By SUSAN DWYER

GEORGE BUSH scored major affirmative action points against the Democrats with the nomination of a long-time loyalist Alberto R. Gonzales to the position of United States attorney general. It remains to be seen if the Democrats will be cowed by Bush’s move, but early indications are that Gonzales will be confirmed. This is not terribly surprising. Both parties basically agree about the current occupation of Iraq; the internment and treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo; the growing powers of the executive branch; and the Patriot Act. Gonzales has played a major role in providing the legal cover for these policies.

On the surface, Gonzales looks like the American dream. Born the second of eight children in 1955, he grew up in a small, two-bedroom house just outside Houston, did well in school, and joined the U.S. Air Force. While stationed in Alaska, he studied for and received an appointment to the Air Force Academy. Deciding that the air force was not for him, Gonzales transferred to Rice University, and went to law school at Harvard, graduating in 1982. His rise was rapid. He was hired by the international law firm Vinson & Elkins straight out of school. When George Bush became governor of Texas, Gonzales was appointed the governor’s general counsel in 1994, and then secretary of state in 1997. Bush then appointed Gonzales to a seat on the Texas Supreme Court in 1999.

While serving in Texas, Gonzales helped Bush speed up the state’s machinery of execution. One hundred fifty-two people were executed in six years. Gonzales provided Bush with the case synopses for fifty-seven of those people, synopses which, according to Alan Berlow, a former National Public Radio reporter who reviewed them, "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." Most of the synopses were three pages or less, and they followed the recommendations of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. The Board’s record was so shoddy and its decisions so lacking in fairness or legal procedure that U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks was moved to remark in 1998 that "a flip of the coin would be more merciful than these votes."

After reading one of those three-page memos, Bush denied clemency for Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with "the communication skills of a seven-year-old." According to Berlow, Gonzales’s report luridly recounted the murder Washington committed, but "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," the central case his lawyers were putting forward for clemency.

In two of Bush’s executions, Gonzales preformed the legal gymnastics that foreshadowed his later role as White House legal counsel. The first is the case of a Mexican national, Irineo Tristan Montoya, accused of murdering John Kilheffer in Brownsville in 1985. Montoya did not read or speak English. He was not given access to a lawyer, nor was the Mexican consulate notified of his arrest, which is required by the Vienna Convention (ratified by the U.S. in 1969). With no defense lawyer present, Montoya, who ever afterwards maintained his innocence, signed a "confession" he believed to be immigration papers.

In a letter to the U.S. State Department a few days before Montoya’s execution, Alberto Gonzales wrote, "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 the arrest and conviction of a Mexican national." Despite strenuous objections by the Mexican government, Montoya was executed.

With the execution of Canadian national Joseph Faulder two years after Montoya, Gonzales finally tacitly acknowledged that even Texas was bound by treaties ratified by the United States when, in another letter to the State Department, he claimed that the state’s failure to notify the Canadian consulate was a "harmless error."

Gonzales’s role as the bureaucrat of death proved so useful to George Bush that after being appointed president by the Supreme Court in 2000, he called Gonzales to head the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel. After the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Gonzales quietly put together a working group of lawyers and bureaucrats charged with providing the legal cover for Bush’s USA PATRIOT Act, and the subsequent actions of the CIA and the armed forces in their treatment of prisoners captured in Afghanistan. The working group was constructed to shut out lawyers from the State Department, the national security adviser, and the various armed forces’ Judge Advocate Generals (JAGs).

Faced with another irksome international treaty ratified by the United States, the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, Gonzales and his working group needed to come up with a justification for circumventing it. Gonzales’s team provided the legal basis for the Bush administration’s argument that the "war on terror" represented a new kind of war in which the old Geneva rules do not apply. In this context, it was argued that captives are not prisoners of war, but "unlawful combatants," and therefore without rights.

Designated as terrorists, prisoners could be held indefinitely, transported across national boundaries, kept out of the U.S. and territory captured by U. S. forces, and would not be subject to protections provided by the World Court, international agreements and treaties or, more importantly, the laws and legal protections offered by the U.S. Constitution and the federal courts. A concurrent task of the group was to ensure that their legal justifications provided George Bush with cover if he were to be indicted as a war criminal for contravening international treaties outlawing torture.

The lawyers in Gonzales’s group, many of whom were members of the arch-conservative Federalist Society, worked diligently to justify the creation of military tribunals to detain, investigate, and prosecute the hundreds of prisoners sent to Guantánamo Bay. Gonzales reportedly even wrote the presidential order creating them.

Timothy E. Flanigan, a leading member of the group stated, "Are we going to go with a system that is really guaranteed to prevent us from getting information in every case or are we going to go another route?" Gonzales made clear what the other route was in a January 2002 memo to the president, in which he criticized certain "quaint provisions" of the Geneva Convention:

The "quaint" reference to "athletic uniforms" cannot hide the point of the memo. It is a common tactic of neocons such as Alberto Gonzales, to pick an insignificant aspect of something–in the case of the Geneva Conventions, the "quaint provision" of distributing athletic uniforms to prisoners of war–as an excuse to attack and dismiss the whole. In this way, the quaint provisions are equal to the "harmless error," and whole treaties and bodies of law can be dismissed as trivial. But the whole is comprised of its parts, not the other way around. If athletic clothing is not needed, wanted, or regularly given to prisoners, that in no way dismisses the entire Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. The requirement to give out athletic clothing is just one small piece of a treaty that aims through all of its collected pieces to prevent just such treatment as Afghani and now Iraqi prisoners face every day from a vengeful American government.

There remain about 560 people held in Guantánamo, and, in spite of widespread accounts from those released that they were subjected to various forms of torture, from sleep deprivation to beatings, every one of those abuses was authorized by Alberto Gonzales’s agreement under the sole jurisdiction of the president’s tribunals. Despite four years of torture disguised as investigation, only four prisoners have been charged and government officials have admitted that "investigators have struggled to find more than a dozen they can tie directly to significant terrorist acts."

As officials, CIA operatives, and other personnel are transferred back and forth between Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the practice of torture has spread. Indeed, according to John Barry, Michael Hirsh, and Michael Isikoff in a May 24 Newsweek International report, "Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantánamo Bay, seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions." Gonzales and his crew of lawyers have narrowed the definition of torture to mean only pain severe enough to cause death or permanent mental derangement. It has become the operative definition for both the military tribunals in Guantánamo and the armed forces on the ground in Iraq.

Democrats do not approach the confirmation of Gonzales with "a clear conscience and clean hands," as lyrics from an old Tracy Chapman song put it. They scarcely raised a peep when Gonzales protected Dick Cheney from review of his collusion with Enron executives while constructing the nation’s energy policy, nor when he haggled to allow Condolleezza Rice to testify before the 9/11 commission in secrecy. When the scandal of Abu Ghraib broke and the media released pictures of torture and found that officials long knew of its practice, most were silent. The Patriot Act and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have received strong support from both sides of the aisle. So, if Alberto Gonzales is confirmed as attorney general, it will be up to the rest of us to put a halt to his dirty tricks.