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Just say no
Why Senate Democrats must stop Alberto Gonzales. Plus, Dan Conley needs to look in the mirror, and the Big Dig is now officially a Republican boondoggle.

THE WHOLESALE reshuffling of George W. Bush’s cabinet obscures what may be the single worst appointment the president has ever made: naming his White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general. Even the change at State is not nearly as momentous. After all, replacing the well-meaning if ineffective Colin Powell with the incompetent Condoleezza Rice is likely to affect foreign policy only at the edges, given that Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will remain the real powers on international affairs. The damage Cheney and Rumsfeld have already done will undoubtedly continue into Bush’s second term. The Gonzales appointment, though, is another matter altogether.

One might suppose the president could not have done worse than Ashcroft, a hard-right ideologue best known for his silly war against pornography and for his unabashed cheerleading on behalf of the civil-liberties-trampling Patriot Act. Gonzales is worse. It was Gonzales who wrote a secret January 2002 memo that led to the Bush administration’s declaring that members of Al Qaeda who were captured would not enjoy the protections of the Geneva Conventions, which govern how nations must treat prisoners of war. Calling the conventions "quaint" in the wake of 9/11, Gonzales wrote that rejecting them would reduce the chances that high-level Bush-administration officials would be prosecuted for war crimes. The memo paved the way for the use of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and for the use of so-called military tribunals to try terrorism suspects — a blatantly extra-constitutional procedure put on hold last week by a courageous federal judge, James Robertson.

Gonzales served as Bush’s legal counsel when Bush was governor of Texas. In that capacity, Gonzales advised Bush on inmates scheduled for execution, laying out the case for whether or not they should be considered for clemency. According to a 2003 report in the Atlantic Monthly, Gonzales was stunningly derelict and insensitive in performing this task. For example, in the case of Terry Washington, a 33-year-old convicted murderer who was executed in 1997, Gonzales did not tell Bush that Washington was mentally retarded, or that as a child he had been subjected to horrific physical abuse, "regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts." Granted, Bush never gave much indication that he cared. But Gonzales was playing God and executioner by withholding such crucial information.

Perversely, the Gonzales appointment is seen in some circles as something of a sop to moderates. If confirmed, he would be the first Latino attorney general, and he has a reputation for being less than hard-line on affirmative action and reproductive choice. No one should be fooled. It’s been widely reported that Bush intends to let Gonzales prove his right-wing credentials as attorney general, and use that as a steppingstone to the Supreme Court. Thus in Gonzales we can expect an attorney general every bit as ideologically extreme as Ashcroft, compounded by the fact that Gonzales, unlike Ashcroft, enjoys a close relationship with Bush.

The outnumbered Senate Democrats cannot be expected to use the filibuster in order to shoot down all of Bush’s nominations. But Gonzales should be targeted for defeat. If not Gonzales, who? If not now, when?

AFTER LAST week’s unexpected acquittal in the murder of three-year-old Malik Andrade Percival, Suffolk County district attorney Dan Conley knew precisely whom to blame: the jury. Citing what he called the "CSI effect," Conley told the Boston Herald, "After watching these programs — and they’re on just about every night — they come to expect to see fingerprints or DNA or fibers that will prove beyond all possible doubt that a person is guilty." He added, "Defense attorneys are able to exploit that lack of evidence when in fact none of that evidence should necessarily be expected."

Conley’s finger-pointing is misdirected. The prosecution’s case against 35-year-old James Bush was mangled from the start. Consider, for instance, that a key witness ran away before the trial began. Superior Court judge Christine McEvoy postponed the start of the trial for four days while police attempted to track down the witness. They failed, and thus prosecutors were forced to proceed without crucial testimony against Bush.

Or consider that Sergeant Detective Daniel Keeler admitted during his testimony that he had lied in police reports about the case. Keeler, it turns out, had made false statements in an affidavit for a search warrant, had wrongly claimed that he videotaped the crime scene, and had stated that his partner, Detective Dennis Harris, responded to the shooting with him when in fact Harris, according to his own testimony, had not worked that night. Nor is Keeler’s lying the only example of police giving false testimony in an important criminal case.

Or consider that the eyewitness-identification techniques that landed Bush in jail for two years while he awaited trial have since been abandoned by the Boston Police Department as unreliable.

There is ample reason for any jury to be skeptical of Conley’s office. Over the past five years, the district attorney has admitted to five wrongful homicide convictions; six other homicide convictions have been overturned on appeal. These miscarriages of justice reflect badly not only on Conley, but also on his predecessor, Ralph Martin, who was equally shoddy in exercising his prosecutorial due diligence.

Yes, it is true that justice has not been done in the sad case of Malik Andrade Pervical, but it is by no means clear that convicting Bush would have changed that. Rather than blaming the jurors, Conley needs to look at how police, his prosecutors, and, ultimately, he himself performed.

REVELATIONS THAT the Big Dig is leaking — and that officials knew about it as far back as 2001 — show what a disgrace the management of this gigantic undertaking has been. For nearly 14 years the project has been overseen by four Republican governors, folks who love to talk about fiscal conservatism and their embrace of private-sector-style management controls. What we’ve got for all that rhetoric is a $14.25 billion tunnel that leaks and that may, for all the denials and reassurances to the contrary, represent a significant threat to public safety.

The problem isn’t government. The clean-up of Boston Harbor — also an expensive, technologically difficult project — was accomplished on time and without any of the mind-blowing cost overruns that have defined the Big Dig. For that matter, the Sumner and Callahan Tunnels have carried traffic to and from East Boston for some 70 and 40 years, respectively, without springing any life-threatening leaks.

Of the governors who have overseen (or not overseen) the Big Dig, Jane Swift perhaps deserves the greatest share of the blame. Last week Peter Pendergast, former general counsel to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, wrote an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe in which he charged that her illegal firings of Turnpike commissioners Christy Mihos and Jordan Levy allowed her hand-picked chairman, Matt Amorello, to dismantle a management restructuring then under way that could have prevented the leaks and other construction flaws.

Still, each governor — not just Swift, but also Bill Weld, Paul Cellucci, and now Mitt Romney — deserves to share in the blame. Romney has called on Amorello to resign. That’s a good start, although Amorello’s refusal to step down suggests that another long, complicated political duel, Massachusetts-style, is about to commence.

But from the day he became governor, Romney has used the word "reform" as a slogan and a symbol rather than as a substantive approach to government. If Romney were willing to roll up his sleeves and dive into the Big Dig mess, using his much-vaunted (just ask him) management expertise to set things right, then he would deserve our praise and applause.

Unfortunately, there is as yet no evidence that the governor intends to treat the Big Dig as anything other than another symbol of dysfunctional Massachusetts politics that he can run against as he prepares to hit the 2008 presidential-campaign trail.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com


Issue Date: November 19 - 25, 2004
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