Gonzales: The Texan Who Can't Shoot Straight
Still, some of Gonzales's supporters outside the government said he had made the right decisions. "This is a politically driven, make-believe scandal created by a very partisan Congress that is bent on jumping on a weakened president," said a former White House associate counsel, Noel Francisco, who's now in private practice. "This is simply the funnel that Democrats are pouring their policy disputes in, and they are inventing a scandal because they can't win on the actual issues." Asked what Gonzales's chances of survival are, Francisco said, "He's a man who takes things in stride. He'll weather it."
Gonzales and the 'War on Terror'
But even if Gonzales manages to put out this blaze, there undoubtedly will be more. For Democrats, there is no soothing the savaged beast, at least not for a while. So it's likely that Gonzales's tenure will be hobbled by more and more investigations. But in the long run, his legacy will not be defined by the U.S. attorney firings but will come full circle to his role was in crafting and executing the "war on terror" strategies.
And what was that role? By all accounts, it was a central one. When Gonzales was White House counsel, he was part of a small group of lawyers including his deputies, David Leitch and Timothy Flanigan; the Pentagon's general counsel, William Haynes; a Justice Department attorney named John Yoo; and Cheney's then special counsel, now chief of staff, David Addington, who is viewed as a central architect of those antiterrorism strategies. There is a split view as to how Gonzales fit into the group: Some say Gonzales was engaged in a "race" with the others to see "who was tougher than the rest, and how expansive they could be with respect to presidential power," according to a former Justice official. But others say Addington and Flanigan were able to exert greater influence because Gonzales lacked any national security background.
The picture that develops is this: After the 9/11 attacks, Gonzales wasn't the one drunk on the potent mix of fear and power that can goad people into making reckless decisions. Rather he was the enabler, who turned a blind eye and allowed those around him to push through their plans. For instance, it's been widely reported that then National Security Council legal adviser John Bellinger came to Gonzales early in the game and said the White House should authorize a thorough review of those who were held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because he believed not all were bad guys. Gonzales is said to have listened and shown concern without saying anything; Flanigan and Addington did all the talking. Their view was that all the Gitmo detainees were terrorists and that no review was needed. And that's how it happened.
Gonzales was also intimately involved in drafting the executive order authorizing the creation of military commissions to deal with terrorism detainees outside the federal court system. He allowed Addington and Flanigan to leapfrog past the process that had been set up that Bellinger and other officials had been tasked with; instead, the military commission order was drafted and pushed through without a broad review or consensus. And Gonzales also allowed the drafting of the "torture" memos that authorized the CIA and Pentagon to use unorthodox and highly aggressive interrogation techniques that civil rights groups and many in Congress say amounted to torture. And perhaps most important, Gonzales and Addington were the only two officials in the White House who provided legal counsel on the NSA warrantless surveillance program, which allowed the NSA to bypass the federal courts and conduct warrantless surveillance of so-called terrorism suspects on U.S. soil. The legality of that program has yet to be determined.
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