Ashcroft: Officials Fought Over Snooping

[RamboLiberal]

Source: My Way News

The administration was sharply divided over the legality of President Bush's most controversial eavesdropping policies, a congressman quoted former Attorney General John Ashcroft as telling a House panel Thursday.

"It is very apparent to us that there was robust and enormous debate within the administration about the legal basis for the president's surveillance program," Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, told reporters after a closed-door meeting with Ashcroft.

The point is critical to two matters being considered in the Democratic-controlled Congress: One is the House and Senate Intelligence committees' ongoing review of 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which includes an extensive examination of the president's warrantless eavesdropping program.

The other is the House and Senate Judiciary Committees' parallel examinations of current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' service to the administration. Under that probe, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey revealed that Gonzales, then White House counsel, tried to pressure him and a critically ill Ashcroft to certify the legality of the wiretapping program.



Read more: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070621/D8PTEEL81.html

[UpInArms]

1. related: Ashcroft Tells of Surveillance Disputes

Former attorney general John D. Ashcroft told the House intelligence committee yesterday about disputes in the Bush administration over aspects of its domestic surveillance program, which peaked in the March 2004 visit to his hospital bedside by White House officials seeking his change of heart.

House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.) said the two-hour closed-door hearing covered Ashcroft's "whole tenure as attorney general." The hearing, Reyes said, examined how the administration viewed the use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provisions requiring a special court to issue warrants for domestic eavesdropping.

The panel heard last week from former deputy attorney general James B. Comey, whose mid-May testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the 2004 hospital episode sparked an outcry among congressional Democrats. Next month, Reyes said, the committee will hear private testimony from Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, with the goal of holding public hearings in the fall.

<snip>

But another member of the panel, Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), said that Ashcroft did not give detailed explanations of what he was so concerned about in 2004, more than two years after the program's inception. "He gave long, rambling, nonspecific answers," Holt said.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, frustrated by what Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) called "stonewalling" of its requests for information about the dispute by the Bush administration, approved subpoenas yesterday for documents from the Justice Department and the White House related to the authorization and legal justifications for the surveillance program.

read more here

[gratuitous]

2. Really, a debate?

That's funny, because I clearly remember being derided as a coward or a namby-pamby or a traitor or worse when I and others like me questioned the legality of these proposals. We also have a sitting Supreme Court Justice who would like nothing better than to lock me up based on his beady-eyed suspicion that I might not be his kind of American.

It's so reassuring to know that some unidentified people at some indeterminate time may have made some undescribed objection to the unfettered illegality of the Bush administration. Because the results of those alleged debates seem to be that that dissent was totally throttled. But at least they brought it up before the mayhem ensued. Sort of like that moment between the national anthem and the beginning of a Cubs game.

[0007]

3. How can these bossy pricks order us (the government) around?