Mr. Gonzales’s Never-Ending Story
President Bush often insists he has to be the decider - ignoring Congress and the public when it comes to the tough matters on war, terrorism and torture, even deciding whether an ordinary man in Florida should be allowed to let his wife die with dignity. Apparently that burden does not apply to the functioning of one of the most vital government agencies, the Justice Department.
Americans have been waiting months for Mr. Bush to fire Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who long ago proved that he was incompetent and more recently has proved that he can’t tell the truth. Mr. Bush refused to fire him after it was clear Mr. Gonzales lied about his role in the political purge of nine federal prosecutors. And he is still refusing to do so - even after testimony by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, that suggests that Mr. Gonzales either lied to Congress about Mr. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping operation or at the very least twisted the truth so badly that it amounts to the same thing.
Mr. Gonzales has now told Congress twice that there was no dissent in the government about Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize the National Security Agency to spy on Americans’ international calls and e-mails without obtaining the legally required warrant. Mr. Mueller and James Comey, a former deputy attorney general, say that is not true. Not only was there disagreement, but they also say that they almost resigned over the dispute.
Both men say that in March 2004 - when Mr. Gonzales was still the White House counsel - the Justice Department refused to endorse a continuation of the wiretapping program because it was illegal. (Mr. Comey was running the department temporarily because Attorney General John Ashcroft had emergency surgery.) Unwilling to accept that conclusion, Vice President Dick Cheney sent Mr. Gonzales and another official to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to get him to approve the wiretapping.
Mr. Comey and Mr. Mueller intercepted the White House team, and they say they watched as a groggy Mr. Ashcroft refused to sign off on the wiretapping and told the White House officials to leave. Mr. Comey said the White House later modified the eavesdropping program enough for the Justice Department to sign off.
Last week, Mr. Gonzales denied that account. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee the dispute was not about the wiretapping operation but was over “other intelligence activities.” He declined to say what those were.
Lawmakers who have been briefed on the administration’s activities said the dispute was about the one eavesdropping program that has been disclosed. So did Mr. Comey. And so did Mr. Mueller, most recently on Thursday in a House hearing. He said he had kept notes.
That was plain enough. It confirmed what most people long ago concluded: that Mr. Gonzales is more concerned about doing political-damage control for Mr. Bush - in this case insisting that there was never a Justice Department objection to a clearly illegal program - than in doing his duty. But the White House continued to defend him.
As far as we can tell, there are three possible explanations for Mr. Gonzales’s talk about a dispute over other - unspecified - intelligence activities. One, he lied to Congress. Two, he used a bureaucratic dodge to mislead lawmakers and the public: the spying program was modified after Mr. Ashcroft refused to endorse it, which made it “different” from the one Mr. Bush has acknowledged. The third is that there was more wiretapping than has been disclosed, perhaps even purely domestic wiretapping, and Mr. Gonzales is helping Mr. Bush cover it up.
Democratic lawmakers are asking for a special prosecutor to look into Mr. Gonzales’s words and deeds. Solicitor General Paul Clement has a last chance to show that the Justice Department is still minimally functional by fulfilling that request.
If that does not happen, Congress should impeach Mr. Gonzales.
© 2007 The New York Times
Why doesn’t Bush fire him? For the same reason he commuted Libbys’ prison term. He knows enough to be dangerous.
If I were Gonzo I wouldn’t be taking any flights in small, private aircraft.
Firing or resigning I think may make Gonzo elegible for retirement benefits and a whole bunch of other stuff (that’s what happened with ol’ Wolffie at the World Bank). The only way Congress is going to get to the bottom of this is through impeachment. If Gonzo is impeached, Shrub can’t commute or pardon him. It’s done. And it will take half the time of a special prosecuter investigation.
Times up! IMPEACH NOW!!!
Surely the New York Times is joking when it suggests that Mr. Bush might fire Gonzalez for his incompetence and deception. In the first case, he is not incompetent: he is just a bad human being. In the second, he is deceiving on behalf of Mr. Bush. But I believe the Times knows this and, like those of years past who had to suggest that criminality was not done by the King, but by his ministers, it is showing deference to those with pretenses toward royalty. It is a time when the Democrats in congress are also behaving as if they cannot risk offending the King. Perhaps it is a more apt title than “President” because it is Kings who preached that might makes right and it is the case that the Bush administration took offices by extra-legal means. They use whatever means are available with complete disregard for law, dignity, ethics and humanity to meet their ends, which usually are at odds with everything this country claims in its, decreasingly true, democratic mythology.
At this moment, the US is considering a $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. To counter this perceived threat to Israel, the US government would GIVE Israel $30 billion in military aid to compensate. While we claim to be surrendering all of our Civil Rights, setting our Constitution on fire and holding foreign nationals without charges in the name of national security, our government schemes to sell $20 billion in high-tech weaponry to the nation that gave us 15 of the 9/11 hijackers. The nation that gave us Osama bin Laden. Interesting that citizens of the United States are not free to communicate through email or telephone without the government feeling free to listen in when we produced NONE of those behind the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon, but to Saudi Arabia, who provided much of the funding as well as the majority of the manpower and the man behind the 9/11 attacks, we are willing to sell great masses of weaponry.
At the same time that the government and media pundits are claiming that we cannot afford the “drowning” taxes required to offer healthcare to all citizens, we are GIVING $30 billion to Israel to compensate for our arms industry selling $20 billion to the Saudis! The justification for the arms sales is that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but, while we’ve gone to war with Iraq over the fear of weapons of mass destruction and are threatening to do the same to Iran on the grounds of nuclear “potential”, we are giving $30 billion in military aid to the ONE COUNTRY in the region that we KNOW to possess nuclear weapons: Israel!
We can’t afford to fund healthcare, education, environmentally responsible technologies, etc, because we are busy sowing the seeds of chaos in destruction in the Middle East. We are too busy protecting the interests of Big Oil, destined to kill us by war or by climate, to save ourselves from this same death industry!
http://unknown-arts.org/politics/?p=126
Can you believe these congresspersons have sat there day after day after day, week after week after week and let Gonzalez lie right in their faces. What took them so damned long to call him on it?
Using campaign spending limits to get America better politicians is the only way to solve America’s problems enough. Government funding of campaigns is a waste of time without it.
Where was the Times when the Dems were caving into the theocrats in the appointment of Roberts & Alito? The publisher and editors need to fire themselves for incompetence and deception. Paul Krugman, who early on recognized the radically fascist nature of the Beast, Bob Herbert and Frank Rich are the only ones on staff worth a tinker’s cuss.
What is becoming increasingly clear from this and the Scooter Libby “commutation” is that Bush is growing even more arrogant and disdainful of law and congressional oversight, let alone public opinion which is becoming ever more disgusted with him and his criminal regime.
This is beyond anything the country has ever witnessed, certainly worse than the Nixon misdeeds. I am almost inclined to believe that Congress is afraid to initiate impeachment proceedings because Bush and gang would ignore it and proceed to declare martial law based on domestic insurrection.
Having witnessed the entire Watergate scandal, I got some feeling of closure when safeguards were put in place to prevent the same type of stonewalling. Now we are witnessing yet another generation of weasels in the White House using all loopholes to stonewall America worse than ever.
They need to make an example of Alberto Gonzales. He has been the lawyer-enabler basically saying that anything King George wants to do is fine because of the war powers act. He needs to go down into a full crash and burn in front of national television.
However, what is critical is that somehow leads can be developed, people turned, a deep throat found that will finally uncork two of the masterminds of the evil in the white house, Carl Rove and Dick Cheney (the real president).
The Presidential Transparency Act needs to be fully upheld. Why should we have to go through another missing tapes to here are the tapes with accidentally erased portions BS act? The official business e-mail on Republican servers needs to be punished. E-mails are missing off of the official server, therefore a clear violation of the act or they need to be provided in their original 100 percent form. We need to make a few examples of people that are arrogantly stonewalling America and strengthen our safeguards to prevent future situations like this developing.
The NYT accuses Gonzales of “helping Mr. Bush cover it up” (the “it” referring to more wiretapping than has been disclosed, perhaps even domestic wiretapping). This is hilarious, considering that the NYT itself knew about one of the wiretapping programs for at least a year, but sat on the information until December 2005. The newspaper “helped Mr Bush cover it up” even though they knew about it BEFORE the 2004 elections.
And that’s not the worst of it. The NYT is taking its usual 2-faced sanctimonious stance, pretending to stand for accountability by demanding that Gonzo be impeached. Why don’t they demand that Bush & Cheney be impeached, as well, since they concede that Gonzo was just protecting his boss?
The NYT is terrified of what might happen, if a serious move to impeach Bush-Cheney gets underway. They’ve done too much themselves to keep Bush-Cheney propped up. They’re too closely linked with other Establishment social forces, especially the Democratic Party, to be willing to risk discrediting the whole Establishment — which might well be the result of a serious public airing of Bush-Cheney’s crimes.
Impeaching Gonzo is of course fully warranted, but it’s merely the appetizer. It’s not the main course.
It’s obvious why Gonzales has not been fired.
In Bush’s terms, he is doing a heckuvajob.
what a joke, so that’s what we’re reduced to, investigating Gonzo. Pure theater, it will lead to fucking nothing, except of course fooling the fools who want to believe Democrats are doing something.
Why aren’t Dems investigating REAL Bush crimes, like the reason he invaded Iraq? Or why he outed Valerie Plame? Or why he spied on Americans illegally?
Answer: because it would get Bush in REAL trouble and Neocon Nancy, Reid and Coward Conyers don’t want that. Shame on all of you for cheering and voting for these Bush enablers.
An incompetent president, an incompetent administration, an incompetent congress, and they are going to fire an incompetent attorney-general. Don’t hold your breath.
UNKNOWN ARTS, RICH M and JP: Great points and analysis.