What Gonzales Really Told Us

[zengrifter]

Oh, and this just in (figures). zg

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White House Reiterates Faith in Gonzales 20 Apr 2007 The Bush White House called embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "our No. 1 crime fighter" Friday, a day after Gonzales' often halting explanations for the firings of eight federal prosecutors brought additional demands for his resignation.

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What Gonzales Really Told Us
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist | Friday 20 April 2007


The Gonzo Meter shows how close Alberto is to retirement.

The testimony given Thursday by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing to investigate the firing of eight Unites States attorneys, deserves a place of high honor in the Gibberish Hall of Fame. It was astonishing in its vapidity, almost to a point beyond description. The emptiness of Gonzales's answers, after several hours, became the political version of a Zen koan. They simply stopped my mind.

It was, in the main, an unspeakably gruesome performance. The aspect most commentators immediately seized on was the amazing number of questions Mr. Gonzales answered with either "I don't recall," or some permutation thereof. Estimates put the final count somewhere between 74 and 100 "dunno" replies, an amount truly Reaganesqe in stature.

There was no bristling give-and-take during this hearing, no fiery debate, no "Have you no sense of decency" moment when the rogue official is brought snarling to bay. Indeed, the only time tempers flared was when exasperated senators became fed up with Gonzales's inability to answer virtually any of the questions put to him. The annoyed senators, Republican and Democratic alike, at several points rained condescendingly rhetorical questions upon him in extremis, expecting no answers because they knew none were ever going to come.

...more - http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042007A.shtml

[zengrifter]

GOP To Gonzales -
Care For Some Hemlock?
John Nichols
The Nation / 4-21-7

The reviews are in: The Bush White House pronounces the president "pleased" with his solicitor's response to the rabble. It is a discreet pleasure.

While the president may be satisfied with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the response of just about everyone else -- including some of the nation's most conservative Republicans -- was anything but positive.

The online report on the testimony at the site of the National Review, America's leading conservative magazine, was headlined: "Alberto Gonzales strikes out."...more - http://rense.com/general76/gop.htm

[zengrifter]

The Problem With Alberto
By Elizabeth de la Vega
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor | Sunday 22 April 2007

After a day of testimony that showed Alberto Gonzales to be so self-contradictory, so conveniently vacant and - at times - so simply risible that even radio listeners could feel the disgust that permeated the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, we are all waiting to learn the attorney general's fate: Will he be pushed over the side, take a dive off the plank or simply hang onto the railing of the wreck the Bush administration has made of the Department of Justice?

Certainly, Gonzales is unfit to be the nation's chief law enforcement officer. We knew that before he testified on April 19. We knew that before he was even confirmed. No one who signs off on tortured legal memos authorizing torture, kidnapping and illegal detentions is fit to be the attorney general of the United States. But the departure of Alberto Gonzales will not right the listing ship that is the Justice Department. ...
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As one who worked as an assistant US attorney from 1983 through 2004 - in two districts, under four presidents and roughly ten different US attorneys - I can say that virtually every clause, and certainly the overall implication, of Gonzales's claim is false.
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...more - http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042207A.shtml

[zengrifter]

Alberto Gonzales: Tip of the Iceberg

by Prof. Marjorie Cohn
Global Research, April 21, 2007

As Democratic and Republican leaders alike pile on to demand Alberto Gonzales' resignation, only George W. Bush is singing his praises. Deputy press secretary Dana Perino said Bush was happy with Gonzales' testimony. "The attorney general continues to have the president's full confidence," she said.

It's not surprising that Bush would be pleased. Like a good soldier, Gonzales, who claimed a faulty memory 70 times, was careful not to incriminate his bosses.

Bush and Cheney hired Gonzales as attorney general to carry out their plan to amass governmental power in the hands of the Executive. They knew they could count on him.

Gonzales' bona fides were well-known to his bosses. When he was counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush from 1995 to 1997, Gonzales provided his boss with "scant summaries" on capital punishment cases that "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence," according to the Atlantic Monthly.

Gonzales prepared 57 such summaries, including one regarding the case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded man executed for murdering a restaurant manager. The jury was never told about his mental condition. Gonzales's three-page summary of the case for Bush mentioned only that Washington 's defense counsel's 30-page plea for clemency (which covered the mental competency issue) was rejected by the Texas parole board. Bush refused to stay executions in 56 of the 57 cases in which Gonzales wrote abbreviated memos.

The attorney general was central to the Bush-Cheney-Yoo illegal domestic surveillance program. When he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee after the New York Times uncovered the secret spying program, attorney general Gonzales walked in lockstep with his bosses. Gonzales would not tell the senators whether Bush had authorized other secret programs. He refused to say whether the government could wiretap purely domestic calls without a warrant, or whether he had the authority to search the first class mail of American citizens or to examine people's medical records. When Republican Senator John Cornyn asked him whether law enforcement could shoot down a plane with drugs, Gonzales said, "I'd have to think about that."

...more - http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...articleId=5456

[zengrifter]

Airing Gonzales' Dirty Laundry

By Bill Boyarsky, Truthdig
Posted on May 2, 2007, Printed on May 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/51317/

Since Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' inept stonewalling before the Senate Judiciary Committee shed no light on the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, let's dig into one of the real reasons -- the Republican effort to stop voter registration campaigns in poor neighborhoods.
The assault is an early battle of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Republicans are trying to limit registration of African-Americans and Latinos in a number of states that Democrats have a chance of carrying. It's not the only reason that attorneys were fired, but it is the most reprehensible.
U.S. attorneys are political appointees. When a new president and his party take power, the old are swept out for the new. But once in office, the attorneys usually work with local law enforcement and lawyers and are not often micro-managed from Washington. There have been exceptions to this. The power of local segregationists sent Kennedy administration lawyers into action to take over some law enforcement in the South during the civil rights movement.

This operation is different. The Kennedys wanted to give African-Americans rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The Bush crowd is trying to exclude African-Americans and Latinos.

...more - http://www.alternet.org/rights/51317/

[zengrifter]

Congress Considers Broadening
Justice Department Inquiry

OLBERMANN VIDEO - http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050807A.shtml

[zengrifter]

Gonzales Digs a Deeper Hole

TIME / Tuesday, Jul. 24, 2007
By JAY NEWTON-SMALL/WASHINGTON

Just when it seemed that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' reputation on Capitol Hill couldn't possibly get much worse, he showed up Tuesday for yet another hearing. And as with so many of his recent appearances before Congress, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee raised a lot more troubling questions than it answered — not just about his own conduct of and honesty about the U.S. Attorney firings, but also about the Administration's domestic intelligence gathering programs.

...more - http://www.time.com/time/politics/ar...6714%2C00.html

[aslan]

Originally Posted by zengrifter

Oh, and this just in (figures). zg

-----------------------------
White House Reiterates Faith in Gonzales 20 Apr 2007 The Bush White House called embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "our No. 1 crime fighter" Friday, a day after Gonzales' often halting explanations for the firings of eight federal prosecutors brought additional demands for his resignation.

----------------
What Gonzales Really Told Us
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist | Friday 20 April 2007


The Gonzo Meter shows how close Alberto is to retirement.

The testimony given Thursday by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing to investigate the firing of eight Unites States attorneys, deserves a place of high honor in the Gibberish Hall of Fame. It was astonishing in its vapidity, almost to a point beyond description. The emptiness of Gonzales's answers, after several hours, became the political version of a Zen koan. They simply stopped my mind.

It was, in the main, an unspeakably gruesome performance. The aspect most commentators immediately seized on was the amazing number of questions Mr. Gonzales answered with either "I don't recall," or some permutation thereof. Estimates put the final count somewhere between 74 and 100 "dunno" replies, an amount truly Reaganesqe in stature.

There was no bristling give-and-take during this hearing, no fiery debate, no "Have you no sense of decency" moment when the rogue official is brought snarling to bay. Indeed, the only time tempers flared was when exasperated senators became fed up with Gonzales's inability to answer virtually any of the questions put to him. The annoyed senators, Republican and Democratic alike, at several points rained condescendingly rhetorical questions upon him in extremis, expecting no answers because they knew none were ever going to come.

...more - http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042007A.shtml

I bet Scooter Libby wishes he had invoked the "I dunno" defense more often in his testimony. Whenever you make a statement of fact, and the other side is fishing to get something on you, you had better be entirely correct or you might end up with a charge of perjury. I wouldn't testify before Congress that red is a color, or that water is wet.

I suspect Congress has an secret informer so they know there is something to be gained by all this badgering. I also suspect they'll bring him down in the end, even though there is nothing illegal about firing attorneys for political reasons.

What do you say?

[moo321]

Of all the **** that we could go after this administration for (wiretapping, violating the Geneva Convention, etc.) they chose to go after them for something that ISN'T ILLEGAL! You can fire attorneys whenever you want.

[zengrifter]

Did Gonzales Lie to the Senate?


Washington Dispatch: New testimony from FBI Director
Robert Mueller suggests that the attorney general did not
tell Congress the truth about warrantless wiretapping.

By Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium
July 27, 2007

At a House hearing Thursday, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director
Robert Mueller provided information that added to a growing body of
evidence that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may have perjured himself
before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

...more - http://www.motherjones.com/washingto...testimony.html