Alberto Gonzalez, The Sequel

NY Times Editorial, January 28, 2009

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should have considered himself a lucky man when he was allowed to resign in disgrace in August 2007 without being hauled into Congress on perjury or contempt charges.

He was in the thick of President George W. Bush’s most damaging attacks on the rule of law. As White House counsel, he helped to justify torture and illegal wiretapping. As attorney general, he politicized the Justice Department. And he misled Congress in both jobs.

He could have told the truth about those things. Or, he could have gone quietly away and waited for a subpoena from the Obama administration.

Instead, he is trying for some sort of bizarre comeback by painting himself as an upstanding man victimized by a “mean-spirited town.”

In an interview with National Public Radio this week, Mr. Gonzales attacked President Obama’s choice for attorney general, Eric Holder, for saying that waterboarding is torture. To hear Mr. Gonzales tell it, Mr. Holder was in the wrong — not the lawyers like Mr. Gonzales who tortured the law to justify torture, or the former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who approved its use, or the interrogators who actually subjected detainees to waterboarding and other inhumane and illegal interrogation techniques.

Making a “blanket pronouncement like that,” Mr. Gonzales warned, might affect “the morale and dedication” of intelligence officials. He said agents at the Central Intelligence Agency “no longer have any interest in doing anything controversial.”

We’re certainly glad to hear that.

No one in the Bush administration — certainly not Mr. Gonzales — has offered evidence that torturing prisoners produced reliable information. It did undermine the law, further endanger American soldiers who might be captured in the field and destroy the nation’s image.

Mr. Gonzales did not stop there. He said it was his subordinates’ fault that nine United States attorneys were fired for obviously political reasons. “I deeply regret some of the decisions made by my staff,” he said.

Mr. Gonzales had no regrets about the infamous visit he paid to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2004 while he was White House counsel. Mr. Ashcroft was barely conscious after serious surgery, but Mr. Gonzales and Andrew Card, then the White House chief of staff, tried to get him to sign off on a program to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant.

James Comey, then the deputy attorney general, rushed to the hospital and managed to thwart the plan. As for reports that the illegal eavesdropping program had prompted threats of a mass resignation by top Justice officials, Mr. Gonzales dismissed that with an airy “lawyers often disagree about important legal issues.”

Mr. Gonzales said he was not worried about being prosecuted for his actions because he was “acting in good faith” and — yes — following orders.

That smug self-assurance should be another powerful reminder to the White House of the need for an unsparing review of all of Mr. Bush’s policies on torture, wiretapping and executive power. Only by learning the details of those disastrous decisions can the nation hope to undo the damage and make sure these mistakes are not repeated.