Gonzales's Anti-Porn Initiative and the Plot Against Prosecutors

By now most people believe the firing of the U.S. Attorneys was nothing more than a political move to appoint a more loyal cast of characters to the Bush Administration. More than likely, the US Attorneys fired, threatened this administration's corrupt way of handling matters.

What's even more interesting -- as the investigation continues into the firing of the US Attorneys -- is once again we find how much Bush relies on sex to distract American citizens and FBI agents from paying attention to what is really important. One of the US Attorneys top priorities, under Gonzales, would be prosecuting porn between consenting adults.

Ward's endless stream of mandates, the source revealed, were a source of frustration to many US Attorneys. "There were countless child obscenity cases crying out to be prosecuted," the source told me, "but [Brent] Ward wanted to focus on cases involving consenting adults. That's just not a good way of dedicating resources. When you have so many children being harmed, why not allocate your resources towards that?"

Ward's heedless prosecutions of legally available pornography reflected more than his ideology; they also defined his power within the Justice Department. Once Bush began his second term in the White House, Gonzales declared the prosecution of pornography portraying sex acts between consenting adults "one of the top priorities" of his department. He signed off on an FBI headquarters memo that recruited agents for an anti-porn task force. That memo stated that prosecutions would focus particularly on material depicting "bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior." These acts, according to the memo, were most likely to offend local juries.