[Infowarrior] - Making Alberto Gonzales Look Good

[Richard Forno]

June 11, 2013, 3:12 pm 

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/making-alberto-gonzales-look-good/?hp

Making Alberto Gonzales Look Good

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

Government officials employ various tactics to avoid actually saying anything at intelligence hearings, mostly by fogging up the room with references to national security and with vague generalities. It’s part of a dance, which the public and the media may grumble about but which we also expect.

Outright lying is another matter.

On March 12, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, testified at an open congressional hearing. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, asked him whether the National Security Agency collects “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”

His answer: “No sir.” Then he added: “Not wittingly.”

It was a lie, as everyone now knows from the articles about the N.S.A.’s data-mining program.

Mr. Wyden knew it wasn’t true at the time, since he is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and is privy to secret briefings from people like, well, Mr. Clapper.

On Sunday, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Mr. Clapper about the exchange.

“First, I have great respect for Senator Wyden,” Mr. Clapper said, using a Washington code phrase to indicate that he has no respect for the senator. “I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked ‘when are you going to start–stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is, meaning not answerable necessarily, by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least untruthful manner, by saying, ‘No.’”

Mr. Clapper further explained his least-untruthiness by saying he thought Mr. Wyden was asking whether the N.S.A. was actually listening to phone conversations (which Mr. Wyden clearly was not). “Going back to my metaphor, what I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers of those books in the metaphorical library,” he said. “To me collection of U.S. persons data would mean taking the books off the shelf, opening it up and reading it.”

This was not, by the way, the first time data-collection came up at a Senate hearing. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in July 2006, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was asked whether the government had accumulated large amounts of data on Americans’ routine phone calls. “The programs and activities you ask about, to the extent that they exist, would be highly classified,” Mr. Gonzales said.

You have to wonder about giving a position of vast responsibility to someone who can beat Mr. Gonzales in dishonesty.

Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate today that Mr. Clapper should be fired. I doubt Mr. Obama is going to do that. But, as Mr. Kaplan said, Mr. Clapper’s participation in any public discussion of the limits of data mining will be of no value, since we are going to have to parse his meanings of complex words like “yes” and “no.”

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