Hot on the heels of Karl Rove (Bushs Brain) quitting and ‘Scooter’ Libby being handed a jail sentence there is breaking news that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is also deserting the sinking ship. Long gone also are Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. It looks like the whole rotten neo-con pack of cards is finally starting to collapse around Bushs ears and for that the American people can only be thankful.
Gonzalez (who notoriously seemed to justify the use of torture by American troops) has resigned ending a months long standoff with critics who questioned his honesty and competence at the helm of the Justice Department. Republicans and Democrats alike have demanded his resignation over the botched handling of FBI terror investigations and the firings of U.S. attorneys, but President Bush had defiantly stood by his Texas friend until accepting his resignation Friday. It is understood that Solicitor General Paul Clement will be acting attorney general until a replacement is found..
Gonzales served more than two years as the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general but other lawmakers voiced doubts about his truthfulness in combative and often evasive testimony to Congress. Although Democrats most fiercely questioned Gonzales’ stewardship of the nation’s law enforcement establishment, several Republicans in Congress criticized him too.
For his part, Bush steadfastly, and often with his characteristic belligerence when questioned, refused to give in to critics, even from his own GOP, who argued that Gonzales should go. Earlier this month at a news conference, the president grew irritated when asked about accountability in his administration and turned the tables on the Democratic Congress. “Implicit in your questions is that Al Gonzales did something wrong. I haven’t seen Congress say he’s done anything wrong,” Bush said testily.
Reacting to Monday’s developments, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said that Gonzales’ department had “suffered a severe crisis of leadership that allowed our justice system to be corrupted by political influence.” He said that Gonzales’s resignation “reinforces what Congress and the American people already know—that no Justice Department should be allowed to become a political arm of the White House.”
A frequent Democratic target, Gonzales could not satisfy critics who said he had lost credibility over the Justice Department’s handling of warrantless wiretaps related to the threat of terrorism and the firings of several U.S. attorneys. As attorney general and earlier as White House counsel, Gonzales pushed for expanded presidential powers, including the eavesdropping authority. He drafted controversial rules for military war tribunals and sought to limit the legal rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, prompting lawsuits by civil libertarians who said the government was violating the Constitution in its pursuit of alleged ‘terrorists’.
There were indications that the development came suddenly. Bush normally handles Cabinet resignations with efficiency, only allowing news of them to leak when a successor has been chosen and appearing with both the person departing and the replacement when the public announcement was made. That was not to be the case this time, the official said.
Lawmakers said the dismissals of the federal prosecutors appeared to be politically motivated, and some of the fired U.S. attorneys said they felt pressured to investigate Democrats before elections. In other words they were being asked to act as hatchet-men for Bush which, if true, is the most heinous subversion of the American justice system and would warrant the impeachment of any President who had any knowledge of such activities. Gonzales has maintained that the dismissals were based the prosecutors’ lackluster performance records but his denials have not been widely believed.
Thousands of documents released by the Justice Department show a White House plot, hatched shortly after the 2004 elections, to replace U.S. attorneys. At one point, senior White House officials, including Rove, suggested replacing all 93 prosecutors. In December 2006, eight were ordered to resign. In several House and Senate hearings into the firings, Gonzales and other Justice Department officials failed to fully explain the ousters without contradicting each other. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, and can be removed. But congressional Democrats said politics played an unusually critical role in the ouster of several prosecutors.
In 2004, Gonzales pressed to reauthorize a secret domestic spying program over the Justice Department’s protests. Gonzales was White House counsel at the time and during a dramatic hospital confrontation he and then-White House chief of staff Andrew Card sought approval from then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in intensive care. Ashcroft refused.
The White House subsequently reauthorized the program without the department’s approval. Later, Bush ordered changes to the program to help the department defend its legality. The domestic surveillance program was later declared unconstitutional by a federal judge and since has been changed to require court approval before surveillance can be conducted.
Similarly, Gonzales found himself on the defensive in early March for FBI’s improper and, in some cases, illegal prying into Americans’ personal information during terror and spy probes. On March 9, the Justice Department’s inspector general released an audit showing that FBI agents, over a three-year period, demanded telephone and Internet companies to hand over their customers’ personal information without official authorization.
The damning audit also found that the FBI had improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances, and concluded that it underreported to Congress how often it used national security letters to ask businesses to turn over customer data. The letters are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge’s approval.
We’re into the endgame now, folks. Gonzalez is gone. America is a better place today for that. But it is just another small step towards the bigger clean-out thats essential to restore any pride to the nation. Gonzalez was just the puppet of a corrupt and desperately un-American regime. The big task remains .
-Tags:activism Bush civil liberties corruption felony freedom George W Bush government Iraq judicial system justice karl rove Political News president white house whitehouseactivism, Bush, civil liberties, corruption, felony, freedom, George W Bush, government, Iraq, judicial system, justice, karl rove, Political News, president, white house, whitehouse
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
It is reported that Fox News, the house-channel of the Republican party, was caught with its pants down sabotaging Wikipedia entries. The Wikipedia is a hugely successful and valuable wordwide resource that relies on the honesty and integrity of its contributers, who can submit and amend entries to the internet encycopaedia . Fox News has allegedly been abusing this to change the Wikipedia entries of their critics and competition (like Al Franken) . A scanning device introduced by Wikipedia was able to trace the changes back to a Fox News IP address.