Support for Attorney General Gonzales slips further

Even among GOP lawmakers on the Hill, concerns mount about the attorney general's truthfulness.

from the August 2, 2007 edition

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But administration officials have insisted that technically Gonzales was telling the truth, as he was talking about the terrorist surveillance program that was publicly confirmed by Mr. Bush in 2005 following news reports of its existence.

"The particular aspect of these activities that the president publicly described was limited to the targeting for interception without a court order of international communications of Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist organizations coming into or going out of the United States," wrote Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell in a July 31 letter to Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee's ranking minority member. [Editor's note: The original version incorrectly named the Director of National Intelligence.]

In other words, administration officials are saying the 2004 bedside dispute was about something other than the basic thrust of the program, something that has yet to be officially disclosed.

Given this defense, it perhaps would be hard to pin a perjury rap on the attorney general, according to some analysts. Perjury cases are hard to prove and can turn on technicalities.

Even so, Democrats say Gonzales clearly meant to mislead the panel. That fits a pattern of obfuscation on the part of the attorney general, they say. During a Senate hearing in April, Gonzales said more than 60 times that he did not recall certain aspects of the firings of US attorneys. Among the things he did not remember was a crucial final meeting on the subject in his office prior to the dismissals, a meeting which other testimony and documents show he did attend.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D) of Wisconsin said July 26 that he had read the classified record of the program, and that Gonzales's testimony was "misleading at best."

Other secret surveillance programs?

That leaves open the question as to what other aspects of the terrorist surveillance program remain secret.

Reports in The New York Times and elsewhere have said the confrontation may have involved a dispute over "data mining," a practice in which computers perform complicated searches through masses of electronic records, in an attempt to piece together personal relationships or other networks that might reveal the workings of terrorists.

Large-scale data mining has long been controversial in the US, due to its potential for infringement on basic civil liberties. One post-9/11 effort, the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, had its funds cut off by Congress in 2003 following criticism by the American Civil Liberties Union and others that it went too far.

The publicly admitted outlines of the terrorist surveillance program are "only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the NSA's spying on the American public," writes Ms. Cohn.

Despite opposition from EFF and other watchdog groups, Congress on Aug. 1 appeared close to updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the NSA to eavesdrop without a warrant on terror suspects overseas.

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