Remember when Gonzo testified repeatedly and inconsistantly about the NSA eavesdropping

[maddezmom]

could this have anything to do with CIA tapes and the President's approval of Torture?

Documents Dispute Gonzales Testimony
Published: July 26, 2007
Documents indicate 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 on Tuesday by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. Gonzales repeatedly testified that the subject of the emergency meeting on March 10, 2004, was not the terrorist surveillance program, which allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on suspects in the United States without receiving court approval.


Instead, he said, the meeting focused on another intelligence program he would not describe.

But a four-page memorandum from the national intelligence director's office, obtained by The Associated Press, shows that the White House briefing was about the surveillance program.

more: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CE3DF103EF935A15754C0A9619C8B63


Gonzales Offers a Defense to Senate Panel

By JAMES RISEN
Published: August 2, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales offered a narrowly drawn defense of his recent Congressional testimony on Wednesday, saying he had been truthful in denying that there had been serious disagreements within the Bush administration about the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without warrants.

In a letter to leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Gonzales said a dispute between the Justice Department and the White House in March 2004 involved other N.S.A. surveillance activities, not that domestic eavesdropping program. He said the White House first called the eavesdropping the Terrorist Surveillance Program after it was publicly disclosed in December 2005 and confirmed by President Bush.

The attorney general has been under fire from Congressional Democrats for what they describe as misleading testimony both last week and in 2006, and some lawmakers have threatened him with a perjury investigation.

In his letter on Wednesday, he acknowledged that his testimony might have been confusing to those who did not realize that he was parsing his words so carefully.

“I recognize that the use of the term Terrorist Surveillance Program and my shorthand reference to the ‘program’ publicly ‘described by the president’ may have created confusion, particularly for those who are knowledgeable about the N.S.A. activities authorized in the presidential order,” he said in the letter, sent to Senators Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the committee’s senior Republican.

more:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/washington/02gonzales.html


Can You Even Imagine How Bad it Must Have Been?


Marty Lederman


I want to put yesterday's incredible Comey testimony in some context, to demonstrate just how otherworldly this story is -- and what an extraordinary tale it tells about the nature of the officials who are running our government.

In March 2004, the NSA surveillance program had been operational for two-and-a-half years. According to the President and NSA, it had produced extraordinarily valuable intelligence against potential terrorist actions. (At the very least, it's fair to assume that the folks in DOJ understood this to be the case.) The NSA and the phone companies had been going full-steam ahead on the program, even though on its face it would be a crime to do so under FISA. See 18 U.S.C. 1809. Presumably they did so only because OLC had written one or more legal opinions concluding that the President had Article II authority to disregard the statute in wartime -- a legal theory not only critical to the operation of the program, but also at the very heart of the Vice President's passionately held philosophy of Executive prerogatives.

Jack Goldsmith was confirmed to be head of OLC in October 2003. He was a loyal Republican and supporter of the President. And yet almost as soon as he took office, he began reviewing much of John Yoo's handiwork, and found it lacking. Barely two months into his new job, for instance, Goldsmith called the Pentagon and told them that they must immediately cease relying on the critical Yoo Opinion that formed the basis for the Department of Defense's absuive interrogation policies in Iraq and elsewhere. (I've reviewed this fascinating story in detail here.)

According to Comey, "there were a number of issues that was looking at" as part of his "reevaluation" of past OLC advice, and the NSA program "was among those issues" under OLC review. "Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. They did so at their peril." (The quotation from the best account yet of this basic story -- the article in Newsweek in February 2006 by Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor and Evan Thomas. That article obviously owes a great deal of debt to partial accounts published earlier by, e.g., the New York Times and this blog. Nevertheless, it is a taut, comprehensive and compelling account of what might be the most revealing aspect of the legal crisis within the Executive branch during the past six years. It is well worth reading.)

more:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/05/can-you-even-imagine-how-bad-it-must.html

[sakabatou]

1. So, do we indict for perjury?

[maddezmom]

2. Gonzo?

sure then maybe we can get Bush and Cheney and all the rest of the criminals.

[sakabatou]

3. But when?

I don't think this Congress will actually do anything.

[L. Coyote]

4. "Gonzolies" is the English neologism describing the last man standing after a lying match.

Remember? More succinctly, I do not do not recall!

"Gonzolies Adventures in Ronderland" is a tale with twisted logic epitomizing the genre of nonsense literature. Gonzolies is just one of the characters in the fairy tale of current American politics. The Republican Party has fallen down a rabbit-hole into an hallucinatory realm populated by grotesque misstatements from wild, anthropomorphic creatures like Talking Point Cards, a rabbit-hole where beliefs transcend reality.

Gonzolies, a bored attorney looking for an adventure, starts a journey at Folly Bridge near Crawford, Texas, and ends up years later in the village of Gods Town. Gonzolies takes interest in a passing, ghostly super hero, a white knight muttering "Oh dear! Oh God! The Commies are coming!" He follows the knight down a deficit hole, and finds himself in a dreamlike world of magical beliefs where Gonzolies and R, the now aging super hero, grow to gigantic size.

Eventually Gonzolies joins Mad-Hater and his boss, March-to-War at a never-ending tea party of deficit spending, they go to a distant seashore and meet Mock Truth, and finally attend the Trial of "Critical Reason," the sole non-grotesque character in their adventure. Critical Reason has been accused of "disturbing truths." While Gonzolies prosecutes Critical Reason, he shrinks to a fraction of his inflated height, and the dream ends. Gonzolies wakes up at the picnic in Crawford, Texas.

Nonetheless, Gonzolies soon realizes that in Crawford up is still down and down is still up, and his new super hero, W, is enraptured by his own hallucinatory realm populated by wild, grotesque misstatements and talking points. Just when diminitive Gonzolies realizes the dream has not actually ended, he awakens again, and he realizes he was still at a lying contest and he was not the last man standing.

This time he has awakened in American politics, on the far side of Folly Bridge in Gods Town, where up is still down and down is up, and the lying contest goes on as W praises Gonzolies. Gonzolies wonders, "Am I still dreaming. How can I know if up is down and down is up?" He also wonders, "Am I still standing? Am I really Gonzolies, or is all this still just a dream in Ronderland?"