[NYTr] Gonzo's Gone: Now, Get Cheney

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Aug 27, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff08272007.html


Gonzo's Gone; Now, Get Cheney

By DAVE LINDORFF

Let's be clear. Alberto Gonzales is resigning as attorney general not
because he's become an embarrassment to the Bush administration-which
has repeatedly shown itself to be beyond embarrassment-but because he
is no longer useful. Exposed as a serial liar and an administration
hack, he can no longer be relied upon by the Bush administration to
carry forward its criminal agenda of subverting the Constitution, the
electoral process and the Bill of Rights, because his every step is
being watched by the public and the Congress.

But this is no victory unless the Congress follows up by pursuing those
who put Gonzales up to his crimes.

The whole reason felons and hacks like Gonzales resign from office is
to bury their misdeeds by leaving town.

If Congress then obliges by moving on to other things, the resignation
will have succeeded.

Next, it looks like we will have Michael Chertoff as AG. Now on one
level that might seem to be an improvement. Gonzales was a both a house
servant to Bush through his years as governor and president, doing
whatever was necessary to tidy up after Bush's messes, like hiding
evidence of his drunk driving record and his dereliction of duty during
the Vietnam War, and a kind of mob attorney, developing legal loopholes
to protect the president from prosecution (or impeachment) for various
crimes as president, like violating the Geneva Conventions or
unleashing the nation's spy apparatus against Americans. Chertoff, who
is not a part of the Texas Mafia, may not be so ready to cross the line
into rank sycophancy and to play the role of co-conspirator,
particularly given that it's only for another 16 months.

Then again, Chertoff, in his short stint at what is still referred to
as the "Justice" Department, headed up the anti-terrorism unit under
Gonzales' predecessor, John Ashcroft, and willingly played along with
the sham prosecution of John Walker Lindh, the kid who was captured in
Afghanistan and inflated by Ashcroft and Chertoff into "the American
Taliban." It was Chertoff who successfully deep-sixed evidence of
Lindh's weeks of torture at the hands of American forces, by
threatening Lindh with a treason prosecution, while holding out the
offer of a deal-"just" 15 years in the can if he agreed to sign a
fraudulent statement saying he had "never been mistreated" in US
captivity, and to accept a gag order barring him from talking about
what had happened to him for the entire length of his sentence-an
unprecedented gag order.

That prosecution and silencing of Lindh, which prevented the public
from exploring the deliberate campaign of torture that had been
developed in Afghanistan, later to "migrate" to Guantanamo and thence
to Abu Ghraib and Iraq, was in its way as damaging to the nation as was
Chertoff's other signal disaster-his inept and callous mishandling of
the catastrophe of the Katrina flooding of New Orleans.

If Chertoff-a demonstrable failure both as an administrator and as a
defender of justice-is the best this administration can come up with as
a replacement for Gonzales, we should be worried about the future of
the nation's "justice" system. (Okay, I concede that the Justice
Department has as much to do with justice as the Defense Department has
to do with defense or the Education Department has to do with
education.)

The one good thing that can be said about the Gonzales resignation is
that it eliminates the Democratic leadership's latest gambit for
attempting to derail the impeachment movement. As support for the
impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney has grown, both among the
public at large and in Congress, where there are now at least 20
co-sponsors for Rep. Dennis Kucinich's Cheney impeachment bill, the
Democratic leadership in the House scrambled to get behind a purely
inside-the-beltway "campaign" to impeach Gonzales-a move that did
succeed in dividing the real, authentic impeachment movement.

The interesting thing is that in backing the impeachment of Gonzales,
those leaders and senior House Democrats who have been brushing off the
broader impeachment movement gave the lie to two of their main
arguments against impeachment-that it would be "too divisive" and that
there "isn't time" for impeachment. Clearly if it wasn't too late to
impeach Gonzales, and if impeaching Gonzales would not be too divisive,
neither is it too late to impeach Cheney and neither would impeaching
Cheney be "too divisive."

So let's hail the departure of Gonzo, let's demand a thorough vetting
of the demonstrably incompetent and unprincipled Chertoff, and most
importantly, let's move forward with the campaign to impeach Cheney,
starting with a full-court campaign to get all those who so readily
signed on to Washington Rep. Jay Inslee's Gonzales impeachment bill to
now sign on to Rep. Kucinich's H.Res. 333, a resolution to impeach the
vice president.

[Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by
Barbara Olshansky. He can be reached at: dlindorff at yahoo.com ]