Throughout his lame explanations and excuses to U.S. senators about the Bush administration's secret spying on Americans' telephone and Internet communications, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales ducked and weaved and provided little more than banal political justifications for breaking the law.
Yes, breaking the law. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the government to obtain warrants before the fact, or five days thereafter, to spy on Americans. The president, on advice of his attorney general, broke the law.
Gonzales, whose career with the president has been more focused on political fixes of the law than constitutional, followed the White House line.
To wit: Spying is urgent; the FISA court takes too long; the FISA court leaks information helpful to "our enemy"; other presidents have done it; the president as commander in chief can ignore laws when he deems it urgent.
How many intercepts have been made? He didn't know. How many have been productive? He didn't know or wouldn't say.
Even Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans were aghast at his truculence and evasiveness, and they said so.
Given that Gonzales and others with the president's ear believe the FISA law and constitutional rights can be ignored, President Bush might believe he's entitled to impose yet more police powers on the public.
The question must be asked: Is America sinking into an oligarchy?
The impeached and ousted President Nixon believed he had power to spy and eavesdrop and bug without court order. Guess who helped carry out Nixon's black bag jobs? His attorney general, John Mitchell, whose paw prints were all over the Watergate burglary.
In his testimony this week, Gonzales joined the ranks of White House scaremongers as he used the threat of terrorist bombings to justify the spying program. It was cheap rhetoric.
He claimed that the spying program—read suspending rights of Americans and ignoring the law—are the key weapons in the government's quiver to battle the gossamer spooks of international terrorism.
Hogwash.
America doesn't have to throw out the Constitution in order to secure intelligence about terrorists. If the Constitution is not to look like Swiss cheese before this president is through, the nation's senators, congressmen and the judiciary have to do what they swore to do when they took office. They must protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America—even if it means protecting it from the president and his attorney general.
