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LOYALTY AND DISHONOR
08/28/2007
Loyalty is a wonderful thing. Misguided loyalty can be disastrous, deadly or even treasonous.
The behavior of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, ultimately leading to his resignation, has been a clear example of misguided loyalty. One of many loyal "Bushies," Gonzales put his loyalty to George W. Bush before everything, and as a result he did not serve his country well. Alberto Gonzales put loyalty to the president over loyalty to the Constitution and the American people, whom he was supposed to serve.
Political appointees often like to remind us that they "serve at the pleasure of the president," but that doesn't mean they "serve" the president. They are, in fact, supposed to serve the American people, and Alberto Gonzales is fully aware of that fact, as evidenced in his resignation announcement when he said "Public service is honorable and noble. And I am profoundly grateful to President Bush for his friendship and for the many opportunities he has given me to serve the American people." Yes, Alberto Gonzales knew his job was to serve the American people. He just didn't do it. Instead he served the man who gave him those opportunities, even when it meant he was taking the Executive Branch and the Justice Department to places it had never gone before, setting precedents that would have horrified the founding fathers.
While he was White House Counsel, Gonzales joined with those who offered the legal opinion that the use of torture to extract information from prisoners captured in Afghanistan was acceptable and that the United States was no longer required to comply with the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States was a signatory. In a 2002 memo to the president he said "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." In other words, the law of the land was no longer the law of the land because Gonzales said it wasn't – things had changed and so Gonzales decided to change the law himself, in order to please his boss. This was clear evidence of Gonzales being first and foremost a Bush loyalist. Nothing was more important to the Bush administration than the global war on terror, not even the Constitution or international treaties, not even our own soldiers whose safety would be compromised by this change in policy, should they be captured, as many officials - including Colin Powell - warned Bush would happen if the United States decided to ignore the Geneva Conventions.
Later, when the Bush administration wanted the Justice Department to reauthorize a secret domestic wiretapping program, and the acting Attorney General James Comey would not sign on, White House Counsel Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card went to the hospital to pressure the gravely ill John Ashcroft into overruling his deputy who was acting AG during his illness. Comey found out about it and enlisted the help of the FBI to stop them, but they managed to get into the room and try anyway. To Ashcroft's credit, he rebuffed them, but their actions show one more instance of loyalty to Bush over loyalty to the American people, whose rights they sought to violate.
As White House Counsel, Gonzales' role was to provide legal advice to the president, so if his loyalty was more to the president than the people, that might be understandable, although as chief legal advisor his duty is above all to adhere to the law, and his job to advise the president to adhere to the law. However, once Mr. Gonzales became the Attorney General, his loyalty should have been only to the Constitution, the highest law in the land, and to the American people, on whose behalf he upheld that law. The office of the Attorney General should have nothing to do with politics, yet under Alberto Gonzales, the Justice Department became one more arm of the Republican Party.
This became clear when out of the blue and for no justifiable reason, eight U.S. Attorneys were fired after Bush won re-election. At first, Gonzales tried to say they were fired for performance reasons, but most had had glowing reviews, so that reason didn't fly. Little by little it began to leak out that these attorneys had not prosecuted Democrats fast enough or had not aggressively pursued "voter fraud" cases against Democrats. In other words, it seems they had not done their part to influence a couple of close elections by threatening some minority voters or even disenfranchising them prior to the election.
Now, this has not yet been proven, although some of the fired attorneys have begun speaking out, but the proof is difficult to obtain as Gonzales refuses to answer the questions of Congressional committees regarding who fired the attorneys and why, or he "cannot recall," or he gives multiple answers that contradict each other. Since it seems impossible that Gonzales has that faulty of a memory, and since he doesn't seem to be a stupid man, the only possible explanation for his "memory lapses," contradictions, and refusals is his loyalty to Bush and his administration, which may be behind the entire fiasco. Since others, such as Karl Rove, Harriet Meiers and even minor White House staffers, are refusing to testify under the banner of executive privilege, it appears the White House has something to hide. We may never know exactly what happened and whether or not any of it was illegal, because of the stonewalling of the Executive Branch, which has determined that they are above the law and that Congress has no right to investigate anything that they do.
William Rivers Pitt calls the actions of Gonzales "treason." He writes:
"Their treason is not in the actual crimes they have committed, but in the way they have chosen to avoid accountability for them. Their treason is not their refusal to obey the Freedom of Information Act, but in their insistence that they are above the application of that law. Their treason is not in their refusal to obey subpoenas from Congress, but in their claim that they are above the laws behind those subpoenas. Their treason is not that they fired United States attorneys and then refused to come clean about it, but that they decimated the impartiality of the Department of Justice and turned the rule of law into another partisan weapon. Their treason is not the NSA surveillance of Americans, but their steadfast refusal to submit to the governing laws and the requirement of oversight."
Treason may be the best word to describe the actions of the Attorney General, even though I hesitate to use it. Instead of upholding the law, which was his sworn duty, Gonzales used the Justice Department to uphold the president's unprecedented claims of executive privilege, his use of illegal wiretapping, and his torture directives, while he himself sat before Congress and danced around the truth. As Rahm Emmanuel said "Alberto Gonzales is the first Attorney General who thought the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth were three different things." And finally, the Attorney General went along with the Republican operatives in the White House who wished to use the Justice Department to help them prosecute their political rivals and gain unfair advantages in elections. If this isn't treason, it certainly comes close.
The president and the few remaining defenders of Gonzales on Capitol Hill ignore the actions of the Attorney General and play even more political games, as they claim he was unfairly treated, "dragged through the mud," and under constant partisan attack. In his statement about the resignation, Mr. Bush had the audacity to say: "It's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons."
Well, Mr. President, you're partly right. It is sad that talented and honorable people have their names dragged through the mud for political reasons – I'm thinking of military heroes like John McCain, your opponent in the 2000 primary election, Max Cleland in the 2002 election, and John Kerry, your opponent in the 2004 Presidential election. These men, Democrats and Republicans, were dragged through the mud by your political allies, lied about and treated shamefully, so that you and members of your party could win elections. But I would not include Alberto Gonzales in the list of talented and honorable men. He made a mess of the Justice Department, whose employees are abandoning ship like so many rats, and ignored the Constitution repeatedly. Honor is not what I would call it, unless your definition of honor is "honor among thieves."
I would call it dishonor, the inevitable result of putting your loyalty to one man before your loyalty to the Constitution, which is the very foundation of your country, and which is the essence of the principles and laws to which you have sworn allegience. As I noted above, William Rivers Pitt calls it treason, not because the actions of Gonzales constitute specific violations of the law, but because they are actions that completely ignore the law, while claiming to be above it. I'll end with his magnificent words:
"Americans have only the rights they are able to protect and defend. Our rights are nothing more than ideas; only theory and argument on parchment all too easily burned to ashes. The power of those rights is only found in our collective submission to the rule of law, and submission to that rule of law is all that stands between our freedoms and the conflagration of tyranny. Without the rule of law, there is no America.
That is the treason of Alberto Gonzales, and the treason of the Bush administration entire. They have attacked and undercut the rule of law by refusing to submit to it, and in doing so have brought us to the edge of appalling infamy. Theirs is a crime without peer, and we will be fortunate beyond measure if we are able to recover from it."
-Ellen Terich
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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