clemency to death row inmates.
The report also notes possible concerns with the unique dynamic of a White House counsel - which could be called "defense counsel for the West Wing" - moving to the head of the Justice Department, which is responsible for investigating criminal activity by high-level government officials. Were the president to face a scandal in his second term, Gonzales would be placed in the awkward position of investigating his friends and former colleagues.

The ACLU does note, however, a few positive marks on his civil liberties balance sheet, namely:

Gonzales's apparent willingness to follow the law, in at least two cases decided during his tenure as State Supreme Court Justice, irrespective of his personal position on abortion or other reproductive rights.

His openness to moderate immigration policies.

His mitigation of the original White House draft brief in one of the 2003 affirmative action cases, in which he tacitly accepted the notion of admissions policies that take race into account in order to remedy past and current racial discrimination.
Finally, the ACLU notes a number of specific avenues of inquiry for Senators seeking to examine Gonzales's civil liberties record. Most notably, he should be held to account for:

His possible role in approving so-called "ghost detainees" in Iraq, whose existence is illegally kept secret from the International Red Cross.

Whether he and others approved of constructing military detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to deliberately create a "legal limbo" for the detainees.

What role he played in the events leading up to the virtual revolt of career military lawyers, who were forced to complain to Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer in New York, about efforts to gut legal protections for military detainees.

Notably, this past Friday, the Justice Department released an updated memorandum rescinding an earlier one describing what constitutes "torture" for the purposes of military interrogation. In the new memo, the government backs away significantly from its previously permissive position; the earlier memo was commissioned and reviewed by Albert Gonzales in 2002. Last week's release should in no way temper the Senate's questioning of Gonzales, the ACLU said.

"In terms of raw legal authority, the attorney general, especially after 9/11, is the second most powerful government official after the president," Romero said. "It is imperative that the Senate asks the tough questions to make sure the right person is in the job."

Alberto Gonzales: A Record of Injustice

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As White House Counsel

GONZALES APPROVED MEMO AUTHORIZING TORTURE: An August 2002 Justice Department memo "was vetted by a larger number of officials, including...the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office." According to Newsweek, the memo "was drafted after White House meetings convened by George W. Bush's chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Department general counsel William Haynes and (Cheney counsel) David Addington." The memo included the opinion that laws prohibiting torture do "not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants." Further, the memo puts forth the opinion that the pain caused by an interrogation must include "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions-in order to constitute torture." The methods outlined in the memo "provoked concerns within the CIA about possible violation of the federal torture law (and) also raised concerns at the FBI, where some agents knew of the techniques being used" overseas on high-level al Qaeda officials. (Gonzales 8/1/02 memo; WP, 6/27/04; Newsweek, 6/21/04; NYT, 6/27/04)

GONZALES BELIEVES MANY GENEVA CONVENTIONS PROVISIONS ARE OBSOLETE: A 1/25/02 memo written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war" and "this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." The memo pushes to make al Qaeda and Taliban detainees exempt from the Geneva Conventions' provisions on the proper, legal treatment of prisoners. The administration has been adamant that prisoners at Guantanamo are not protected by the Geneva Conventions. (Gonzales 1/25/02 memo; Newsweek, 5/24/04)

GONZALES ADMITTED HIS VIEWS 'COULD UNDERMINE U.S. MILITARY CULTURE': The 1/25/02 memo shows Alberto Gonzales was aware of the risk that ignoring the Geneva Conventions could create for the military. One concern expressed is that failing to apply the Geneva Conventions "could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries," which is what happened at Abu Ghraib. Secretary of State Colin Powell strongly warned against taking this decision, as did lawyers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps, or JAG. This week, a federal judge ruled that "President Bush had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions" when he established military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to try detainees as war criminals. (Gonzales 1/25/02 memo; Bloomberg, 6/14/04; New York Times, 11/9/04)

GONZALES BLOCKS INFORMATION FROM CONGRESS: Historically, senators have been allowed to review some memoranda by judicial nominees. But, in a letter [about nominee Miguel Estrada], Gonzales told the Democrats that the administration would not produce the memos, because to do so would chill free expression among administration lawyers and violate the principle of executive privilege, which protects the internal deliberations of the president's aides. (New Yorker, 5/19/03)

As Texas Chief Legal Counsel

DEATH PENALTY MEMOS: GONZALES'S NEGLIGENT COUNSEL: As chief legal counsel for then-Gov. Bush in Texas, Gonzales was responsible for writing a memo on the facts of each death penalty case – Bush decided whether a defendant should live or die based on the memos. An examination of the Gonzales memoranda by the Atlantic Monthly concluded, "Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." His memos caused Bush frequently to approve executions based on "only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute." Rather than informing the governor of the conflicting circumstances in a case, "The memoranda seem attuned to a radically different posture, assumed by Bush from the earliest days of his administration-one in which he sought to minimize his sense of legal and moral responsibility for executions." (Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003)

MEMORANDUM ON TERRY WASHINGTON: A CASE STUDY IN INCOMPETENCE: In his briefing on death-row defendant Terry Washington – a mentally retarded 33-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old – Gonzales devoted nearly a third of his three-page report to the gruesome details of the crime, but referred "only fleetingly to the central issue in Washington's clemency appeal-his limited mental capacity, which was never disputed by the State of Texas-and present[ed] it as part of a discussion of 'conflicting information' about the condemned man's childhood." In addition, Gonzales "failed to mention that Washington's mental limitations, and the fact that he and his ten siblings were regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts, were never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence." Nor did he mention that Washington's lawyer had "failed to enlist a mental-health expert" to testify on Washington's behalf, even though "ineffective counsel and mental retardation were in fact the central issues raised in the thirty-page clemency petition" it was Gonzales's job to review. This all came at a time when "demand was growing nationwide to ban executions of the retarded." (Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2003)

GONZALES TOLD GOV. BUSH HE COULD IGNORE INTERNATIONAL LAW: In 1997, Alberto Gonzales wrote a memo for then Gov. Bush to justify non-compliance with the Vienna Convention. The Vienna Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1969, was "designed to ensure that foreign nationals accused of a crime are given access to legal counsel by a representative from their home country." Gonzales sent a letter to the U.S. State Department in which he argued that the treaty didn't apply to the State of Texas, as Texas was not a signatory to the Vienna Convention. Two days later, Texas executed Mexican citizen Irineo Tristan Montoya, despite Mexico's protestations that Texas had violated Tristan's rights under the Vienna Convention by failing to inform the Mexican consulate at the time of his arrest. (Slate, 6/15/04)

GONZALES GETS BUSH OUT OF JURY DUTY TO KEEP DUI SECRET: In 1996, as counsel to Gov. Bush, Gonzales helped to get him excused from jury duty, "a situation that could have required the governor to disclose his then-secret 1976 conviction for drunken driving in Maine." Gonzales argued "that if Bush served, he would not, as governor, be able to pardon the defendant in the future." (USA Today, 3/18/02)

As Texas Supreme Court Justice

GONZALES DOES ENRON'S BIDDING: As an elected member of the Texas Supreme Court, "Enron and Enron's law firm were Gonzales's biggest contributors," giving him $35,450 in 2000. Overall, Gonzales raked in $100,000 from the energy industry. In May 2000, "Gonzales was author of a state Supreme Court opinion that handed the energy industry one of its biggest Texas legal victories in recent history." Since Bush brought him into the White House, Gonzales has worked doggedly to keep secret the details of energy task force meetings held by Vice President Cheney. (New York Daily News, 2/2/02)

ACCEPTING DONATIONS FROM LITIGANTS: In the weeks between hearing oral arguments and making a decision in Henson v. Texas Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance, Justice Alberto Gonzales collected a $2,000 contribution premium from the Texas Farm Bureau (which runs the defendant insurance company in this case). In another case, Gonzales pocketed a $2,500 contribution from a law firm defending the Royal Insurance company just before hearing oral arguments in Embrey v. Royal Insurance. (Texas for Public Justice)

Visit the Alberto Gonzales resource page.