I guess the should have put Gonzales under oath after all

[mburbank]

Gonzales Seeks to Clarify Testimony on Spying
By Charles Babington and Dan Eggen
The Washington Post

Wednesday 01 March 2006

Extent of eavesdropping may go beyond NSA work.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales appeared to suggest yesterday that the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance operations may extend beyond the outlines that the president acknowledged in mid-December.

In a letter yesterday to senators in which he asked to clarify his Feb. 6 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales also seemed to imply that the administration's original legal justification for the program was not as clear-cut as he indicated three weeks ago.

At that appearance, Gonzales confined his comments to the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, saying that President Bush had authorized it "and that is all that he has authorized."

But in yesterday's letter, Gonzales, citing that quote, wrote: "I did not and could not address . . . any other classified intelligence activities." Using the administration's term for the recently disclosed operation, he continued, "I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the President, the legality of which was the subject" of the Feb. 6 hearing.

[sspadowsky]

You have to admit that they do have a pretty sound strategy, Max: Overwhelm the public with so much horrible shit that they give up the fight out of sheer disgust.

[KevinTheOmnivore]

So the revised Patriot Act passed overwhelmingly yesterday.

This is what gets me about all of this. Why is the Patriot Act so imperative if the NSA program is within constitutional bounds? How is the existence of both justifiable?

[mburbank]

Yeah, that confused me too until I thought of it this way. They want to do whatever they want whenever they want, but they still hate hearing the word 'non' and they want to win every fight no matter what it's about.

It doesn't make sense, but I've raised two kids through toddlerhood, so it's a pattern I recognize.