Three Key Republicans To Side With Dems This Week At Intel Committee Wiretap Hearings...
Newsweek Michael Isikoff, Mark Hosenball and Evan Thomas February 12, 2006 at 12:33 PM
READ MORE: George W. Bush
The attorney general of the United States was playing rope-a-dope. Why, the senators wanted to know, did the White House circumvent a law passed by Congress, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires intelligence services to obtain search warrants before intercepting international communications inside the United States? Alberto Gonzales was evasive and bland. Speaking in legalisms, he offered few details about the National Security Agency's sweeping post-9/11 eavesdropping program. After a series of senatorial questions had gone essentially unanswered, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont interjected, "Of course, I'm sorry, Mr. Attorney General, I forgot: you can't answer any questions that might be relevant to this."
Such sarcasm might be expected of a Democrat like Leahy. But Gonzales also came under tough questioning from four of the 10 Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, including its chairman, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. At the hearing, Gonzales argued, as President George W. Bush has several times before, that Congress gave the executive branch the power to wiretap when it passed a resolution, right after 9/11, authorizing the "use of force" to battle terrorism. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a conservative Republican, called that argument "very dangerous in terms of its application to the future. When I voted for it, I never envisioned that I was giving to this president or any other president the ability to go around FISA carte blanche."
READ WHOLE STORY
READ MORE: George W. Bush
The attorney general of the United States was playing rope-a-dope. Why, the senators wanted to know, did the White House circumvent a law passed by Congress, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires intelligence services to obtain search warrants before intercepting international communications inside the United States? Alberto Gonzales was evasive and bland. Speaking in legalisms, he offered few details about the National Security Agency's sweeping post-9/11 eavesdropping program. After a series of senatorial questions had gone essentially unanswered, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont interjected, "Of course, I'm sorry, Mr. Attorney General, I forgot: you can't answer any questions that might be relevant to this."
Such sarcasm might be expected of a Democrat like Leahy. But Gonzales also came under tough questioning from four of the 10 Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, including its chairman, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. At the hearing, Gonzales argued, as President George W. Bush has several times before, that Congress gave the executive branch the power to wiretap when it passed a resolution, right after 9/11, authorizing the "use of force" to battle terrorism. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a conservative Republican, called that argument "very dangerous in terms of its application to the future. When I voted for it, I never envisioned that I was giving to this president or any other president the ability to go around FISA carte blanche."
READ WHOLE STORY
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 1:37 PM
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