Today the New York Times reports on testimony given to the House Judiciary Committee by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- testimony which has a familiar ring. Here's the key paragraph:
Gonzales suggested on Thursday for the first time that the president might have the legal authority to order wiretapping without a warrant on communications between Americans that occur exclusively within the United States.
"I'm not going to rule it out," Mr. Gonzales said when asked about that possibility at a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
Notice that this would be a significant expansion of the already remarkable surveillance program that allows the National Security Agency to tap phone calls and read e-mails between American citizens and people abroad, so long as the agency suspects the communication has something to do with terrorism. That program supposedly did not touch communications that were made within the United States. Gonzales was asked by the House Judiciary Committee whether a program intercepting such communications existed, and he refused to say yes or no. Tasia Scolinos, a Justice Department spokeswoman, later tried to backtrack: "The attorney general's comments today should not be interpreted to suggest the existence or nonexistence of a domestic program or whether any such program would be lawful under the existing legal analysis." His comments don't suggest the existence or nonexistence of such a program? That's a non-denial denial if I've ever heard one.
Clearly, it's important not to jump the gun here, but there are a few additional bits of somewhat old information that make Gonzales's testimony particularly intruiging. Last November, before the Times broke news of the NSA's domestic surveillance program, Walter Pincus of the Post reported that the Defense Department had expanded a number of intelligence operations into "domestic security activities." At the time, the White House was also proposing an expansion of the Pentagon's little-known office of Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, in order (as Pincus put it) to "transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts ... to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage." CIFA already got busted for spying on antiwar protestors within the US, after which it later admitted that it had screwed up. But as Pincus described the office, there was not much known about what it would be up to, and it's entirely possible that they've been doing more than spying on Quakers.
Also, about a month ago, after appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about the NSA's domestic surveillance program (at least the one we already know about), Gonzales sent a letter to them that was interpreted by some as indicating that there were more secret surveillance programs about which the administration hadn't told Congress. Something similarly curious had occurred in early February, when John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, was asked by Russ Feingold before a Senate Intelligence Committee whether there might be surveillance programs that had not been revealed to the full intelligence committees. As the Times put it, "The intelligence chief hesitated, then replied, 'Senator, I don't know if I can answer that in open session.'"
Add to all that the mysterious resurrection, as reported by the National Journal, of the main elements of Total Information Awareness, the very ambitious data mining program that was briefly to be headed by John Poindexter but which Congress immediately shut down. The parts of the intitiative that were apparently moved into the NSA supposedly dealt mostly with data mining from telephone calls and e-mails, but as the National Journal's story made clear, we still don't have a very good idea of how extensive the remaining programs are.
I hate to sound all conspiratorial, but I think it's helpful to recall these curious bits of information that have popped up -- and to which we were never treated a full explanation. It's possible that Gonzales was being overly cautious in speaking before the House Intel Committee. But remember: On at least one other occasion when Gonzales chose his words carefully before a Senate committee, there was, of course, a reason.