Gonzales as the lubricant in the Texas death machine

Before he got into the torture-enabling business, Alberto Gonzales was in the business of enabling executions, in at least one case the execution of someone for a crime he hadn’t committed. (In that case, after the Texas Attorney General made a fuss, Gov. Bush had to reverse the decision he’d made on the basis of Gonzales’s memo.)

There’s a pattern here: Gonzales apparently doesn’t know the differience between advocacy situations, in which a lawyer’s ethical responsibility is to push a particular position as hard as he can within the bounds set by basic honesty and the procedural rules, and advisory situations, in which a lawyer’s ethical responsibility is to give his client an accurate picture of the considerations that ought to move his decision. In lawyering, as in investment banking, there are good careers to be made writing dishonest opinions that tell a client what he wants to hear, but those aren’t honest careers.