Next question: Why is Gonzalez in trouble for firing people who serve at the pleasure of the administration and can, therefore be fired for any reason, instead of coming under fire for this outrageous questioning of our civil liberties?
You said a mouthful there. Attorneys who serve the justice department in the capacity those 8 did can be fired at will. It's been that way for a long time, and Gonzalez isn't the first who did it.
On its face, this seems to be a pure power ploy. "We demand the right to keep people who don't agree with you working in your office. And if you don't like that, you're anti-democracy!" At least, that's how it comes across to me.
Now, as for Gonzalez and
habeus corpus, you'd think someone so well educated as to split the legal hair that the constitution makes no explicit mention of habeus corpus would also be educated well enough to be versed in the founding father's concept of natural rights...those rights that they considered to be inherent rights of all men, rights that existed before the constitution and that the constitution neither granted nor could take away, no matter how it was worded. Among these would be the right to due process, and in their minds any notion of due process necessarily included habeus corpus.
As his opponents pounce on any real or perceived flaw in their aim to "win" at any cost, so does Gonzalez seek to further the administration's aims at any cost. The only way to make us safe from terrorists is to kill or detain them, or at the very least deter them (and given that many of them are fanatics, the deterrent had better be quite strong!) Now, by that logic, anything that stands in the way of detaining terrorists puts us all at risk. Given the tradeoff between legal protections for the accused and crumbling towers burying thousands of innocents, it's not hard to see how someone like Gonzalez would perceive the possiblity that a terrorist could use something like habeus to "get off on a technicality" as a problem to be solved. And his solution is to chip away at those inconvenient protections that the accused have in any free society.
What I find distubing is that if he's so shortsighted that he'll split the hair of habeus vs. the literal text of the constitution, then I have every reason to suspect that he's also so shortsighted as to be unable to distinguish that the reason for protecting this country against Al Queda is so that there can be a bastion of freedom and justice somewhere in the world for us all to enjoy.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Too few are willing to pay the price any more.
And that, sadly, is why there are more people "playing the game" to have Gonzalez fired then there are who are frightened at the prospect of the Attorney General working tirelessly to diminish the liberty of free men.