Alberto Gonzales' Bait-and-Switch

Tom Maertens

During his February 6 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Gonzales was careful to restrict his testimony to a program he called the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

In fact, he was so careful to answer questions only about "this program," that at some point it became clear that he was trying to limit his testimony to only a portion of NSA's domestic eavesdropping program.

I noted the verbal sleight-of-hand during commentary for Minnesota Public Radio (here -- two segments) and suggested that there must be other domestic eavesdropping that Gonzales was refusing to talk about. A dozen intelligence community members would not have gratuitously revealed the existence of highly classified program to the New York Times unless they were seriously concerned about violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Newsweek has now revealed that the infamous Total Information Awareness program, led by John Poindexter, was continued under another name, Topsail. Congress refused to appropriate money for TIA because it was viewed as a threat to civil liberties -- an industrial scale fishing expedition. The fact that Poindexter was in charge, a guy convicted of several felonies in connection with the Iran-Contra, guns-for-hostages scandal, was further reason to be suspicious of the program. (Some counts were later overturned; George H.W. Bush pardoned Poindexter for the remaining felony counts.)

Instead of killing the program, as Congress mandated, Rumsfeld and DOD reincarnated it as Topsail. That was the program Gonzales did not want to talk about.

Senators were asking questions about domestic eavesdropping, and he was answering questions about just a portion of the overall program, one involving overseas calls to the U.S. That allowed him to say that "this" program is limited and carefully circumscribed.

So, Senate Judiciary Committee members, in case they hadn't figured it out earlier, should now be aware that Alberto Gonzales pulled a classic bait-and-switch.

This makes it clearer why Arlen Spector did not swear in Gonzales, an omission probably insisted on by the White House. Gonzales was about to perpetrate a carefully-orchestrated deception and the administration wanted to protect him from perjury charges should someone like Russ Feingold, who had charged that Gonzales lied to the Senate in earlier testimony, decided to pursue legal action. In other words, the Senate was punked again by Bush/Rove/Cheney.