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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The attorney general nominee claims he and then Texas Gov. Bush held "rolling" discussions before executions were approved. He's almost certainly not telling the truth.
Jan 14, 2005 | In seven hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Alberto Gonzales demonstrated astute powers of evasion, obfuscation and equivocation when it came to the Bush administration's torture policy, leading one Democratic senator, Joseph Biden of Delaware, to ever so gently suggest that the attorney general nominee might be less than totally forthcoming. "So we're looking for candor, ol' buddy. We're looking for you when we ask you questions to give us an answer, which you haven't done yet. I love you, but you're not very candid so far."
In the end, few senators wanted to sully the Gonzales love-in just because the sworn testimony of the soon-to-be rubber-stamped head of the nation's chief law enforcement agency was not entirely responsive. But if Gonzales was lacking in candor on the subject of torture, the main thrust of the hearing, he almost certainly crossed the line from half-truth to untruth when it came to a discussion of his role in the execution of 57 Texas death row inmates.
In response to questions from Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold and Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, Gonzales repeatedly stated that each of the so-called execution memos he wrote for then Texas Gov. George W. Bush was nothing more than a "summary" of what he suggested had been an elaborate, ongoing review process for each and every execution Bush approved. "It was not unusual -- in fact, it was quite common that I would have numerous discussions with the governor well in advance of a scheduled execution," Gonzales told Feingold. "There would be a rolling series of discussions in connection with every execution."
This explanation of how executions were reviewed is essential to Gonzales' defense of his record because the documentary evidence is so damning. What it shows is that the only reports Bush reviewed were Gonzales' three-to-seven-page summaries, which not only were heavily biased against clemency but repeatedly failed to make any mention of the most powerful claims on a defendant's behalf, including plausible claims of innocence. Rather than writing a balanced summation of arguments for and against commutation, Gonzales' work product was frequently little more than a brief for execution.
Because the written summaries were so thoroughly unprofessional, Gonzales no doubt felt he had to downplay their significance in his Senate testimony. He did this by suggesting that the summaries were invariably preceded by a real meat-and-potatoes review -- in-depth, scrupulous and balanced discussions of the evidence. Yet senators never asked Gonzales to substantiate this claim, which is unfortunate because Gonzales would have been hard-pressed to do so.
In fact, in virtually all 57 cases for which Gonzales and his staff prepared written execution summaries (Bush signed off on 152 executions in all), there is no record of any additional work having been done for the governor.
Gonzales wants senators and the rest of us to believe that in the 57 cases he chaperoned to the executioner, the most important and substantive work was done in ad hoc conversations, with no scheduled meetings and with nothing beyond his brief and one-sided memoranda committed to paper.
But when did all these conversations about executions take place? Bush's appointment logs typically show one, and only one, 30-minute meeting per execution. And that meeting almost always took place on the day of the execution itself, leaving Gonzales little time to explore any issues or questions about an impending execution Bush might have raised. It was at those meetings that Gonzales presented his appallingly incomplete summaries of the cases.
Gonzales told Feingold that if he "expressed concerns or questions" about an execution, "the governor would direct me to go back and find out and to be absolutely sure." Yet in not one instance did Gonzales actually write a memo or report for the governor following up, elaborating on or clarifying these life-or-death questions that both he and the governor claimed to take so seriously. Indeed, Gonzales wants senators to believe that these purported discussions, of which there is no record, were so thorough that by the time execution day rolled around and he presented his truncated written summary to Bush, there was no need to include in that document the most salient facts about a case -- hence the persistent omissions.
