Watching the war on terror.(RoundUps)

Gonzales: What Racial Bias?

The media buzz over Alberto Gonzales' confirmation as Attorney General mostly focused on the lovely pairing of his racial identity and political orientation. Criticism focused on his Abu Ghraib torture memos and other dismissals of international law. But what impact has Gonzales' legal work had on people of color in the United States?

From 1995 to 1997, Gonzales was legal counsel to then Governor George W. Bush during the first few years of Bush's death penalty spree--he approved 57 executions. More than half of those ended the lives of people of color: 21 blacks, four Latinos, two Asian Americans and one Native American, according to data from the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. Of course, it comes as no surprise that more than 80 percent of those executed had white victims, and a significant number of the people of color executed had at some point been accused of sexual violence.

In each case, Gonzales was responsible for preparing a memo to help Bush decide whether or not to approve the execution. Alan Berlow, a freelance journalist who obtained the memos, has written that Gonzales "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence." Such ineffective counsel included one black defendant's lawyer who literally slept through much of the trial's jury selection.

At the time of his confirmation hearings, Gonzales said he was not very familiar with racial bias in death penalty matters.

More Cash for the Prison Industry

The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, passed last December, excluded a provision to severely restrict the access immigrants might have to drivers' licenses but kept another provision to double the number of agents on border patrol. What fewer media outlets picked up on was the legislation's call to expand detention facilities by at least 8,000 beds annually between 2006 and 2010. Should the cash be approved, the number of detention beds would double from just over 20,000 to around 40,000, according to Elizabeth Llorente, a reporter with the Bergen Record. But this didn't start with the war on terror.