IN NOMINATING Alberto Gonzales to succeed John Ashcroft as attorney general, President Bush noted that “this is the fifth time I have asked Judge Gonzales to serve his fellow citizens.” The other four? In order: general counsel for Gov. Bush, Texas secretary of state, Texas Supreme Court justice, and, since 2001, White House counsel.
Those are small-office jobs while that of attorney general obviously isn’t. The AG presides over the Department of Justice, which, with its six litigating divisions, is the world’s largest law firm, and also over its satellite law enforcement agencies, chief among them the FBI. The department has 110,000 employees and a budget of $25 billion, and while it has multiple responsibilities, its top priority since 9/11–and rightly so–has been fighting terrorism here at home.
Given what the job of attorney general entails, it’s easy to see how Bush might have picked someone with attributes that Gonzales, his longtime aide, plainly lacks, starting with substantial management and criminal law enforcement experience. Someone, in fact, like Larry Thompson, the recently departed deputy attorney general. Gonzales will need a deputy as capable as Thompson to run the department day-to-day, not to mention a management team able to implement needed changes, especially those designed to better fight terrorism.
As Gonzales knows, under Ashcroft, Justice has deployed against terrorism in three major ways. It has sought to enhance the government’s intelligence capability so as to anticipate what might happen next, to prevent those about to pull the trigger from carrying out their deadly missions, and to disrupt the networks and institutions that sustain terrorists. Gonzales’s constant challenge will be to keep moving forward on each of those fronts, and especially the first, since prevention and disruption depends on good intelligence–on “connecting the dots.”
The infamous “wall” that for more than two decades prevented sharing of information between the intelligence and law enforcement communities is no more, having been brought down by the Patriot Act. Yet the FBI, having long investigated very different kinds of (already committed) crimes (bank robbery, for example), is still habituating itself to its greatly stepped-up role against terrorism. The Bureau could use more agents as it makes the transition and certainly new information technologies.
While Gonzales labors to complete the institutional makeover that Ashcroft began, he will have related work to do outside the department–specifically on Capitol Hill. The Patriot Act comes up for reauthorization next year, and the department will be severely hindered in fighting terrorism if the law is not extended.
Criticisms of the law tend to be overblown, but the challenge for Gonzales will be to hold firm in behalf of key provisions (such as the one that facilitates sharing of intelligence information) but in a voice more persuasive than Ashcroft’s.
Here the key for Gonzales is to see that it is not enough to answer concerns about civil liberties, as Ashcroft too often did, by saying that the department’s efforts fully comply with existing law or by suggesting that national security simply demands those efforts. The urgency is to frame a discussion about the tensions between liberty and security that are necessarily in play in fighting terrorists who are stateless, agile, inventive, and absolutely willing to die, and about the kind of hard choices that the nation is confronted with.
Gonzales will have much else to do as attorney general, with judicial selection a high priority. He’ll hold a job that in certain key respects he’s unprepared for when performance in that position has seldom been so important. One must hope that Bush’s confidence in Judge, soon to be General, Gonzales, is justified.
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard. This column originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News.
