Hems and Haws from Alberto Gonzales

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales marched into the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday and proceeded to dodge every question directed to him. But even so, the session did have a few interesting moments. The senators started with a small controversy over whether or not Gonzales should testify under oath. When Gonzales provided sworn testimony during his nomination hearings, he refused to answer a question from Senator Russell Feingold about the president's power to wiretap U.S. citizens illegally without a warrant because it was a "hypothetical situation" and, besides, such an activity was "not the policy or the agenda of this president." Of course, we've since learned that the question wasn't hypothetical, and it was the policy or the agenda of this president to do exactly that. But Gonzales wasn't sworn in today (a decision Senator Arlen Specter justified with the ever-popular "because I'm chairman and I say so" argument), so Gonzales had even more wiggle room when Feingold followed up. Not surprisingly, when pressed again, Gonzales continued to play semantics and insist that it was a hypothetical question because, despite the clear laws against it, the surveillance wasn’t illegal--so therefore, according to Gonzales, asking whether the President would approve illegal wiretaps has no relation to reality in any way whatsoever, so why bother wasting our time discussing it?

Feel free to wade through the transcripts if you want to. You can get a nice play-by-play at firedoglake in five easy installments (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I'm begging off from giving you more details myself, because there's really not much more too it than Gonzales stonewalling. He did remind senators from time to time that the nation was attacked on 9/11, but that's about the only spice he added. By the end of the day, Gonzales had left no question that he continues to act as the President's attorney rather than as the nation's top law-enforcement officer.

In his column yesterday, Dan Froomkin pointed out some nice comparisons between today's situation and the Senator Frank Church hearings on NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens thirty years ago. Revelations from those hearings led to the establishment of FISA in the first place.

The National Security Archive reports: "Despite objections from then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then-CIA director George H. W. Bush, President Gerald Ford came down on the side of a proposed federal law to govern wiretapping in 1976 instead of relying on the 'inherent' authority of the President because the 'pros' outweighed the 'cons,' according to internal White House documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University."