Sidney Blumenthal annotates the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on NSA spying

blumenthal compares gonzales' performance and the hearings in general to kafka, john lecarre and mel brooks... my take is more fellini...

The scene at the Senate was acted as though scripted partly by Kafka, partly by Mel Brooks and partly by John le Carre.

[...]

The attorney general argued that the FISA law did and did not apply, that the administration was operating within it, while flouting it, and that it didn't matter. The president's "inherent" power, after all, allowed him to do whatever he wants. It was all, Gonzales said, "totally consistent."

[...]

Congress, Gonzales elaborated, had no proper constitutional role, but in any case had already approved the president's secret program by voting for the authorization for the use of military force in Afghanistan, even if members didn't know it or, when informed years later that they had done so, objected that they hadn't. The law that was ignored, Gonzales declared, shouldn't be amended to bring this domestic spying under the law because the secret program is already legal, or might be legal, and anyway it doesn't matter whether Congress says it's legal. The all-powerful president should be trusted, but when Bush states wrongly that he goes to court for warrants, it's all right that he doesn't know what he is talking about. "As you know," Gonzales said, "the president is not a lawyer."

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