Were it not for the fact that Alberto Gonzales has prostituted himslef so many times for the sake of his "friend" George W. Bush, one could almost feel some sympathy for him while addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee. He looked like a man facing a firing squad and appeared to be just about as defenseless with his ludicrous defense of the President's domestic spying program. Of course, coming from a man who penned and approved legal memoranda that purported to justify and legalize torture of detainees in order to vindicate his boss, it is not surprising to find Gonzalez coming to a shootout with no bullets in his gun.
Gonzales, with a dour and reasonably straight face, told the Committee that the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan to go after suspected terrorists (and those harboring or abetting terrorists) to prevent future attacks like the 9/11, supports the use of a domestic spying program. Never mind that not one Congressional representative from any political stripe thought that the resolution stated or even permitted that interpretation. In the mind of Gonzalez, Congress authorized the President to protect the American people from terrorist attacks. Therefore, the President is authorized to do anything he chooses and use any means to pursue that objective. He need not obey any Congressional limits, any statutes that Congress has enacted, any treaties that the US has adopted or even any Constitutional limits. The Administration essentially argues that he cannot break the law because he is above the law and anything he chooses to do is therefore legal.
Other Republicans have come shuffling to the President's support by arguing that "the end justifies the means." Jeff Sessions, R-AL stated:"One case of identifying one sleeper cell can mean a matter of life and death," he said on CBS. "It's not academic." By his logic, domestic spying on thousands of innocent Americans is justified if it nets even a single terrorist or terrorist plot. Of course, the US tried this logic before in WWII by putting Japanese Americans in "internment camps" to supposedly prevent their collaboration with the enemy. Unfortunately for Bush and Gonzalez, the Supreme Court ruled squarely that the practice was unconstitutional. Gonzalez seems to have skipped a few pages when he was supposed to have been syudying history, and in law school as well. [But then his boss was not to much of a stickler for actually being present in duty assignments, like school or National Guard service.]
Another Administration flack, General hayden, claims that the program is not used as a "drift net" in which thousands of communications are intercepted and then culled to find only the ones that justify further scrutiny. Of course, neither Hayden or any other Administration official will reveal any information that would back up their assertions, and they claim that releasing that information would endanger American lives [they decline to explain how]. We are exhorted to trust them in their good faith exercise of unbridled executive power and unreviewable discretion.
However, Information that has been released about the program, and comments from those familiar with it, suggest very clearly that the program has been used to intercept thousands of communications and less than a dozen have arguably contained any information that could have justified getting a warrant from the extremely accommodating FISA Court. This does not mean that the intercepted communications were actually harmful or that they actually involved any terrorist activity, only that they involved individuals or content that provided the most meager basis for justifying that they should be intercepted in the first place.
Former Congressional leader Tom Daschle has stated, in rebuttal to the Gonzalez assertion that the Resolution authorizes domestic spying, that the Administration sought to include such language in the proposed authorization and Congress expressly rejected it. So to argue that the Congressional Resolution supports the domestic spying program is not only absurd, it is a flat out lie. Arlen Specter, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee has expressed frustration at the Administration's refusal to allow Administration officials to testify, to release legal opinions regarding the program or to release any documents showing how the program is actually being used. [Most of us would call that "stonewalling," and the GOP would have called it that too if the information was sought from a Democratic White House.]
The GOP controlled Congress has been doinf backflips to give the administration any possible out or excuse to justify the legality of the president's conduct. In response to the White House lack of cooperation, Specter has urged that the White House go and get an opinion from the FISA Court as to whether the program is legal. That would put the Bush Administration in a real bind. The FISA Court would be asked to determine whether the FISA Court itself is irrelevant, because if the President can circumvent the warrant procedure entirely whenever the President wants to, there is nothing for the FISA Court to do and no reason for it to exist. It would require an amazing argument to convince the FISA Court that Congress expressly created a court to review and oversee wiretap authorizations, and then authorize the President to ignore that Court at his complete discretion. One FISA Court Judge has resigned in protest of the administration's activities.
How simple would it be to take random example of wiretaps that the administration has done and ask for in camera review by the FISA Court, after the fact, to at least give some comfort that the activity truly was connected to counterterrorism and was not completely abusive and illegal. Of course, doing so would negate the administration argument that following the FISA procedures would have imposed too much of a burden.
So we get to watch Gonzalez squirm while trying to defend the indefensible. At least Colin Powell appeared to have been given filtered or false information when he was required to go before the United Nations and make a complete fool of himself. Gonzalez, unless he is totally incompetent as a lawyer [an open question], clearly knows that he is pitching a loser.
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