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On December 7, 2006, eight federal prosecutors were notified by their superiors at the US Department of Justice that they were being dismissed. The reason cited was problematic job performance. The principal problem, however, seems to have been that the presidentially appointed US Attorneys had taken action against Republican officeholders loyal to George W. Bush, or had failed to share the Bush Administration's eagerness to indict certain targeted Democrats.

When the press and members of Congress began asking questions about the DOJ's apparent political purge, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales responded with a public relations blitz, meeting with Republican power brokers and soliciting testimonials. Pinning responsibility for the firings on underlings, he adopted a tried-and-true method of changing the subject, trumpeting DOJ efforts to stamp out child pornography and sexual solicitation on the internet.

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n March 2007, as Congressional voices on both sides of the aisle began calling for Gonzales's resignation, the Attorney General told reporters he had participated in "no discussions" regarding the US Attorneys' dismissals. As the heat intensified, Gonzales embarked on a cross-country tour promoting his most crowd-pleasing creation, Project Safe Childhood. Along the way, he took the opportunity to state, "I'm not going to resign. I'm going to stay focused on protecting our kids."

Formally launched in May 2006, Project Safe Childhood (PSC) is a DOJ initiative involving partnerships with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and various child-protectionist non-profits. Conceived as a propaganda organ and funding magnet, the project is supposed to coordinate efforts of law enforcement agencies, the DOJ-funded Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) program, the DOJ's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, and the FBI's anti-child-porn apparatus, Operation Innocent Images.

The PSC website (Projectsafechildhood.gov) describes the project as an effort "to combat the proliferation of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation crimes against children." The PSC advocates "coordinated, comprehensive, and robust" responses to the "growing problems" of child pornography and "sexual predators soliciting children for physical sexual contact."

In the first three months of 2007 alone, PSC issued more than 115 press releases bearing such headlines as "Tulsa Area Businessman Guilty of Child Pornography Charges" and "Smith County Man Guilty of Soliciting Minor." The press releases fail to note which arrests resulted from child-porn stings or from internet dates made by sheriffs' deputies haunting chatrooms in teen disguise.

Gonzales's PSC promotional tour lost some of its luster when the Children's Online Protection Act (COPA) suffered its latest defeat in federal district court. The case has been bouncing back and forth between the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court since 1999, with a preliminary injunction against COPA in place for the past eight years. On March 22, Judge Lowell Reed ruled that COPA, which would criminalize the commercial distribution of material "harmful to minors" via the World Wide Web, is overly broad, unconstitutionally vague, and inimical to First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression.

A Clinton legacy, COPA has nevertheless been championed by the post-Clinton Department of Justice under John Ashcroft and now Gonzales. In 2006, when the case was headed for a showdown between the DOJ and the ACLU, the former insisted on an elaborate public trial. The tactic backfired, giving ACLU lawyers an opportunity to demonstrate the insidiousness of COPA and the relative effectiveness-- and constitutionality-- of voluntary internet filters as a means of avoiding cybersmut. The DOJ is expected to appeal Reed's ruling as a matter of course. Gonzales, meanwhile, is exploring ways of achieving some of COPA's goals via other means, such as mandatory Web ratings.

Family man

An idealizer of hearth and home, Gonzales was born in 1955 to Mexican-American parents in San Antonio, Texas. He attended Rice University and Harvard Law School. Although he has divorced and remarried, he identifies himself as Roman Catholic. He has three children by his second wife. Gonzales is the kind of family-values proponent who facilitates execution, enables torture, short-circuits due process, holds prisoners for years without trial, and gives obscenity prosecutions priority over efforts to stop political corruption and organized crime.

He is a longtime member of George W. Bush's inner circle. In 1994, when the current US president was governor of Texas, Gonzales became Bush's general counsel, helping to rationalize a record-breaking volume of executions. Bush elevated him to Secretary of State three years later, then appointed him to the Texas Supreme Court in 1999. When the quasi-elected new President Bush arrived in Washington, DC, in January 2001, Gonzales was part of his entourage.

As White House counsel, Gonzales wrote the Bush Administration's executive order abridging the Freedom of Information Act. More notoriously, he authored the administration's memo on why the "quaint" Geneva Convention guidelines prohibiting coercive treatment of prisoners don't apply to anyone the US decides to brand a terrorist. Gonzales also formulated legal justifications for trying detainees before military tribunals, and for "renditions" of foreign prisoners to CIA-affiliated, torture-friendly prisons in locations around the world.

No legal operative within the executive branch of the US government has done as much to undermine the safeguards against arbitrary imprisonment inherent in the constitutionally guaranteed right to a writ of habeas corpus. Addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18, 2007, Gonzales denied there is any "express grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution." In fact, as shocked committee chairman Arlen Specter reminded the Attorney General, Article One of the US Constitution states that habeas corpus is a basic right to be suspended only in cases of rebellion or invasion. But since Gonzales has for years been helping the Bush regime bypass habeas corpus, his belief that no such right exists should have come as no surprise.

When Gonzales became US Attorney General on February 3, 2005, he was perceived by some as superior to Bush's much-despised first-term Attorney General, John Ashcroft, an Assemblies of God adherent dedicated to upending Roe v. Wade. But Alberto Gonzales appears to have an even weaker commitment to defending basic civil liberties than his predecessor.

When he was thought to be next in line for a seat on the US Supreme Court, right-wing opposition coalesced around the probably mistaken belief, based on Gonzales's record as a Texas Supreme Court justice, that he was pro-choice. A more compelling conservative argument against the Attorney General's ascension to the high court might have been his lack of respect for-- and apparently limited grasp of-- the US Constitution. The FBI's abuse of the USA PATRIOT Act, using its provisions to spy on Americans not accused of terrorist activity, is one of many incursions into the Bill of Rights that have occurred on Gonzales's watch as chief law enforcement officer of the United States.

SM porn targeted

Gonzales's tenure as Attorney General has cast a colder chill on the production and distribution of sexually explicit material than Ashcroft's bleak reign, when 38 federal obscenity convictions were obtained in a four-year period. Soon after Gonzales became Attorney General, US Attorneys were told to give porn prosecutions the highest priority. One of the sins of Paul Charlton, the dismissed US Attorney for Arizona, seems to have been (apart investigating the influence-peddling patterns of Republican Congressman Rick Renzi) a failure to attack smut with sufficient zeal.

The opening salvos in Gonzales's war on porn were safe ones, with the DOJ taking aim at porn producers on the fringes of the adult entertainment industry. Among Gonzales's first acts as Attorney General was to appeal a ruling by US District Court Judge Gary Lancaster dropping charges against Robert Zicari and Janet Romano, the owners of Extreme Associates, an adult video production company specializing in violence and simulated rape.

Zicari and Romano, a husband-and-wife team working under the names Rob Black and Lizzie Borden, had originally been indicted in 2003 for marketing such videos as Forced Entry, whose publicity promises "Satanic rituals and the depths of human depravity." The DOJ succeeded in having charges against the couple reinstated by the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals. If Zicari and Romano are tried and found guilty, they could face 50 years in prison and $2.5 million in fines.

One of Gonzales's most effective strategies was the expansion of records-keeping requirements under Title 18 US Code 2257. The regulations state that anyone who "produces any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, or other matter" must keep on file "individually identifiable" records certifying that every performer involved in a sexually explicit visual depiction is 18 years of age or older. Such records must be available for inspection "at all reasonable times."

The revised law explicitly extends the regulations to images transmitted via the internet, specifies the manner in which records must be kept, and details protocols for inspection. Both the actual creators of adult material and "secondary producers" (distributors such as Video 10, or proprietors of websites) must keep proof-of-age records on file dating back to 1995. Gonzales approved the updated version of Rule 2257 on May 17, 2005, one year to the day before Project Safe Childhood's "implementation launch."

The Free Speech Coalition, a First Amendment advocacy group focused on the adult entertainment industry, immediately filed suit, noting that "requiring twenty-, thirty-, forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year-old performers to divulge personal information and identification documents to producers of regulated expressive works is not a narrowly tailored means of promoting a legitimate and compelling government interest in child protection."

In July 2006, the federal government embarked on a series of inspections of porn-model records. These fishing expeditions netted an almost nonexistent catch. Charges against two sibling companies, Mantra Films and MRA Holdings, producers of the softcore "Girls Gone Wild" series, were dropped in January, though the companies' legal problems continue. (The "Girls Gone Wild" prosecution seems to have been a pet project of Brent Ward, the veteran anti-porn activist who heads Gonzales's Obscenity Prosecution Task Force.)

Thousands of models have appeared in hardcore films, videos, Web materials, and still photographs since proof-of-age records became obligatory under the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988. Only four, most recently gay performer Brent Corrigan, appear to have embarked on porn careers before their 18th birthdays. All four had provided convincingly appropriate IDs. The rarity of underage models' participation in porn production underscores the fact that the purpose of stringent records-keeping regulations is harassment.

On March 30, Colorado Federal District Court Judge Walker D. Miller issued a preliminary ruling narrowing the scope of Free Speech Coalition v. Alberto Gonzales, the industry's challenge to 18 USC 2257. Miller rejected the argument that the rule violates First Amendment protections against prior restraint on speech. He did, however, in response to concerns regarding identity theft, rule that some personal information provided to secondary producers could be redacted. Other facets of the lawsuit should be argued through by the end of April, at which point Alberto Gonzales may no longer be Attorney General.

Gonzales's former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned on March 13, has disputed Gonzales's denial of involvement in the US Attorneys' dismissals. DOJ White House liaison Monica Goodling resigned three weeks later, saying she would refuse to answer questions on the firings on Fifth Amendment grounds.

Early in April, archconservative former House Speaker Newt Gingrich joined such Republican lawmakers as New Hampshire Senator John Sununu and a chorus of Democrats in urging Gonzales to step down. As The Guide [print version] goes to press, Gonzales is scheduled for an April 19 showdown before the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate.