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.
Berlow wrote that although Gonzales intended the memos to remain confidential, he got them under the Texas Public Information Act. The governor's office fought disclosure, appealing Berlow's request to then-Attorney General John Cornyn for review -- an appeal Gov. Bush lost on June 23, 2000. In a letter to Assistant General Counsel Jack Hines, the AG's opinion read in part: "We have reviewed the submitted memorandum and find that it consists entirely of factual information," Assistant AG E. Joanna Fitzgerald wrote. "The memorandum contains no opinion or advice from the General Counsel, nor does it contain client confidences. Accordingly, the office may not withhold the memorandum."
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Berlow's article can be found online at www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/07/berlow.htm, and copies of three of the clemency memos in question can be found at www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/07/berlow-documents.htm...
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http://tiger.berkeley.edu/sohrab/politics/pres_papers.htmlBush 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.
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"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."
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1111-10.htmGonzales 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.
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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.
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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.
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0202-01.htm Published on Wednesday, February 2, 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Gonzales OK Could Be Seen as OK for Torture Rules
by Robert Collier
After a year of near-constant revelations and allegations, the controversy over the use of torture in the war on terror is reaching its crucial moment in the Senate debate over whether to confirm Alberto Gonzales as attorney general. If Gonzales is confirmed, which appears likely, the Bush administration is likely to claim that Congress has given a firm mandate for its interrogation policies, just as President Bush said his re-election victory in November was a new mandate for his policies on Iraq.
"People who wanted a public discussion of this issue of interrogation methods have had it, for almost a year now," said John Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor who played a key role in helping craft the administration's policies on torture when he was a Justice Department official from 2001 to 2003.
"There has been debate, press leaks, hearings. Sen. (John) Kerry could have attacked President Bush on torture during the election campaign, but in fact, he tried to outflank the president on the right on terrorism. Congress could have expanded the statute on terrorism to tighten interrogation rules, but it hasn't. The election and the confirmation of Gonzales are a sign of general support of the administration's anti-terrorism policies, which include interrogation and the Patriot Act."
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