Trust the liar

One would hardly know it from the fun Phoenix Woman is having over the revelations of the DC Madam, but there is actually some hard news coming out of Washington (Solomon, WaPo, via t/o):

“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.

    

The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.

   

 The reports also alerted Gonzales in 2005 to problems with the FBI’s use of an anti-terrorism tool known as national security letters (NSLs)…

   
    

Each of the violations cited in the reports copied to Gonzales was serious enough to require notification of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board…

… Some of the reports describe rules violations that the FBI decided not to report to the intelligence board. In February 2006, for example, FBI officials wrote that agents sent a person’s phone records, which they had obtained from a provider under a national security letter, to an outside party. The mistake was blamed on ‘an error in the mail handling.’ When the third party sent the material back, the bureau decided not to report the mistake as a violation.”

We have Alberto Gonzales’s word of honor that the FBI did nothing more serious than investigations have already shown. But if the past is any guide, there are secret, compartmentalized operations that have yet to be uncovered. We are asked to trust a liar.