As Dahlia Lithwick and others have assiduously demonstrated, Alberto Gonzales is not merely an evasive toady looking to protect his by now shameless Justice Department — he's also a liar. To Congress. The Washington Post reports today:
[T]he FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.
Can you guess, without reading on, Gonzales' justification for this contradiction? Only procedural "safeguards" were trangressed — not civil liberties. Never mind that such safeguards are all that stand between constitutionality and well, you know the rest…
No government bureau, even one that looks to justify actions that polite society would deem unreasonable and autocratic, can deny the findings of its own internal investigations. Not only does denial make that bureau lose credibility, but it makes it well near impossible to convince the public that, say, torturing suspected jihadists is both necessary and morally legitimate. (Dear commenters: I'm not convinced.)
I'm now waiting for the next Gallup poll which says the majority of Americans no longer condone torture in extreme cases like the ultra-hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenario. When that happens, the Bush administration's assault on the Bush administration's agenda will be complete.