Abu G's long incompetence trail.
Alan Berlow's famous Atlantic piece on Abu Gonzales' clemency memos from when he was legal counsel to Governor Bush in Texas was recently freed from behind the subscription wall. It's just about what you'd expect:
Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant's personal background, and a condensed legal history...
A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents 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.
Probably most appalling is Bush's alleged hand-wringing and actual buck-passing over the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, an execution that didn't come close to meeting the clemency standards of the Bush governorship but was opposed by Pat Robertson and much of the religious right. Regarding Abu, though, the picture that emerges isn't so much maliciousness or hypocrisy. It's just the total cluelessness the rest of the country would come to know and love: a total absence of thought about the process; a willingness just to summarize court reports and be done with it; a complete lack of the sort of moral imagination that might lead to a sense of responsibility for other people's life and death.
Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant's personal background, and a condensed legal history...
A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents 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.
Probably most appalling is Bush's alleged hand-wringing and actual buck-passing over the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, an execution that didn't come close to meeting the clemency standards of the Bush governorship but was opposed by Pat Robertson and much of the religious right. Regarding Abu, though, the picture that emerges isn't so much maliciousness or hypocrisy. It's just the total cluelessness the rest of the country would come to know and love: a total absence of thought about the process; a willingness just to summarize court reports and be done with it; a complete lack of the sort of moral imagination that might lead to a sense of responsibility for other people's life and death.
5 Comments:
Superb name for the Gonz Laura. Why didn't I think of that?
I wish I could say I made it up, but I didn't.
Good one Laura. One of the things I noted in that article is that Gonzales, even then, was playing a game of immunity from public scrutiny and oversight.
It's really quite telling now that we see he brought that same mindset to the Bush White House.
the picture that emerges isn't so much maliciousness or hypocrisy. It's just the total cluelessness the rest of the country would come to know and love: a total absence of thought about the process
I would go one further than Dave and suggest that this is precisely why he was brought both to the Governor's mansion and the White House.
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Thanks and good point; it's important to remember just how far back this man's hackdom stretches.
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