One of the least popular members of President Bush’s Cabinet, John Ashcroft, announced his resignation from the Cabinet last week. During his tenure as attorney general, he ran a highly ineffective Justice Department that constantly misidentified terrorism suspects.

He can also lay his claim to fame on enacting the Patriot Act, among the worst legacies of Bush’s first term. Here, he gave law enforcement officers new tools to fight terrorists, but their powers went way beyond necessity and stomped on the feet of civil liberties.

So Ashcroft is old news, and Bush quickly replaced him with White House counsel and former aide Alberto Gonzales. Although it’s good to see a new “top cop” in the White House, some of Gonzales’ ideas on civil rights seem sketchy, at best.

One of Gonzales’ most memorable actions was sending Bush a memo that justified torturing prisoners. The comment in Gonzales’ famous 2002 memo to President Bush called for the United States to ignore a Geneva Convention while fighting the Taliban. He said that “our adversaries in several recent conflicts have not been deterred by the Geneva Convention III on the Treatment of Prisoners of War … and terrorists will not follow GPW rules in any event.”

Basically, he said we should fight dirty like the terrorists.

Although these guidelines could be theoretically justified in the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, they don’t apply to Iraq, which is a nation-state. Some believe this mentality ultimately paved the way for the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses, an event which ignited seething hatred for the United States across the globe.

Gonzales’ intention was that in the new world of fighting terrorists, they should ignore the GPW because of the need “to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.”

Gonzales is Bush’s chosen replacement, and there’s little chance he won’t be approved by the Republican-heavy Senate, so there’s little reason to denounce Bush’s decision. Though some of Gonzales’ past actions have been questionable, it’s clear that he takes the law more seriously than Ashcroft.

When he was a Texas Supreme Court justice, he voted to allow a teenager to have an abortion without her parent’s knowledge because it was the law in Texas. He sidestepped personal feelings and didn’t allow political convictions to stand in the way of law enforcement.

As the attorney general, we hope Gonzales can continue to distinguish politics from the law. His past actions might be questionable, but he can’t be worse than Ashcroft.