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Jewish World Review Feb. 10, 2005 / 1 Adar I, 5765 Gonzales' other position By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As a Mexican-American who is thrilled at the sight of other Latinos achieving great heights, I am busting with pride over the incredible odyssey of Alberto Gonzales.
Now that he has become the nation's first Latino attorney general, Gonzales has earned his place in the history books and, no doubt, in the hearts of millions of Latinos.
But, given everything I heard during his confirmation, I'm also concerned. That's because, for me, the most important job of any government lawyer is the protection of individuals' civil rights and civil liberties. Given that Gonzales — in his written responses to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee — asserted that the United States has the right to hold people indefinitely without charging them of a crime and transport them to countries that practice torture, it doesn't appear that the new attorney general agrees with me.
But nor do I agree with those on the left who have tried to portray Gonzales as a monster. One reader wrote me: "I cannot perceive of how the appointment of the first sadistic despotic Latino attorney general will serve the interests of the Mexican-American community."
Sadistic? Despotic? Rhetoric like that is over the top. Gonzales is no monster. He's just a public official who has made some mistakes in judgment. His critics could have said that and left it there. But they didn't. Instead, they tried to make it seem as if Gonzales was directly responsible for the military intelligence officers and National Guard flunkies who tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He wasn't.
The fact that Gonzales is Latino only made him more of a target for Democrats. They must realize by now that they can't sit around and do nothing while Bush creates a repository of good will with the nation's largest minority. They have to fight back.
The Gonzales appointment adds to the repository. Why else would Henry Cisneros, lifelong Democrat and former Cabinet official in the Clinton administration, have publicly urged senators to confirm Gonzales?
You could call it ethnic politics. That's not exactly new in America. Every time this country makes room at the table for someone with your background, you feel as if there's a place for you as well. It's why so many Jewish voters were eager to cast their ballots for a Democratic ticket that offered Joe Lieberman as a candidate for vice president in 2000.
And it's one more reason that Gonzales carries such a heavy burden — not just to the man who appointed him and the country that produced him, but to the Latino community that takes inspiration from him.
Here you have someone whose life story only keeps getting better: the son of farm workers, graduate of Rice University and Harvard Law School, partner in a top Houston law firm, former Texas secretary of state, and former justice on the Texas Supreme Court, former White House counsel and now attorney general. Anyone can make bad decisions or errors in judgment. But Gonzales must hold himself to a higher standard and steer clear of anything that could tarnish his reputation in the eyes of Latinos and of all Americans.
Yet he came close to doing that when, as White House counsel, he went along with giving government a blank check after 9/11 to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants for as long as it wants to do it while fighting the war on terror.
One result of that philosophy was that many Muslim-Americans were harassed, rounded up, secretly detained, abused in federal detention facilities and denied their right to due process. Some were even declared "enemy combatants" so that the government didn't have to afford the rights due them under either the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions.
Gonzales should never have signed off on that treatment. Yet in his written responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he did just that.
And, in his new job, he should make amends. He may be preparing to do that. On his first day at the Justice Department, he told his staff that they would combat terrorism "in a way that's consistent with our values."
Alberto Gonzales has always been a team player. Now, as the nation's top law enforcement officer, he needs to be more than that. He needs to be the conscience of the administration. As often as necessary, he needs to remind his colleagues — and, for that matter the rest of the country — that in order to keep America strong, we have to protect our freedoms, not erode them. If he does that, he will have provided a real public service.
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