So How Badly DID Gonzales Do?

The next-day reaction to AG Alberto Gonzales runs (as they say) the gamut of A-to-B. A being bad and B being way bad.

From the AP:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales came to Capitol Hill with only one mission: to placate Republican and Democratic senators dissatisfied with his account of how eight federal prosecutors were fired.

Apparently, he failed. For the first time, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee broke ranks and said it might be best if Gonzales stepped down.

Byron York at the National Review (in a piece titled "Alberto Gonzales' Disastrous Day"):

Judging by his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday, there are three questions about the U.S. attorneys mess that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wants answered: What did I know? When did I know it? And why did I fire those U.S. attorneys?

As the day dragged on, it became clear — painfully clear to anyone who supports Gonzales — that the attorney general didn’t know the answers. Much of the time, he explained, he didn’t really know much at all — he was just doing what his senior staff recommended he do

And that's York being nice.

The New York Times editorial board:

If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had gone to the Senate yesterday to convince the world that he ought to be fired, it’s hard to imagine how he could have done a better job, short of simply admitting the obvious: that the firing of eight United States attorneys was a partisan purge.

Mr. Gonzales came across as a dull-witted apparatchik incapable of running one of the most important departments in the executive branch.

And they offered up this as background:

He delegated responsibility for purging their ranks to an inexperienced and incompetent assistant who, if that’s possible, was even more of a plodding apparatchik. Mr. Gonzales failed to create the most rudimentary standards for judging the prosecutors’ work, except for political fealty. And when it came time to explain his inept decision making to the public, he gave a false account that was instantly and repeatedly contradicted by sworn testimony.

Here's the Washington Post editorial board:

YESTERDAY'S "reconfirmation hearing" for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) called it, didn't go particularly well -- but then again, there was no reason to expect that it would. It was impossible to watch the hearing without feeling sorry for Mr. Gonzales, who is bogged down in uncomfortable terrain. He has to acknowledge that he knew something, but not much, about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, which makes him appear a feckless manager, a dissembler, or both. His long-awaited appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee underscored the degree to which his credibility gap has widened into a chasm, for Republicans as well as Democrats.

Boston Globe editorial board:

IT IS DIFFICULT to say which version of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's role in the firing of eight US attorneys more disqualifies him as the nation's chief law enforcement officer. There is his version, in which he was only tangentially involved in an unprecedented mid term purge of federal prosecutors. If that is true, he allowed unsupervised underlings to handle one of the most important responsibilities of the Justice Department.

The other version is the one described by three of those aides: that Gonzales was closely involved in selecting US attorneys to be fired and building a case against them. If that version is true, Gonzales was lying again yesterday when he downplayed his role in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In either case, he should have long since resigned.

Josh Marshall at Talkingpointsmemo:

A lot's been said so far about Attorney General Gonzales's testimony today. I've said plenty myself. The key though was the response from the committee's Republicans. You know that Sen. Coburn (R-OK), an extremely conservative but not necessarily party-regular senator, told Gonzales he should resign. There was more though. Two other Republican senators, I think, basically told Gonzales that they weren't going to tell him to resign but that he should. That's my interpretation of Sens. Specter and Graham's statements, certainly. And you don't have to agree. But I think it's a fair one. And even Sen. Sessions (R-AL), who normally I'd expect to be signing the administration line, was pretty damning.

I think it's fair to say that Gonzales has lost the confidence of at least half the Republican senators on the committee. He's given people too many causes of termination to choose from. You can want him to go for subverting the federal justice system. Or if that's too much for you to handle you can say he should go for running Main Justice like some ungainly combination of a Young Republicans summer camp and Michael Brown's FEMA. And if even that creates too much collateral damage for you to deal with you can just say he should go for lying about everything that happened.

Plenty of reasons to go around.

I'll let our Great and Glorious President, Defender of all that is Good against all that is Scary, Thwarter of Evil-Doers' Evil Deeds, Decider-in-Chief, George "Dubya" Bush have the last word:

President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General's testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators' questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. Attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses.

The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence.

Full confidence. Now that's scary.

First Rummy, then Turd Blossom, now Abu Gonzales

The rats are either fleeing the sinking ship or resigning in disgrace . . .

Jesus, Mary and Joseph! If I hear one more talking head on TV spew how Alberto Gonzales embodies/lived "The American Dream" I'll start spewing chunks.

The American Dream does not include torture.

The American Dream does not include warrantless wiretaps on its citizens.

The American Dream does not include firing good US Attorneys because they won't play politics with justice.

The American Dream does not include lying to Congress.

The American Dream does not include advising the President of these United States that he can break any law and ignore the US Constitution.

Back on Friday, January 28, 2005, we published a post entitled "Unacceptable" at 2 Political Junkies that opened with:

It is simply unacceptable for the United States of America to have the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Dynasty as the Attorney General of this country.

A country founded on the rights of the individual cannot sanctify a person to be the Attorney General of these United States who sanctified torture as long as it wasn't "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

The US Attorney General's job is to function as the chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government. In that capacity the US Attorney General provides assistance and guidance to the heads of executive departments of the Government.

We already know that Alberto R. Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions (which Gonzales views as "quaint") inoperative.

We know that Alberto R. Gonzales believes that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States.

These views are unacceptable in a US Attorney General.

For these reasons, the 2 Political Junkies blog opposes the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him.

Anyone with half a brain should have known back then exactly what kind of justice to expect from Abu Gonzales:


They should have known that he was the kind of guy, for example, who would go over the head of the acting Attorney General to harass a sick old man (Ashcroft) in the ICU to try to get him to allow Abu to keep spying on the citizens of this country -- and lie to the Congress about the whole sick, sordid episode later.

For some recent examples of Abu's problems as covered by 2pj, you can click here. Even many Republicans could no longer stomach the guy.

But, let's not forget that when you hear the MSM call Abu the last of Bush's "Texas Mafia" in the White House how accurate that description is.

The Mafia needs sleazy attorneys to keep them in business and Gonzales was exactly that from the start. After all, he's the guy who in 1996 got Bush out of jury duty so that his DUI wouldn't come out before an election.


Alberto Gonzales and George W. Bush forgot that the United States Attorney General is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. He's not supposed to be one of it's chief criminals.

But, it shouldn't end with his resignation. While Gonzales is now on his way out, he still must be held accountable for his illegal actions as must the rest of this gangland crew.

Three down,* two to go!**

* Rumsfeld, Rove, Gonzales
** Cheney, Bush

Another Lie from AG Gonzales

Via Muckraker, I found this from the McClatchy Papers:

Internal Bush administration e-mails suggest that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may have played a bigger role than he has acknowledged in the plan to fire several U.S. attorneys.

The e-mails, delivered to Congress Friday night, show that Gonzales attended an hourlong meeting on the firings on Nov. 27, 2006 - 10 days before seven U.S. attorneys were told to resign. The attorney general's participation in the session calls into question his assertion that he was essentially in the dark about the firings.

While it's a nice way of putting it, "calls into question" really is just a euphemism for "is more evidence to the AG's lack of credibility."

But I want everyone to notice when the e-mails were delivered: Friday night. The administration has to know how bad things look - they delivered the bad news on a Friday night, when no one is watching.

Here's the funny. The DoJ's spin on how why what's so obvious isn't what it seems:

A Justice Department spokesman said the latest disclosures don't contradict Gonzales' statements that he knew little about the firings.

"This meeting concerned the roll-out of the U.S. attorney plan. The information available to us does not indicate that there was discussion at this meeting about which U.S. attorneys should or should not be on the list," spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.

And if it DID include the specific attorneys, I'm sure they would have said that since the discussion didn't include the date (or some other detail significant or otherwise) AG Gonzales didn't contradict his sworn testimony to Congress.

Muckraker has more:

McClatchy hits all the high points, the main one being, of course, that Alberto Gonzales sat in on a meeting about the firings on November 27 to review the firing plan. The firings occurred ten days later. During his "I take full responsibilty but I didn't know anything about it" press conference earlier this month, Gonzales said "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on."

Cartainly calls into question his credibility.

It also highlights the lie of the DoJ's spin. Gonzales said he was not involved in any discussion, yet the DoJ says that since the meeting wasn't about specific US Attorneys, his being involved in a discussion isn't in fact the contradiction it appears to be.

As Groucho once said, "Who you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?"

Bush, FISA, and More Deceptions

First - were you at all curious about the timing of the new FISA discussions in Congress? Me too. Reuters has a possible explanation:

A U.S. intelligence court earlier this year secretly struck down a key element of President George W. Bush's warrantless spying program, The Washington Post reported in its Friday edition.

The decision is one reason Congress is trying to give legal authorization to the spying program in fevered negotiations with the Bush administration this week, the Post reported.

The intelligence-court judge, who remains anonymous, concluded that the government had overstepped its authority by monitoring overseas communications that pass through the United States, the Post said, citing anonymous government and congressional sources.

But wait - it was a secret? How did we find out about it then? Check out today's Washington Post:

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

What is it with these Republicans leaking classified information for political gain? Don't they know that it's a dangerous world? Leaking classified information is tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or so I'm told.

So the secret, classified FISA court struck down part of dubya's domestic surveillance plan (in secret, of course) and yet when a Repulican member of the House discloses that information on the Republican "news" channel, it's somehow not "revealing classified information."

Yea, and Valerie Plame wasn't covert, either.

But beyond that - what would this new FISA scenario look like? This is from the AP:

The law generally requires court review of government surveillance of suspected terrorists in the United States. It does not specifically address the government's ability to intercept messages believed to come from suspects who are overseas, opening what the White House considers a significant gap in protecting against attacks by foreigners targeting the U.S.

Democrats, who control Congress, would allow the messages from foreign targets to be intercepted, but only after a review by the special FISA court to make sure the surveillance does not focus on communications that might be sent to and from Americans.

They reject the Bush administration's proposal to give Gonzales speedy authority to decide if the surveillance properly targets people overseas _ and not in the United States.

The Bush Administration wanted to give more authority to AG Gonzales?

This AG Gonzales?

Senators in both parties concede they don't have enough evidence to make a perjury charge stick against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. But that doesn't mean they're going to quit trying to pry him from office.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is considering asking the Justice Department's inspector general to examine whether Gonzales' answers to questions from lawmakers amount to misconduct.

"I am deeply concerned about the seriousness of his misleading testimony and the pattern that has developed with regards to the attorney general's testimony over the years," Leahy said Thursday. "At the very least, I am considering sending his answers as they stand to the inspector general for review."

Ranking committee Republican Arlen Specter doesn't sound like he'd stand in the way.

"I think we need to finish this (the committee's) investigation and find a way to end the tenure of Attorney General Gonzales," Pennsylvania Sen. Specter said Thursday at a hearing.

End the tenure of Alberto Gonzales. IMPEACH.

Another lie from AG Gonzales

The Washington Post is reporting:

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

And:

Caroline Fredrickson, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new documents raise questions about whether Gonzales misled Congress at a moment when lawmakers were poised to renew the Patriot Act and keenly sought assurances that there were no abuses. "It was extremely important," she said of Gonzales's 2005 testimony. "The attorney general said there are no problems with the Patriot Act, and there was no counterevidence at the time."

I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.

We'll say it again: IMPEACH

Almost exactly twenty-two years ago, on July 29, 1974 the House Judiciary Committee voted 27-11 on the First Article of Impeachment for Richard Milhous Nixon (there were a few other articles, by the way). Section 4 of Article One said that Nixon stood accused of:

interfering or endeavouring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees;

Today, the AP is reporting that:

President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation of the anti-terror eavesdropping program that intercepts Americans' international calls and e-mails, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday.

Here's more from the AP:

Bush refused to grant security clearances for department investigators who were looking into the role Justice lawyers played in crafting the program, under which the National Security Agency listens in on telephone calls and reads e-mail without court approval, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Without access to the sensitive program, the department's Office of Professional Responsibility closed its investigation in April.

"It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?" Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., the committee chairman, asked Gonzales.

"The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales replied.

The president made the decision to refuse the security clearances - and that stopped a DOJ investigation. Or as Murray Waas put it:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee today that President Bush personally halted an internal Justice Department investigation into whether Gonzales and other senior department officials acted within the law in approving and overseeing the administration's domestic surveillance program.

Waas adds:

The investigation, by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, was halted when lawyers who were going to conduct the investigation were denied the security clearances that would have allowed them to view classified documents related to the surveillance program. President Bush made the decision to deny the security clearances for the investigators, Gonzales said in his testimony today.

So the documents were already AT the DOJ.

Of course Tony Snow (formerly of Fox "News") spun it as best he could (from the AP):

The president did not consider the Justice unit that functions as a legal ethics watchdog to be the "proper venue," Snow said.

"What he was saying is that in the case of a highly classified program, you need to keep the number of people exposed to it tight for reasons of national security, and that's what he did," Snow said.

So this administration (the same administration that lied about Iraq's WMD and that leaked information about a CIA operative to punish that operative's husband) thinks they get to decide the "proper venue" for an ethics probe? On what basis? Trust? Guess again, my friends.

And I could be wrong, but didn't Tony Snow just say that the reason Bush denied those security clearances is because you can't trust the investigators from the United States Department of Justice to keep a secret?

What incredibly huge balls. We're talking gargantuan testicles, the kind that make it difficult to sit down.

Waas continues:

A senior Justice official said that the refusal to grant the clearances was "unprecedented" and questioned whether the clearances were denied because investigators might find "misconduct by those who were attempting to defeat" the probe from being conducted. The official made the comments without knowing that Bush had made the decision to refuse the clearances.

Unprecedented - yeow!

We'll paraphrase John Dean - it's worse than Watergate, because he's worse than Nixon.

Technorati tags:Bush, Richard Nixon, Impeachment

Gonzales' Resignation: Local Reactions

First the Trib. They only point out the US Attorney firings, not the torture or the domestic surveillance or the lying to Congress, just the US Attorney firings.

When Congress questioned the firing of several U.S. attorneys, Gonzales needed to say only one thing: "They served at the pleasure of the president. Under the Constitution neither the president nor his attorney general owes Congress an explanation."

Instead, Gonzales dug a hole defending a thing that required no defense.

Of course once it came out that the Republican US Attorneys were being fired because they weren't "loyal Bushies" enough, it tainted the rest of the US Attorneys everywhere as being little more than political appointees doing the bidding of the Bush White House - and that was the problem. And then he lied about it to Congress.

The P-G takes a different tack - they include some of (the now disgraced and soon-to-be former) AG "Fredo" Gonzales dubious accomplishments:

His fingerprints had been all over some of the worst excesses of the administration -- the expanding of presidential powers, the eavesdropping, the justifications for harsh treatment bordering on torture and the dubious rules for prosecuting detainees in the war on terror. He came under fire, justifiably, in March when it was revealed that the FBI had improperly used the Patriot Act to obtain information about people and businesses -- which was all of a piece with his earlier record.

Though I would, of course, quibble with the phrase "harsh treatment bordering on torture." When the International Red Cross says it's "tantamount" to torture, it is torture - not bordering on torture.

Both editorials, however, lay some of the blame at dubya's feet. The Trib:

We cannot leave this without assessing the performance of the president who promoted Gonzales largely because he was a friend.

And the P-G:

Mr. Gonzales was not chosen attorney general because of his legal scholarship but because he was an old friend from Texas who didn't know how to say no to Mr. Bush.

Heckova job, dubya. Heckova job.

EVENT TODAY: Summer fun and…Alberto Gonzales?

WHAT: Alberto Gonzales Impeachment Rally in Downtown Pittsburgh by Democracy for Pittsburgh
WHEN: Thursday, June 21, 2007, 12:15 PM to 12:30 PM
WHERE: Mellon Square: 6th and William Penn (corner of park), Pittsburgh PA 15219

Summertime is starting. It’s time for sun and games.

Fifty-three senators will enjoy the independence day recess feeling good about their vote to censure Alberto Gonzales. After the recess, it will be Congress’s turn to take up the job of impeaching Mr. Gonzales.

Right now, it’s our turn to move the issue from the Senate to the House.

In this happy moment as summer begins, Democracy for Pittsburgh invites everyone!

Come to a lunchtime “flash event”—15 minutes of summer fun—and help us “put impeachment on the table.” Table will be provided.

Meet by 12:15 at Mellon Square (the corner by 6th and William Penn) downtown Pittsburgh, for this 15 minute event.

No speeches, just brief fun. Gonzales masks and signs welcome. Other “candidates for impeachment” welcome.

You can RSVP here or just show up!

UPDATE: Want a Gonzales mask to wear today's event? Right click on the picture below to save it to your PC. Then you can copy it into a Word file and stretch it there to fit. Then you simply need to print it up and cut it out and add string/ribbon to the holes indicated on both sides of the mask (above the ears).



UPDATE 2: You can see pictures of the event here.
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More Trouble For AG Gonzales

From the AP:

Documents show that eight congressional leaders were briefed about the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program on the eve of its expiration in 2004, contradicting sworn Senate testimony this week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The documents, obtained by The Associated Press, come as senators consider whether a perjury investigation should be opened into conflicting accounts about the program and a dramatic March 2004 confrontation leading up to its potentially illegal reauthorization.

A Gonzales spokesman maintained Wednesday that the attorney general stands by his testimony.

I saw this on Olbermann last night. More details:

At a heated Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday, Gonzales repeatedly testified that the issue at hand was not about the terrorist surveillance program, which allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on suspects in the United States without receiving court approval.

Instead, Gonzales said, the emergency meetings on March 10, 2004, focused on an intelligence program that he would not describe.

But if the document, a four page memo from the Director of National Intelligence, is right, then AG Gonzales is lying. If the memo is incorrect then there's some other intelligence gathering program out there.

Looks like it's the first one. I guess an AG who's perjured himself is better than another illegal domestic surveillance program, right?

Right?

Sidney Blumenthal on the Gonzales' lies

I think Sidney Blumenthal has it completely right. He wrote this for the Guardian.

In 1996, Governor George W Bush received a summons to serve on a jury, which would have required his admission that 20 years earlier he had been arrested for drunk driving. Already planning his presidential campaign, he did not want this information made public. His lawyer made the novel argument to the judge that Bush should not have to serve because "he would not, as governor, be able to pardon the defendant in the future". (The defendant was a stripper accused of drunk driving.) The judge agreed, and it was not until the closing days of the 2000 campaign that Bush's record surfaced. On Monday, the same lawyer, Alberto Gonzales - now attorney general - appeared before the senate judiciary committee to defend "the client", as he called the president.

Gonzales was the sole witness called to explain Bush's warrantless domestic spying, in obvious violation of the foreign intelligence surveillance act (Fisa) and circumvention of the special court created to administer it. The scene at the Senate was acted as though scripted partly by Kafka, partly by Mel Brooks, and partly by John le Carré. After not being sworn in, the absence of oath-taking having been insisted upon by the Republicans, Gonzales offered legal reasoning even more imaginative than that he used to get Bush off jury duty: a melange of mendacity, absurdity and mystery.

But the scary part comes later on:

Who was or wasn't being spied on couldn't and wouldn't be explained. When Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, asked whether the program could be used to "influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media", Gonzales replied: "Those are very, very difficult questions, and for me to answer those questions sort of off the cuff, I think would not be responsible." When Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, asked for assurances that only al-Qaida or suspected terrorists were subjected to surveillance, Gonzales answered: "Sir, I can't give you absolute assurance."

Whah??? He can't give "absolute assurance" that only terrorists (or suspected terrorists) are being watched?

The amazing thing is that this is the answer he gave even though he wasn't under oath.

How much more do we need to know about this administration before we all understand it's a real threat to our civil liberties?

IMPEACH

Let's Break Strom's Filibuster Record

From the Levity in Action blog:

Let's Break Strom's Filibuster Record

There are those who say it would be a waste of time to hold the Senate floor until Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales answers the questions he’s been asked, about those memos that redefined torture. It’s a lost cause. It’s energy better conserved to fight a right wing Supreme Court Nominee.

But that’s worse than cowardice. It's a lack of self respect -- a failure of imagination and passion. Doesn't anyone remember "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"? Once upon a time, a Senator had that passion.

After Gonzales, Strom Thurmond’s black daughter has been the biggest newsmaker this week. She kept their secret, revealing who her father was only after he was dead. Now she's released her autobiography and talks to everyone.

Strom (he deserves a worldwide first name basis – like Saddam) still holds the Senate filibuster record. The year I was born, Strom held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes all by himself, because he believed in something important and he wasn’t afraid to stand up for it. CNN quoted him when he died a year ago:

"I want to tell you that there's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

Except I heard a recording of this on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show – which was, as usual, more accurate than CNN – and Strom didn’t say “Negro” race. As a 21st century American of some African descent, I am permitted to use his vocabulary, though most often I choose not to.

The pool thing was a big deal. When black movie star Dorothy Dandridge was staying at a 5 star Vegas hotel, she dipped her feet in the pool without permission, and the next thing she knew, the management had drained all the water out.

Today as I watch CSPAN today flashing ‘No Agreement on Debate Length,’ and the somnolent announcer actually uses the phrase “possible filibuster’ at the Gonzales hearings, I have hope. And I have an idea.

See, publicly Strom was full of passion and racism. Privately, he helped support his Negro daughter, and insisted he was just giving Americans in the south what they wanted – what they were used to, what would keep him popular with his people.

Last May, South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham was stumbling out into the light after a screening of the other Abu Ghraib photos and videos – the ones that still have never been shown to the public. When asked what he’d seen, Graham answered, “Rape and murder.” Rape, like severe beatings, no longer fit the new Gonzales definition of illegal torture, because neither necessarily causes “organ failure or death”.

Then last week, the same Graham chastised Alberto Gonzales for his role in changing the official interrogation rules in ways that quickly led to Abu Ghraib, among at least 300 reports of abuse and murder in U.S. run prisons. “I think we've dramatically undermined the war effort by getting on a slippery slope in terms of playing cute with the law,” said Graham. “We’ve lost our way.”

And then he voted with his party – even though all of Gonzales’s other support had disappeared – to recommend his confirmation as the next U.S. Attorney General, the nation’s chief of law enforcement.

So let’s learn a lesson from Strom. Maybe he didn’t hate black people as much as we thought. Maybe it was just a popular act. But he sure put on a good show. He made it into the history books. And the 21st century history books still need to be written.

So whatever we feel deep down, let’s pretend we really, deeply hate rape, murder, and torture for just a day or two. We’ve probably got 30 Senators or more, so it’ll be easy to hold the floor compared to what Strom had to do. We could go for 25 hours easy, beat Strom’s record, and then give up. We’ll be in the history books too.

And from that effort, future generations will believe we really hate it when Americans rape and murder arabs, just as much as we hate niggers in our pools.

One Spy Program or Two?

That's what they're asking over at TPMCafe.

Alberto Gonzales' testimony that there was "no serious disagreement" within the Bush Administration about the NSA warrantless surveillance program has left senators sputtering and fulminating about the attorney general's apparent prevarications. But a closer examination of Gonzales' testimony and other public statements from the Administration suggest that there may be a method to the madness.

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that Gonzales's careful, repeated phrasing to the Senate that he will only discuss the program that "the president described" was deliberate, part of a concerted administration-wide strategy to conceal from the public the very broad scope of that initial program. When, for the first time, Program X (as we'll call it, for convenience's sake) became known to senior Justice Department officials who were not its original architects, those officials -- James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, principally -- balked at its continuation. They did not back down until the program had undergone as-yet-unspecified but apparently significant revisions. But when President Bush announced what he would call the "Terrorist Surveillance Program' in December 2005, he left the clear impression that the program had always functioned the same way since its 2001 inception.

It's always nice to see Hamlet referenced in the news. In the play, Polonius notices a certain rationality in Hamlet's seeming insanity:

Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't. (Hamlet II, ii, 206)

But let's get back to the current madness, this administration.

It's an interesting article. The main point being that the domestic surveillance program as originally conceived and put into operation is very different from the one dubya described in Dec, 2005.

In essence, the issue is this: if Gonzales succeeds in convincing the committee that there really is a material distinction between the program as it existed before and after Comey’s intervention, he won't just save himself from perjury. He will perhaps have preserved an administration strategy of concealing the scope of Program X from the public and most of Congress -- making it appear that the program that Bush disclosed in December 2005, incorporating Comey's objections, is the same program that existed since October 2001, long before Comey put the brakes on at least some aspects of it. That may be at the heart of the White House's claim of executive privilege to prevent the Senate Judiciary Committee from seeing documents detailing the genesis of Program X.

I don't think I'm following this, however as there seems to be a contradiction. If Gonzales succeeds in convincing the committee there is a distinction between the programs (pre- and post- Comey's intervention), then he will possibly be preserving the administrations strategy of concealing the scope of the program as originally implemented and keeping up the appearance that the two programs (pre- and post-Comey's intervention) are the same?

Am I reading it wrong? Am I reading too deeply? Should I just drink the kool-aid and blame it all on Clinton (doesn't matter which - Hill or Bill) and the "Democrat Congress" instead?

More Administration Lies

From the Washington Post:

In testimony on Jan. 18, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department had no intention of avoiding Senate input on the hiring of U.S. attorneys.

Just a month earlier, D. Kyle Sampson, who was then Gonzales's chief of staff, laid out a plan to do just that. In an e-mail, he detailed a strategy for evading Arkansas Democrats in installing Tim Griffin, a former GOP operative and protege of presidential adviser Karl Rove, as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.

"We should gum this to death," Sampson wrote to a White House aide on Dec. 19. "[A]sk the senators to give Tim a chance . . . then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, evaluate the recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in 'good faith,' of course."

Of course.

The part I'm having trouble grokking follows a few sentences later:

Democrats and Republicans are demanding to know whether Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and other Justice officials misled them in sworn testimony over the past two months.

Whah?? Isn't it obvious? AG Gonzales says one thing that is directly contradicted by an e-mail from his chief of staff. And they're still asking whether they've been misled?

Ok here's another:

The inconsistencies between Justice's positions and the documents are numerous. On Feb. 23, for example, a Justice legislative affairs aide wrote to Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) that the department "was not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin." But internal Justice e-mails show that "getting him appointed is important" to Rove and was closely monitored by political aides in the White House.

Last week, senior Justice official William E. Moschella told a House Judiciary subcommittee that the White House was not consulted on the firings until the end of the process.

But the documents released this week show that the plan began more than two years ago at the White House counsel's office, which initially suggested firing all 93 U.S. attorneys. Gonzales rejected that idea, and Sampson wrote back in January 2006 that Justice and the White House should "work together to seek the replacement of a limited number of U.S. Attorneys."

How much more do we need to know before the default setting is changed to "Whenever the Bush Administration is defending itself on something, always assume it's lying."

How long?

More Bad News for AG Gonzales

When your president's political allies complain, then you know it's probably time to go. From Time Magazine:

In what could prove an embarrassing new setback for embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the eve of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a group of influential conservatives and longtime Bush supporters has written a letter to the White House to call for his resignation.

Here's the text of the letter:

Dear Mr. President and Attorney General:

We, the undersigned co-founders of the American Freedom Agenda, urge the Attorney General to submit his resignation and the President to accept.

Mr. Gonzales has presided over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution's time-honored checks and balances.

He has brought the rule of law into disrepute, and debased honesty as the coin of the realm.

He has engendered the suspicion that partisan politics trumps evenhanded law enforcement in the Department of Justice.

He has embraced legal theories that could be employed by a successor to obliterate the conservative philosophy of individual liberty and limited government celebrated by the Founding Fathers.

In sum, Attorney General Gonzales has proven an unsuitable steward of the law and should resign for the good of the country.

The President should accept the resignation, and set a standard to which the wise and honest might repair in nominating a successor, who will keep the law, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.

The letter is then signed by a group of prominent conservatives including (according to Time):

Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Reagan Justice Department, who has worked frequently with current Administration and the Republican National Committee to promote Bush's court nominees; David Keene, chairman of the influential American Conservative Union, one of the nation's oldest and largest grassroots conservative groups; Richard Viguerie, a well-known G.O.P. direct mail expert and fundraiser; and Bob Barr, the former Republican Congressman from Georgia and free speech advocate, as well as John Whitehead, head of the Rutherford Institute, a conservative non-profit active in fighting for what it calls religious freedoms.

Anyone want to start up a "Gonzales Resigns" pool?

New York Times Editorial: Impeach Gonzales

Today:

As far as we can tell, there are three possible explanations for Mr. Gonzales’s talk about a dispute over other — unspecified — intelligence activities. One, he lied to Congress. Two, he used a bureaucratic dodge to mislead lawmakers and the public: the spying program was modified after Mr. Ashcroft refused to endorse it, which made it “different” from the one Mr. Bush has acknowledged. The third is that there was more wiretapping than has been disclosed, perhaps even purely domestic wiretapping, and Mr. Gonzales is helping Mr. Bush cover it up.

Democratic lawmakers are asking for a special prosecutor to look into Mr. Gonzales’s words and deeds. Solicitor General Paul Clement has a last chance to show that the Justice Department is still minimally functional by fulfilling that request.

If that does not happen, Congress should impeach Mr. Gonzales.

Impeach.

That's Our Arlen!

Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) is often cited as one of the few remaining moderate Republicans in Congress. But where does he stand when the chips are down? While Specter is ostensibly pro-choice, he backed Alito for the Supreme Court.

And then there's Specter's penchant for being "different" as when he famously cited Scottish law to render a verdict of "not proven" on President Clinton's impeachment (his vote was recorded as "not guilty" in the Senate records).

So how did the man who declared Gonzales' explanations to date as "strained and unrealistic" and said the he believed that Bush violated the FISA law conduct the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings yesterday?

On the one hand Specter did not have Gonzales sworn in and as Slate put it:

No witnesses other than Gonzales. No new details of the National Security Agency spying program that the committee was supposed to be inquiring about. No request for the Justice Department's internal legal memorandums about the legality of the NSA program.

On the other hand, Specter responded to Gonzales' prevarications by making such statements as:

"That's false on it's face"

and

"That defies logic and plain English."

Specter closed by suggesting that Bush submit the entire NSA program to FISA's secret court for review.

Mr. Gonzales responded that "we are happy to listen to your ideas."

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to whether this administration will actually do more than "listen" to ideas?

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to whether when push comes to shove, Specter will let them weasel out of any real oversight?

Unacceptable

Unacceptable

It is simply unacceptable for the United States of America to have the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Dynasty as the Attorney General of this country. A country founded on the rights of the individual cannot sanctify a person to be the Attorney General of these United States who sanctified torture as long as it wasn't "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." The US Attorney General's job is to function as the chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government. In that capacity the US Attorney General provides assistance and guidance to the heads of executive departments of the Government. We already know that Alberto R. Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions (which Gonzales views as "quaint") inoperative.

We know that Alberto R. Gonzales believes that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States.

These views are unacceptable in a US Attorney General.

For these reasons, the 2 Political Junkies blog opposes the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him.

We also stand with the Daily KOS blog in asking all bloggers of good conscience to oppose his nomination.

We also congratulate the Democratic members of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary who all voted against the nomination of Gonzales:

Patrick J. Leahy
RANKING DEMOCRATIC MEMBER, VERMONT

Edward M. Kennedy
MASSACHUSETTS

Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
DELAWARE

Herbert Kohl
WISCONSIN

Dianne Feinstein
CALIFORNIA

Russell D. Feingold
WISCONSIN

Charles E. Schumer
NEW YORK

Richard J. Durbin
ILLINOIS

So it was Data Mining!

This weekend, the NYTimes reported:

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

Later on in the article, there's some interesting stuff.

The Justice Department announced in January that eavesdropping without warrants under the Terrorist Surveillance Program had been halted, and that a special intelligence court was again overseeing the wiretapping. The N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, generally eavesdrops on communications in foreign countries. Since the 1978 passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, any eavesdropping to gather intelligence on American soil has required a warrant from the special court.

In that it's a felony (an "offense") to eavesdrop in any way other than what's allowed by FISA. And:

In addition, court approval is required for the N.S.A. to search the databases of telephone calls or e-mail records, usually compiled by American phone and Internet companies and including phone numbers or e-mail addresses, as well as dates, times and duration of calls and messages. Sometimes called metadata, such databases do not include the content of the calls and e-mail messages — the actual words spoken or written.

Now look at this part:

The first known assertion by administration officials that there had been no serious disagreement within the government about the legality of the N.S.A. program came in talks with New York Times editors in 2004. In an effort to persuade the editors not to disclose the eavesdropping program, senior officials repeatedly cited the lack of dissent as evidence of the program’s lawfulness.

I seem to recall that the Times took some heat because it knew about the warrantless domestic surveillance before the 2004 election - and yet didn't say anything. Do you think dubya's administration was lying then about the "lack of dissent" in order to bolster the Republicans' chances in November of that year? For an administration that politicizes everything, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Mr. Gonzales defended the surveillance in an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2006, saying there had been no internal dispute about its legality. He told the senators: “There has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into.”

By limiting his remarks to “the program the president has confirmed,” Mr. Gonzales skirted any acknowledgment of the heated arguments over the data mining. He said the Justice Department had issued a legal analysis justifying the eavesdropping program.

The dispute, it seems, was not about the program itself, but the data that the program sifted through. Yea, that makes sense.

But even the Times misses one:

On Tuesday, to respond to Mr. Comey’s account, Mr. Gonzales testified in a Senate appearance that he went to the hospital only after meeting with Congressional leaders about the impending deadline for the reauthorization. He said the consensus was that the program should go on, so he felt he had no choice but to seek Mr. Ashcroft’s approval.

Where's the mention that this is also completely wrong? Take a look:

Tom Daschle. Jay Rockefeller. And now Nancy Pelosi.

That makes three members of the Gang of Eight -- the bipartisan congressional leadership briefed about President Bush's warrantless surveillance -- to dispute Alberto Gonzales's testimony that the Gang demanded the surveillance continue after a March 2004 briefing telling them that acting Attorney General James Comey refused to reauthorize the program.

Perhaps it depends on what the definition of "consensus" is.

Mary Beth Buchanan - A Curious Plot Twist

Yesterday the Washington Post reported:

Unreleased government records obtained by the Washington Post show that the Justice Dept. listed 26 U.S. attorneys as candidates for firing, including nine who were fired in 2006. The roster of prosecutors is much longer than previously acknowledged.

Included on this list?

Our very own US Attorney, Mary Beth Buchanan.

The Post showed the evolving list of US Attorneys to be fired. On September 13, 2006 Kyle Sampson, AG Gonzales' Chief of Staff (and, ashamed as I am to note it, possible dayvoe-lookalike) Kyle D. Sampson sent a memo to the White House including nine US Attorneys recommended for firing. Incidentally, five of the nine would be dismissed. Buchanan shows up on a list compiled a couple weeks later by Michael Elston, Chief of Staff to the Deputy Attorney General "suggesting five other candidates."

The Washington Post points out elsewhere that:

The documents do not specify why removals were contemplated or why some prosecutors kept their jobs, the sources said.

And no one really knows anything about anything. From Pamela Reed Ward in today's P-G:

But Michael Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, said yesterday through his attorney that his e-mail was taken out of context.

Ok this is where it gets confusing.

The names that were included had been suggested to him by others, and Mr. Elston never thought anyone on that list should be fired.

"To the contrary, Mike's view is that the five U.S. Attorneys mentioned in the e-mail are among the Department's best," the statement said.

But a few paragraphs down:

According to attorney Robert Driscoll, Mr. Elston was asked in October 2006 by others in the Justice Department "if there were any concerns about U.S. Attorneys that senior department leadership was not aware of."

When Mr. Elston asked around, his attorney said, he was not specifically asking for names of people to be terminated, only for those who others might have a problem with.

So - these are the "Department's best" but Elston's looking for "any concerns" about them? How does that make sense? However that's a separate issue. The big problem is how (and why) these names made it, however temporarily, onto a "fire" list. From the Post:

The number of names on the lists demonstrates the breadth of the search for prosecutors to dismiss. The names also hint at a casual process in which the people who were most consistently considered for replacement were not always those ultimately told to leave.

When shown the lists of firing candidates late yesterday, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), perhaps the most outspoken critic of the way Gonzales handled the prosecutor dismissals, said they "show how amok this process was."

The whole thing was a mess. A complete mess. When it wasn't politicizing the DoJ, the administration was just simply screwing it all up anyway.

Buchanan was asked for a comment:

"Simply put, there is no logical reason that my name would appear as part of an e-mail suggesting prosecutors to be considered for replacement," she said, noting that she's had "unprecedented success" during her tenure.

And the White House as well:

Yesterday, Justice Department officials issued a brief statement on the matter, saying the department would not publicly confirm whether any U.S. attorney was on one of Mr. Sampson's lists, which were used by him in the discussion process.

"Many names on these lists which have been shared with Congress, clearly did not represent the final actions or views of the Department's leadership or the Attorney General," the statement said.

"Whether they are on any list or not, U.S. Attorneys currently serving enjoy the full confidence and support of the Attorney General and Department of Justice."

Later in the day, Mr. Gonzales sent another statement, specifically about Ms. Buchanan, saying that she has his full confidence and support.

Considering, though, the drubbing Gonzales has been taking in the Congress recently, I'm not sure that's a recommendation one would want to keep in handy.

Gonzales To Be Charged?

Spokesman.com is reporting:

The U.S. Inspector General may recommend criminal prosecution of departed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the conclusion of an investigation, possibly as early as next month, the fired former U.S. attorney for Western Washington told a Spokane audience Friday.

Some details from McKay:

Gonzales “lied about” reasons for the firings when questioned under oath in July by the Senate Judiciary Committee and now has hired a lawyer and is refusing to answer questions from the Inspector General, McKay said.

The White House said McKay was fired for poor performance ratings of his office, but the ex-U.S. attorney said he and his office got exemplary reviews just three months before he was fired.

“The chief law enforcement officer for the United States should not lie under oath,’’ McKay told the bar association.

It was reported last week that Gonzales has now retained a high-profile defense lawyer, and apparently is refusing to answer questions from the Inspector General, which could signify the investigation is nearly complete, McKay said.

And this guy was appointed by dubya, remember.

There's some deeper stuff over at Next Hurrah.