The resounding sentiment about Alberto Gonzales, Bush's nomination for Attorney General, is that "he's better than Ashcroft," but Gonzales' pending appointment still has some human rights advocates on edge. During his tenure as White House chief counsel, Gonzales has helped to craft administrative doctrine that has justified the use of torture and usurped civil rights for detainees, as well as justifying government secrecy. Justifying Torture. A post-9/11 internal memo justified waiving anti-torture laws and international treaties protecting the rights of prisoners of war. Gonzales argued that the Geneva convention did not apply to enemy combatants. One Gonzeles memo said that to qualify as torture, the physical pain endured must be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." According to Gonzales, for mental pain to amount to torture, "it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g. lasting months or even years." Gonzales also defended the administration's policy of detaining terrorism suspects without access to lawyers or courts. Those policies may have led to the types of abuses uncovered in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and currently in practice at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Negligent Counsel. As legal counsel during Bush's tenure as governor of Texas, Gonzales "failed to provide the governor with crucial details surrounding clemency petitions," in one case leading to the execution of a mentally retarded man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old. From the New Standard: Gonzales also faces criticism from activists opposed to capital punishment. A 2003 Atlantic Monthly article reported that when Gonzales was Bush’s legal counsel in Texas, he routinely failed to provide the governor with crucial details surrounding clemency petitions. The article, which relies on documents obtained by journalist Alan Berlow through the Texas Public Information Act, details several cases in which Gonzales drafted brief reports for Bush outlining the legal arguments and case histories of people about to be executed. "A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute," wrote Berlow. "In fact, in these documents 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." Enforcing the Veil of Secrecy. In an administration already shrouded in secrecy, Gonzales has justified policies to keep internal memos out of the hands of Congress and the public. Gonzales denied Democratic congressmen access to memos on judicial candidate Miguel Estrada that would have given senators greater insight into the candidates beliefs on important issues. From the New Yorker: In an effort to learn more about Estrada’s views, Leahy and his fellow-Democrats asked the Administration to produce memos that Estrada had written when he worked in the solicitor general’s office. “Estrada’s views on Roe are very unclear to me,” Senator Durbin said. “He doesn’t have a treasure trove of legal writings to turn to, he doesn’t have any legal opinions that he’s rendered as a judge. Virtually the only record of his thinking is contained in those memoranda.” In the Bush White House, judicial confirmations are nominally under the control of the counsel, Alberto Gonzalez. (His main deputy on the subject is Brett Kavanaugh, a Federalist Society member who is best known in Washington as having been a prosecutor in Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation and a principal author of the Starr report.) Historically, senators have been allowed to review some memorandums by judicial nominees. But, in a letter, Gonzalez told the Democrats that the Administration would not produce the memos, because to do so would chill free expression among Administration lawyers and violate the principle of executive privilege, which protects the internal deliberations of the President’s aides.