Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Moving into the cover-up phase
One of the bizarre rules of Washington scandals is that severe wrongdoing, including law-breaking, is insufficient to sustain interest or to warrant real accountability. The wrongdoing has to be accompanied by subsequent deceit designed to conceal the wrongdoing, and then everyone gets excited. Put another way, a Washington scandal has not arrived until there is a cover-up component to it.
That is why I thought the letter from Alberto Gonazles to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week was so significant. Gonazles had many weeks to prepare for his testimony and, unlike most witnesses who testify in judicial proceedings, was free to speak for as long as he wanted without ever being interrupted or cut off by his questioners. The fact that he had to issue a 6-page single-spaced letter "clarifying" his testimony only a couple of weeks after he testified -- in which he literally retracted some of the most significant answers he gave and provided brand new, conflicting ones -- makes clear that Gonazles arrived at the Committee prepared to mislead it by concealing the Administration's actions.
This AP article from yesterday (h/t Edward Copeland) reports on a very interesting development in this regard:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060307/ap_on_go_co/eavesdroppingHaving Gonzales called back before the Committee in order to explain the glaring discrepancies between his testimony and his subsequent "on-second-thought" letter can endow the scandal with an even greater whiff of deceit and cover-up. And the fact that one of the topics in which the Judiciary Committee members are interested is the issue of whether there are other warrantless eavesdropping programs in existence greatly heightens the potential danger for the Administration.
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/03/moving-into-cover-up-phase.html
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