Thread: Senate Scolds Gonzales on Eavesdropping Plan

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Senate scolds Gonzales on eavesdropping plan


By David Stout Published: January 18, 2007


WASHINGTON: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was lectured on Capitol Hill on Thursday by senators who were only partly mollified by the Bush administration's concession to allow judicial oversight of its electronic eavesdropping program.

Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who has just become chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told Gonzales that he welcomed the administration's decision, announced Wednesday, to seek approval for eavesdropping from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, "as many of us, many of us, have been saying should have been done years ago."

The administration's decision, Leahy said, is a tiny bit of good news in an otherwise gloomy period.

"In the 32 years since I first came to the Senate — and that was during the era of Watergate and Vietnam — I've never seen a time when their Constitution and fundamental rights as Americans were more threatened, unfortunately, by our own government," he told the attorney general.

Nor did Gonzales get any breaks from Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who has just stepped down as the committee chairman. Specter, too, said he was pleased that the eavesdropping program would now be under review by the intelligence surveillance court.

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"And it is a little hard to see why it took so long," Specter said.

Gonzales appeared at an oversight hearing and spoke on a number of issues, including what he called "the urgent need to reform our immigration laws."

"As the grandson of Mexican immigrants and as a law enforcement official, border security and immigration reform are close to my heart and always on my mind," Gonzales said. "The president and I believe that we can take pride in being an open country and a nation of immigrants while also protecting our country from those who seek to harm us."

But much of the back-and-forth was over the administration's decision to give the secret intelligence court jurisdiction over the wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency, after many months of insistence that the administration had the power to conduct surveillance without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States.

Now, Gonzales said, the administration is satisfied that extensive negotiations with the court have put in place procedures that will allow "the necessary speed and agility the government needs to protect our nation from the terrorist threat." But Gonzales's statement that he is not sure he can release details of the Jan. 10 court order, under which the secret intelligence court began overseeing the surveillance program, annoyed Leahy.

"Are you saying that you might object to the court giving us a decision that you publicly announced?" the senator asked. "Are we in Alice in Wonderland here?"

The attorney general replied that some operational details would still have to be kept confidential.

The testy exchanges indicated the depths of the controversy the surveillance program has stirred since it was disclosed by The New York Times in late 2005, about four years after the administration authorized it in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Leahy said the Justice Department had been "complicit in advancing these government policies which threaten our basic liberties and overstep the bounds of our Constitution," and in so doing had undercut the United States' position as a leading advocate for human rights.

Specter did not disagree, declaring that the administration had "paid a heavy price" for not bringing the surveillance program under judicial review sooner.

"As the grandson of Mexican immigrants and as a law enforcement official, border security and immigration reform are close to my heart and always on my mind," Gonzales said. "The president and I believe that we can take pride in being an open country and a nation of immigrants while also protecting our country from those who seek to harm us."

Sickening is'nt it?

Protecting our nation!! Are you protecting our citizens and police from dangerous illegal criminal aliens? NOT!!

You don't knw the first thing about protecting this nation. You are all for protecting everyone but the citizens of this NATION! TRAITOROUS ANCHOR BABY!