Attorney General Gonzales: Lying or bad memory?

The Washington Post has decided to publish an article on one of the burning questions today rolling through and over the city of Washington D.C.

Whether Gonzales has deliberately told untruths or is merely hampered by his memory has been the subject of intense debate among members of Congress, legal scholars and others who have watched him over the years. Some regard his verbal difficulties as a strategic ploy on behalf of a president to whom he owes his career; others see a public official overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibilities. [Snip]

Gonzales told senators earlier this year that allegations that he had been untruthful "have been personally very painful to me." But Gonzales's critics on and off Capitol Hill say he has had trouble with the truth for more than a decade, pointing to a controversy over Gonzales's account of why Bush was excused from jury duty in 1996 while serving as the governor of Texas.

The article does a lot of reporting on what has been said by both Gonzales' supporters and his detractors, so there is a lot of "On the one hand... then on the other hand..." type statements. But it is very difficult to conclude that the Truth can be found by taking the arguments from both sides and splitting the difference. Consider his history.

Alberto Gonzales spent, two years at the Air Force Academy, then resigned and went on to graduate from the single finest University in Texas, Rice University of Houston. Then he went on to get a law degree from Harvard, joined one of the top law firms in Texas (Vinson and Elkins) where he became a partner. This is not the career pattern of a man with memory and verbal problems.

...scrutiny of Gonzales increased dramatically this year as a result of Democrats' aggressive investigations into the Justice Department's firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. Gonzales has particularly come under fire for his shifting explanations of his role in the dismissals and for his statements that he could not recall a host of details about the firings.

At a Senate hearing in April, for example, Gonzales said more than 60 times that he could not recall events or facts related to the firings, including a final, high-level meeting in his office at which the dismissal plan was formally approved.

Lying successfully requires an excellent memory and a thorough understanding of whatever is being lied about. Without knowing what is really going on, good lies cannot be crafted that do not give themselves away through contradictions. Gonzales does not appear to have been caught in any extremely obvious personal contradiction, though a lot of people have come forward to disagree with his statements. If he is lying, then he is carefully preparing to lie by making sure that he has plausible deniability for most of what he says. Again this strongly suggests that his errors in testimony are intentional, not accidental or the result of a memory or verbal impairment.

Did he suffer some mental disease such as Alzheimer's since then? He left Vinson and Elkins in 1994 to become Bush's General Counsel when Bush was elected Governor of Texas and he is now age 51. If he has some memory or verbal problem which has developed since 1994 it has only become noticeable when he walked into the Senate for hearings after he was confirmed to the job of Attorney General.

There is an attempt to pass the problems off by saying that "Gonzales's strengths 'may lie elsewhere, but they are not in management.'" While Attorneys are notoriously poor managers, and Gonzales has clearly demonstrated that his management skills lie in the low range for that profession, his statements to the Senate are a result of his strengths as one of the better Attorneys in the nation acting to give testimony. It is much more likely that he has structured his job in order to make what he says to Congress more credible or more difficult to disprove than it is that he is a poor manager.

Or to say it another way, he may be a poor manager, but it is because he has structured his job to provide that as an excuse for those lies he gets caught in rather than poor management being the reason for his refusal to tell the truth to Congress. It takes an extremely bright, competent and well-trained attorney to build a large structure of lies and then build - on top of that structure - systems of plausible deniability.

His only remaining excuse might be mental illness. But if that is the case, it demonstrates itself only when he sits in the Senate witness chair. I don't think that medicine has identified a Senate-specific memory or verbal illness. I see no way to draw any conclusion other than that he is lying to protect himself and Bush.