Bush's Man From Humble

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Washington took the nomination in stride because Gonzales has in some ways been functioning as Attorney General for months. Though his title for the past four years has been White House counsel--the official term for every President's in-house lawyer--his role has been larger than that of any other counsel in memory. That's partly because the White House began to lose patience with Ashcroft not long after he was confirmed. The Attorney General had a political tin ear and a weakness for the spotlight. He drew fire for saying critics of the Patriot Act were giving comfort to the enemy. He operated with a tight cabal of longtime aides who prayed together and had an unrivaled distrust of the Justice bureaucracy. After 9/11, Ashcroft had a way of letting his bloodhounds run off the leash. Under Ashcroft, federal prosecutors won 194 convictions in cases involving terrorism. But those successes were often overshadowed by a handful of too hastily conceived cases against suspected terrorists that were tossed out.

Ashcroft's methods strengthened Gonzales' hand at the White House, where he performed as a kind of Administration superlawyer, overseeing a wide variety of legal policies across the government, as well as the vetting and selection of judicial nominations. But in his wider policymaking role, Gonzales made his own mistakes. After 9/11, his office became the crossroads of much of the Administration's legal thinking in the war on terrorism--thinking that has not always stood up under scrutiny.

For example, Gonzales put his name on the January 2002 draft of a legal memo intended for Bush that argued that al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan were not prisoners of war but enemy combatants who had no legal rights under the Geneva Convention, parts of which the memo derided as "quaint." Gonzales contended that "the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians ... renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on the questioning of enemy prisoners."

The Administration boldly argued that in war the President not only has the power to hold enemy combatants indefinitely but also that the courts have very little authority to review the cases of individual detainees. Theirs was a proposal for a dramatic expansion of Executive power. And when detainees fought their cases up to the Supreme Court, the White House continued to insist that the judiciary did not have much oversight in the matter. The White House lost.

Gonzales later requested a legal opinion from a Justice Department agency that ultimately argued that subjecting suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in captivity to extreme stress "may be justified." When abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison came to light last spring, some Administration critics cited that memo as the legal backbone for the harsher treatment of prisoners, which is now the subject of court-martial proceedings.