Gonzales agrees to testify on warrantless-search program

January 13, 2006

Earlier this week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said, in surprisingly candid language, that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would have to testify on the legality of Bush’s warrantless-search program. As Specter said, in reference to Gonzales, “Well, I didn’t ask him if he had agreed…. I don’t think he has a whole lot of choice on testifying.”

Conveniently enough, Gonzales isn’t going to have to face a subpoena.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday he will testify publicly at a Senate hearing on the Bush administration’s domestic spying program, in the face of questions from lawmakers and legal analysts about whether it is lawful.

Gonzales said he reached an agreement with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to answer questions about the legal basis for the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping on telephone conversations between suspected terrorists and people in the United States.

“We believe the legal authorities are there,” Gonzales said at a news conference at the Justice Department. “The president acted consistent with his legal authority in a manner that he thought was necessary and appropriate to protect the country against this new kind of threat.”

A few things. One, this suggests the attempts to shift the hearings to Pat Roberts and the Senate Intelligence Committee have failed, which is bad news for the White House, which wanted the change in venue.

Two, I guarantee the hearings will be more interesting than the Samuel Alito hearings.

And three, is it possible that Gonzales and the rest of the Bush gang have dropped their opposition to hearings because they’ve come to believe the NSA controversy is politically beneficial?

It’s seems absurd to think a White House caught intentionally circumventing the law would find this politically advantageous, but polls suggest the conservative frame for the story — it’s spying on bad guys, not about ignoring the rule of law — has caught on.

Indeed, Slate’s John Dickerson suggested that Bush sees this scandal as a 2002-like opportunity to “invite Democrats to another round of self-immolation.”

As Kevin noted, “after a few friendly rounds of traitor-mongering and mushroom-cloud-alarmism to soften up the crowd,” it’s likely that Rove & Co. believe warrantless-searches is eminently spinnable in a way that helps Republicans and hurts Dems.

If the Dems are caught flat-footed on this one, it’ll be a travesty. We’ll be looking at the first White House controversy ever in which a president is proud to have been caught breaking the law. Something to watch for.

It could mean that they’ve nothing to hide. That the
story is already out there, and appears to have
done little damage. In that case, resisting hearings
would be politically more risky than pretending to
embrace them.

I think in the end, if there’s nothing more to the
story, the American people won’t give a damn.
In fact, most Americans probably applaud his
cutting corners to “protect” them, even if a slight
majority think he should have followed the rules,
which have been described endlessly as a
mere rubber stamp process, so what the hell
is the big deal?

Dems, by arguing how trivial compliance would
have been, face the flip side of “then so what?”

If, there’s nothing more to it.

  • Glenn Greenwald makes a compelling case that only a Select Committee will be able to get to the bottom of this. I tend to like the idea of a Select Committee’s bulldog counsel grilling administration officials about the extra-FISA spying.

    Is there anyway for us to lobby for such a thing? Do you think writing to Harry Reid and ask him to push for it would do any good?

  • Over at DailyKos a diarist points to a very disturbing article from Truthout.
    The short of it explains that NSA’s warrantless wiretaps began in the first days of the Bush regime – months before 9/11.

    What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information.

    But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that’s not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.

    Senior Administration officials? LIke Karl Rove, perhaps? The article goes on to say:

    The NSA’s domestic surveillance activities that began in early 2001 reached a boiling point shortly after 9/11, when senior administration officials and top intelligence officials asked the NSA to share that data with other intelligence officials who worked for the FBI and the CIA to hunt down terrorists that might be in the United States. However the NSA, on advice from its lawyers, destroyed the records, fearing the agency could be subjected to lawsuits by American citizens identified in the agency’s raw intelligence reports.

    I guess 9/11 really did change everything. Up until then, the warrantless wiretaps had only been shared with administration officials, not the intelligence community. At that point the NSA lawyers balked.

    I’m not entirely sure what to make of this until I see it confirmed by other media outlets. But, if it’s even halfway true, I dare them to spin this as a positive.

  • the big deal, hark, is presidential lawbreaking and the willingness of the republicans to go along with it after assuring us, not so many years ago, that the slightest violation of truth-telling by bill clinton in a deposition was a constitutional crisis.

    now, if the dems can’t make that stick, so be it, but that’s exactly the line they should be taking. and if, in the end, the public splits down partisan lines on this matter, which it may, what’s so bad about that? why shouldn’t the dems have pursued the correct position even if it didn’t win them any votes?

    meanwhile, we should note that Karl thought that social security destruction was a great issue to run on, and he thought the awful medicare prescription drug bill was a great issue to run on, and he thought that the “mission accomplished” moment would be the mother of all campaign commercials, and…

    well, you see my point. he’s a clever guy, all right, but he’s not perfect in his foresight.

  • I dare them to spin this as a positive. JoeW

    ShrubCo has been criticized for dropping the ball and not following up on cautions passed on by the Clinton admin. This can be spun to indicate that they were on top of it all and digging below the surface for information and secretive bad guys for the benefit of America. 9/11 happened regardless but it wasn’t because ShrubCo wasn’t trying. That’s the spin anyway. They’ve never let credibility get in the way of a good story.

    Once they say it, they just keep circling back to the same point and emphasize their concern for the safety of America. Shrubbish has already said it’s OK and he’ll keep doing it. Why not just go back to the beginning and crow he was “protecting us all along”.

    He had that stunned look while reading “My Pet Goat” because he KNEW how deeply and throughly and intimately they had been investigating dangerous communications. HOW COULD THEY HAVE POSSIBLY GOTTEN THROUGH? The masses will nod their heads in agreement. He was working so hard for us. How could it have happened? If only ShrubCo had just looked a little deeper. Maybe 9/11 could have been prevented.

  • Yes — I think the main reason why Gonzales has succeeded in keeping the hearings to the legal basis is not so much that details would jeopardized security but that they would appal most Americans. It’s not a long shot that they were used as a domestic political tool since day one of Bush’s first term.

    There are discussions going on elsewhere about the use of chaos as a political tool. What always comes to mind is the combination of chaos and control. The chaos (for example) of Katrina, long lines waiting to vote, mess in Iraq, huge corruption scandals; then the tightening of controls through gradual loss of liberties, rejected voter registrations, control of media, rendering Congress powerless.

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