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February 7, 2006
The President's Attorney
The Los Angeles Times has an editorial that gets to the point of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's testimony yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee,
WHAT A DIFFERENCE eight years makes. In 1998, then-Atty. Gen. Janet Reno was repeatedly battered by Congress for showing insufficient independence from President Clinton (by naming only seven independent counsels instead of nine to investigate his administration). Republicans in one House committee issued Reno a rare contempt citation for refusing to cough up internal memos, while U.S. Circuit Judge Laurence H. Silberman opined that she was "in effect acting as the president's counsel under the false guise of representing the United States."In 2006, the independent counsel law is gone, many Republicans have rediscovered the joys of White House secrecy, and the attorney general not only acts like the president's counsel, he was the president's counsel for four critical years. So it should come as no great surprise that Alberto R. Gonzales sounded more like a White House spokesman on Monday than the country's chief law enforcement officer. But that doesn't make the attorney general's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens any less disappointing.
To me it's not so much what the Attorney General said, although I found much of that both evasive and disingenuous, it's more about his role as chief law enforcement officer rather than the President's attorney. In what I have read of his testimony, he seems to be in a defensive mood rather than a explicative mood. I would have hoped that the Attorney General would have given the members a coherent explanation of the law(s) involved and how the administration was applying them rather than a political defense of his boss.
Read the whole editorial. It's among the best I have seen on this subject.
Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure that President Washington don't do a lot of electronic surveillance and I'm equally sure that Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt did serve before the enactment of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Posted by Duane Smith at February 7, 2006 3:00 PM | Read more on Current Events |
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