(Heather Williams is Associate Professor of Politics at Pomona College.)
Alberto Gonzales is a Criminal, Not a Speaker
Bringing the former Attorney General to campus would not contribute to any discussion
November 16, 2007
by Heather Williams
.........
My question to Pomona College students is this: With a host of people out there with conservative viewpoints who are articulate, smart, and willing to speak in a detailed way about their ideas or their records as public officials,
why invite a man who repeatedly broke the law, shredded the ethical codes of the institutions he served, and then lied about it? Is this really going to balance your political horizons?
For those who missed the televised hearings this spring, an amnesiac (some say perjuring) Attorney General Gonzales answered over 50 times to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he could not remember any of the details of a secret mass dismissal of top level prosecutors on partisan grounds.
A year before, Gonzales was the star of an earlier set of Judiciary Committee hearings in which he dissembled under questioning about having urged an ailing then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign off on blanket domestic spying powers for the National Security Agency while in a hospital bed. Again, Gonzales’ memory was faulty, and he said he remembered no such conversation, even though FBI director Robert Mueller—with no incentive to falsely contradict his former boss under oath—stated that such a meeting did take place in 2004.
But for those who are still hungry for Gonzales’s alternative point of view about perjury, ethics, and the Fourth Amendment, I really wonder whether we can talk about broadening the range of democratic debate about torture.....
more at:
http://www.tsl.pomona.edu/?page=opinions&article=2786&issue=104