As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.
Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Two Justice Department officials say that Gonzo was kept very well informed of FBI civil liberties violations:
The two officials spoke in a telephone call arranged by press officials at the Justice Department after The Washington Post disclosed yesterday that the FBI sent reports to Gonzales of legal and procedural violations shortly before he told senators in April 2005: "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse" after 2001.
"I have discussed and informed attorneys general, including this one, about mistakes the FBI has made or problems or violations or compliance incidents, however you want to refer to them," said James A. Baker, a career official who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.
"I’ve discussed a number of times oversight concerns and, underlying those oversight concerns, the potential for violations. And I’m sure we’ve discussed violations that have occurred in the past," said Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth L. Wainstein.
Gonzales’ office has a spin to rationalize all of this.
[Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth L. Wainstein] defended the 2005 statement by Gonzales that he was unaware of civil liberties abuses related to the government’s counterterrorism effort. Wainstein cited what he described as a dictionary definition of “abuse” in defending Gonzales’s remark. […]Wainstein said Gonzales was saying only that there had been no intentional acts of misconduct, rather than the sorts of mistakes the FBI was self-disclosing. “That is why I cited the definition of ‘abuse,’ which in Webster’s . . . implies some sort of intentional conduct. And I think that is sort of the common understanding of the word ‘abuse,’ ” Wainstein said.
Got that? Those weren’t abuses; they were just instances in which FBI agents illegally obtained personal information about Americans that they were not entitled to have.
Oy, these people!