Furor Over Firings Rages Despite Gonzales Admitting Mistakes
So what's really driving this story is not what Gonzales may or may not have done in this particular instance but the sum total of what he represents to many Democrats and many law enforcement officials, including FBI agents and career prosecutors–to whom the administration's controversial "war on terror" legal policies are anathema.
Gonzales was a central architect of those policies when he was White House counsel. Gonzales was part of a tight-knit small group consisting of his deputies Timothy Flanigan and David Leitch; the Pentagon's legal counsel William Haynes; John Yoo, a Justice Department attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel; and David Addington, then special counsel to Vice President Cheney, who's now Cheney's chief of staff.
Gonzales, Addington, and Yoo were perhaps the most aggressive proponents of the expansive use of presidential powers. Gonzales played a central role in crafting the policies that resulted in the warrantless surveillance of terror suspects on U.S. soil, the creation of military commissions without congressional fiat, the approval and use of aggressive interrogation techniques against terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay and in Iraq, and the sidelining of the Geneva Conventions. It's those policies and the failure of the Republican-led Congress to provide any oversight of the Justice Department and the FBI, and ultimately the war in Iraq, that are fueling the intense emotions over the firings of the U.S. attorneys.
To many in Congress, including some in Bush's own party, Gonzales is the symbol of everything that has gone wrong since the 9/11 attacks. And for that reason, he's going to have a tough time emerging unscathed from the searing heat of this scandal.
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