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Alberto Gonzales and the Rule of Law

By the end of January Alberto Gonzales is expected to be confirmed as the next Attorney General of the United States. The Attorney General is part of the U.S. cabinet and is responsible for ensuring that the rule of law is upheld. Given this responsibility, Gonzales seems as inappropriate a choice as his predecessor, John Ashcroft.

Gonzales, who was commissioned as Counsel to President Bush in January of 2001, also served under Bush in Texas. He was appointed as Justice of the Texas Supreme Court in 1999 after serving for two years as Bush’s Secretary of State.

In this position in June 1997, Gonzales sent a letter to the U.S. State Department justifying Texas’ decision to execute a Mexican national – Irineo Tristan Montoya – following his conviction on murder charges. In violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the state of Texas failed to inform the Mexican consulate when Montoya was arrested. In his letter, Gonzales argued: “Since the State of Texas is not a signatory to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, we believe it is inappropriate to ask Texas to determine whether a breach occurred in connection with [Montoya’s] arrest and conviction.” The Vienna Convention was ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1969 and became national law at that time.

As Counsel to the President, Gonzales has shown a similar disregard for international law. He penned a memo in January 2002 which justified the use of torture against suspects as part of the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror. Gonzales argued that the U.S. President “wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.” The memo also stated that the president has the authority “to approve almost any physical or psychological action during interrogation, up to and including torture.”

"As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians. …In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of prisoners.”

This memo surfaced in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, and many American commentators have argued that it confirms the widely-held belief that far from being the actions of a few bad apples, the torture of prisoners in Iraq and in Guantanamo Bay is the result of directives from the highest level of the Bush administration.

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