EDITORIAL: The Attorney General's Resignation: Gonzales Good to Go

Aug 28, 03:35 AM

Current Headlines: By The Philadelphia Inquirer

Aug. 28--Wrong man, wrong job, wrong time. That was Bush loyalist Alberto R. Gonzales as attorney general. For the good of the nation, Gonzales had to go.

Now the trouble with looking to President Bush for a new attorney general who can restore trust in the Department of Justice is that Bush thought Gonzales was the right man for the job.

While Gonzales finally bowed to months of bipartisan calls for his resignation yesterday, he had Bush notably still on his side. Gonzales' "good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons," said the president.

The president is wrong. Gonzales ruined his own name. For far too long, the president has stood by while Gonzales -- as attorney general and earlier as White House counsel -- did incalculable damage to public confidence in the rule of law.

Wrongheaded policies that Gonzales shaped for Bush enabled the torture of terrorism suspects, while at the same time denying basic human rights to detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and American-run prisons overseas. The courts appropriately swatted those policies down.

Gonzales even suggested rethinking the Geneva Conventions on treating war captives. In seizing on the idea that "terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales reached the outrageous conclusion that "this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

To dismiss as quaint core principles of human-rights conduct showed the measure of the man. He'd either drunk the Kool-Aid served by those allied with Vice President Cheney's view of an all-powerful president, or Gonzales actually believed such nonsense.

As a proponent of Bush's warrantless surveillance of Americans' overseas contacts with suspected terrorists, Gonzales also contributed to the erosion of civil liberties at home.

As attorney general, Gonzales presided over politicizing the Justice Department, which most Americans believe is supposed to enforce the laws impartially. Among nine federal prosecutors fired were some who said they had been urged to probe Democrats at election time.

Whenever Gonzales deigned to appear on Capitol Hill to account for his actions, he showed a talent for being only slightly more informative than, say, a Miss Teen USA contestant answering a question about geography. (Grown-ups, see YouTube.)

Did Gonzales tell Congress the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Or did he really have the dozens of memory lapses he claimed? We may never find out, but at least it doesn't matter quite as much now that he is leaving. Say this much, it's never a good thing when an attorney general's critics cannot decide if he's a liar or merely a rank incompetent.

Which brings up Gonzales' replacement. It should be a respected attorney or judge with a reputation for revering the rule of law -- and without a political agenda. Senators evaluating the nominee should make sure the person knows that, sometimes, an attorney general's job is to say no to a president, if the law requires it. In particular, Gonzales' successor should be willing to get to the bottom of the prosecutors' purge, and to enforce the law should Congress issue contempt citations in this or other probes.

In their first standard-bearer as attorney general, Latino Americans clearly deserved better from Bush.

Gonzales leaves Sept. 17, fittingly, the day that -- 220 years ago -- 39 brave men signed the document that makes this a nation of laws, not hacks.

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