Gonzalez - looking for edification...

Apart from his "quaint" comment about torture, I'd like to know more about what this guy is about. Are there links you would recommend?

Thx!

I'll look it up, thanks!

available at www.democracyiscoming.com

It's a few posts down -- i'd give the direct link but my computer is running v.e.r.y. s.l.o.w.l.y...

ON EDIT:

here it is (FINALLY):
http://tesibria.typepad.com/democracy_is_coming/2004/11/alberto_gonzale.html

His briefs to Bush in Texas when he was on the Texas suprteme court left out any mitigating circumstances (like mental retardation). They executed 150 under the compassionate Bush. He's a beaut. Just when you think it can't get any worse...

This from msnbc:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6451896/

I'm sure you can google lots more.

coming to a neighborhood near you!

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030620.html

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4999734/

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Alberto_R._Gonzales

Hope someone's saving all these !

didn't have time to check the links others offered, but here are a few things.
==================
The Guv's Death Row Secrets
Naked City
BY JORDAN SMITH

July 11, 2003:


In the current edition of The Atlantic magazine, Alan Berlow writes about the content of the 57 executive clemency summaries of death row cases prepared by then-Gov. George W. Bush's general counsel, Alberto Gonzales, which Berlow obtained through Texas' open-records laws -- memos the state is now seemingly trying to keep out of the public's hands.

Gonzales -- the former Vinson and Elkins partner whom Bush subsequently appointed secretary of state and then a Texas Supreme Court justice, before asking him to come to Washington as his White House counsel -- is considered to be on Bush's short list of U.S. Supreme Court nominees. Back in Texas, as the guv's general counsel, Gonzales prepared clemency memos regarding Texas' death row cases for Bush to review prior to an inmate's execution -- memos that were, as Berlow writes, "Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die." In reviewing the memos, Berlow discovered that they contained a paltry amount of information "repeatedly to apprise the governor of the crucial issues in the cases at hand," such as "ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." And so it went; Bush refused to stay executions in 56 of the 57 cases for which Berlow obtained memos.

<snip>

Berlow's article can be found online at www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/07/berlow.htm
-----------------------------
http://tiger.berkeley.edu/sohrab/politics/pres_papers.html

Bush Keeps a Grip on Presidential Papers
The New York Times, November 2, 2001

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 - President Bush signed an executive order today to allow a sitting president to keep secret the papers of a previous president, even if a previous president wants his papers made public.

<snip>

"Those claims are absurd," said Hugh Davis Graham, a presidential historian at Vanderbilt University who has seen the order. Mr. Graham said he viewed the executive order as the latest effort by the Bush White House to clamp down on the flow of information to the public.

The five-page executive order, drafted by the White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, would give either an incumbent president or a former president the right to withhold the former president's papers from the public.

"We thought it would be more appropriate to really give the primary responsibility regarding presidential records to the former president whose records they belong to," Mr. Gonzales said in a briefing for reporters, "and to have the incumbent president sort of be the backstop in making decisions about whether or not those documents should in fact be released."

..more..

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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1111-10.htm

Gonzales Nomination Draws Cautions, Concerns of Rights Groups
by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON – The nomination by President George W. Bush of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to be the next Attorney General has been greeted with caution and concern by major U.S. human and civil-rights groups that called on the Senate to be especially probing in considering his record and convictions.

<snip>

As White House Counsel, however, Gonzales has been associated with a number of controversial positions, among them his expansive claims of “executive privilege” in order to withhold documents from Congress and his defense of some of the more far-reaching provisions of the USA Patriot Act. His office has also played a key role in screening Bush’s judicial nominees, a process that, according to critics, has been aimed at ensuring that they share the president’s rightwing views.

<snip>

Gonzales’ reluctance to apply international law goes back to 1997 when, as then-Gov. Bush’s legal counsel, he wrote a memo justifying Texas’ non-compliance with the Vienna Convention which is supposed to ensure that foreign consulates are informed of the arrests of their nationals in the United States and given an opportunity to provide legal representation to the accused.

Gonzales argued that the treaty did not apply to Texas because it was not a signatory of the Convention. Two days later, the state executed a Mexican citizen over Mexico’s protests that the condemned man’s rights under the Vienna Convention had been violated. Mexico’s position was upheld by the World Court earlier this year.