Senator May Seek Gonzales Perjury Probe
In May this year I highlighted an editorial from the Washington Post - of all newspapers - in which it was stated:Mr. Gonzales's lack of candor is no longer surprising....
I highlighted this because the Washington Post, more than many other newspapers, has always sought to minimise scrutiny of the Bush regime's behaviour and yet, here, they were publicly and baldly stating that the Attorney General of the United States is a liar. Not only that, they were saying that he lies so often and so repeatedly that his behaviour can no longer be considered shocking. It is simply routine, par for the course. It is what this man does. He lies for the President.
Yesterday, Patrick Leahy threatened to request a perjury investigation of Gonzales, as Democrats said an intelligence official's statement about a classified surveillance program was at odds with Gonzales's sworn testimony.Now the fact that the Attorney General is a repeated and habitual liar is no longer the subject of serious debate. Even the Washington Post now concedes that this is simply what this man does.
The latest dispute involving public remarks by Gonzales concerned the topic of a March 10, 2004, White House briefing for members of Congress. Gonzales, in congressional testimony Tuesday, said the purpose of the briefing was to address what he called "intelligence activities" that were the subject of a legal dispute inside the administration.
Gonzales testified that the meeting was not called to discuss a dispute over the National Security Agency's controversial warrantless surveillance program, which he has repeatedly said attracted no serious controversy inside the administration.
But a letter sent to Congress in May 2006 by then-Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte described the congressional meeting as a "briefing on the Terrorist Surveillance Program," the name that President Bush has publicly used to describe the warrantless surveillance program.
Democrats pointed to the Negroponte letter yesterday in an effort to portray Gonzales's remarks as misleading. They said Gonzales is trying to conceal the existence of a dispute between White House and Justice Department lawyers that involved the surveillance program, which many Democrats have criticized as an illegal or unjustified abuse of executive-branch authority.
Several Democratic lawmakers, including Senate intelligence committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), have also said the meeting focused on the NSA program and have strongly disputed other Gonzales characterizations of the meeting.
However, I would still advise caution before Leahy and others proceed as Gonzales has persistently given himself an "out clause" on this matter.
Every single time he has faced questioning on this he has stated that there was no disagreement concerning "the program that the president has confirmed."
His precise language has never, ever, altered.
He has always made clear that his answers refer to "this program" only, the one he refers to as "the program that the President has confirmed" - i.e. the one exposed by the New York Times. However, whenever he has been asked whether there are other programmes which exist, he has responded, "I don't know how to answer that."
So, when he states that there was no disagreement over the "program that the President has confirmed", I think he might be telling the truth. I think the disagreement, the thing that caused Ashcroft, Comey and others to threaten to resign, was actually even more illegal than the wiretapping program "that the President has confirmed".
The program "that the President has confirmed" may very well have been the compromise that all the players agreed to. So when Gonzales states that the meeting was to discuss "intelligence activities that were the subject of a legal dispute inside the administration", I think they were actually discussing something much darker than the program we have all come to know as the Terrorist Surveillance Program.
As I say, the fact that Gonzales is a persistent and repeated liar is something that even the Washington Post now accepts as an undisputed fact. However, he is a lawyer and he is not dumb. He has consistently provided himself with caveats, and the discrepancy which Leahy has identified between the testimony of Gonzales and the recollections of others centres on the assumption that there is only one program.
If Gonzales utilised the same linguistic parsing skills at the March 2004 briefing that he has employed all along, then people may very well have been led to believe that there was only one program, when Gonzales may have been saying no such thing.On Tuesday, Gonzales described the March 2004 briefing for eight members of Congress as an "emergency meeting" to discuss the classified legal dispute, and he reiterated that the dispute was not about the NSA surveillance program. Rockefeller and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who were present at the briefing, subsequently told reporters the activities in question were part of the NSA program.
"As far as I'm concerned, there was only one" program, Rockefeller said.
It would be a shame to go after such an obvious liar and have him slip off the hook because you have made a false assumption about what he is attempting to mislead you about. The program "that the President has confirmed", I suspect, is not the worst thing that these guys have been up to.
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