As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse,” Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.
However,
Six days earlier, the 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 story goes on to detail all of the various pieces of information that Gonzales was privy to prior to his statements to Congress.
Now, it has oft been stated that Gonzales is either utterly incompetent or a liar. Given that I find it impossible to accept that he has had the career that he has had (a BA from Rice, a JD from Harvard, partner in a Houston law firm, general counsel to the Governor of Texas, Secretary of State of the State of Texas, Associate Justice on the Texas Supreme Court, counsel to the President and US AG) if he is an utter idiot. Granted, his more impressive resume items have all come as a result of George W. Bush’s appointment pen, but it isn’t as if he didn’t actually do those jobs–had he been utterly incompetent, we would have known about it before now.
As such, that leaves the only option as being that the man is a liar, and more insidiously he lies when it matters most: when he is testifying in an official capacity before the Congress of the United States (two other examples: he plead ignorance of meetings regarding the USA controversy and told Congress that there had been no serious disagreements over the White House’s surveillance program, yet we know that that is not the case).
Sean Hackbarth has had enough is calling for Gonzales’ firing on the predicate that Gonzales is incompetent (although he allows that his likely a liar as well). He further argues that Bush is being too loyal.
I fear, however, that this is not the case. Rather, I think that Gonzales knows full well what he is doing and that the President does as well. For one thing, Gonzales has essentially been a key lieutenant of Bush’s since 1994. I find it difficult to believe that he has become a radical free agent at this stage of the game. Further, much of the dissembling before Congress has been done in the pursuit of protecting various anti-terror policies and programs (the domestic surveillance program, the Patriot Act, etc.) which Bush believes he has every right to pursue as he sees fit under his role as a “war president.” Indeed, Gonzales has been a major advocate of the President having extraordinary war-related powers (see here, for example).
No, rather than Gonzales being an embodiment of incompetence and Bush acting outing of misplaced loyalty, I fear that Gonzales is doing exactly what Bush wants him to do: obfuscate for the purpose of maintaining as much power as possible for the executive branch.
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