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Published on Tuesday, July 5, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
by Thom Hartmann
The Bush administration is spectacularly good at sleight-of-hand tricks, directing public attention in one direction while they're working diligently in another. The latest trial balloon of "probable" Supreme Court nominees is no exception.
While everybody is worried about abortion rights and corporate power, a far more insidious agenda may be at play.
Anti-abortion forces and women's rights groups alike are up in arms about the possibility that the next nominee may or may not have an opinion about the Court's interpretation of the Fourth Amendment (and others) in Roe v. Wade. This battle is being loudly played out in the mainstream corporate media, with every analysis and question ultimately turning back to Roe.
Because Alberto Gonzales isn't on the record with regard to abortion rights, both sides are wary of him.
At the same time, corporatist "conservatives" are salivating at the opportunity to pack the Court with judges who will further erode the rights of communities and increase the power of multinational corporations and the super-rich in America. On June 28, 2005 The Wall Street Journal ran a major story ("For a High Court Nomination, Business Has Its Own Agenda") on how corporate Republicans may be at odds with "social" Republicans, because the latter generally endorse states' rights. Corporatists prefer a strong federal government where all politicians can be bought centrally in Washington, DC, and federal rules and agencies can be used to back down states that may want clean air or water.
Because Alberto Gonzales has a very limited record in ruling or writing on corporate rights and powers, the corporatists are not as enthusiastic about him as they are about others.
What nobody seems to be noticing, though, is what may well be the real agenda of George W. Bush and those around him - neo-fascism.
For this agenda, Alberto Gonzales is the perfect man.
Although he testified that "I don't recall today whether I was in agreement with the analysis" on the meeting that led to the infamous 2002 torture memo that said "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions - [are necessary] in order to constitute torture," he actually chaired the committee that drafted it. As The Washington Post noted on January 5, 2003 ("Gonzales Helped Set Course On Detainees"), "White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales chaired the meetings on this issue, which included detailed descriptions of interrogation techniques such as 'waterboarding,' a tactic intended to make detainees feel as if they are drowning."
Gonzales looked over death penalty cases in Texas as Governor Bush's counsel, and, according to an article in The Atlantic Monthly and others, contributed to an environment in which children, mentally retarded persons, and almost certainly innocent men were executed by Bush's order. In 2001, he helped draft Executive Order 13233, which began the shutdown of the transparency and accountability that have been hallmarks of American government since its inception. In 2002 he argued that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and that their language was sufficiently vague that the Bush administration could essentially ignore them.
He also wrote a Presidential Order saying that terror suspects could be tried by secret military tribunals and sentenced to death, and enthusiastically pushed for passage of the USA PATRIOT Act just as Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle and Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy - the two men in the Senate who could have shot down the PATRIOT Act - were receiving anthrax in the mail. Today, as Attorney General, the investigation of that terrorist incident is entirely in his hands.
There is no official count at the moment as to how many people have died at the hands of our interrogators since Gonzales authored his infamous memo, or how many people have been turned over to torturers in other nations by a process euphemistically called "extraordinary rendition." (Estimates run from a low of around 60 up into the thousands.) This is because Gonzales and others in the administration have led a process where, The New York Times notes, "government secrecy has reached a historic high by several measures, with federal departments classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute..."
For that matter, we don't even know how many American citizens are, like Jose Padilla, currently "disappeared," being held incommunicado within or outside the United States, in clear violation of the Constitution but at the behest of the Bush administration. Such information is "classified."
Although the Supreme Court under Earl Warren declined to rule on the legality of LBJ's Vietnam War, a variety of anti-liberty dimensions of Bush's so-called "war on terror" are almost certain to end up before the Court. An administration that can use the final imprimatur of the Supreme Court to "disappear" dissidents, corral Democratic Party campaigners into "free
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