One Program or Two?

(updated below--twice)

According to Think Progress, Alberto Gonzales testified today that the secret program that prompted his late-night visit to John Ashcroft's hospital room was not the NSA warrantless surveillance program that the New York Times first disclosed in December 2005. Gonzales said:

The disagreement that occurred was about other intelligence activities and the reason for the visit to the hospital was about other intelligence activities. It was not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people.

This would appear to directly contradict what Gonzales himself said on June 5th:

Mr. Comey’s testimony related to a highly classified program which the president confirmed to the American people sometime ago. And, because it’s a highly classified program, I’m not going to comment on his testimony.

Think Progress concludes:

If Gonzales’ testimony is accurate today, then he is confirming the existence of a new administration spying program.

I'm not so sure. The other possibility is that Gonzales is being hyper-legalistic here. According to accounts of Comey and others, the program that prompted the hospital room showdown subsequently underwent significant changes before the DOJ was willing to sign off on it again. Presumably the OLC drafted a newer, more narrow legal opinion and the program was tailored to fit that opinion. I suspect that when Gonzales refers to the "Terrorist Surveillance Program," he is using the term in the narrowest possible sense, i.e., he is referring to the post-2004 version of the program, not its predecessor.

It's entirely possible that there are domestic surveillance programs that we don't yet know about and that the Comey-Ashcroft incident involved one of those other programs. But I don't think that is necessarily the case. Either way, though, the fact that Gonzales seems intent on keeping Congress totally in the dark by lying and obfuscating endlessly is totally unacceptable. He needs to be impeached.

UPDATE: Alberto Gonzales and Tony Snow might want to get their stories straight. Here's Tony Snow discussing James Comey's testimony, as reported by the New York Times:

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, deflected questions about Mr. Comey’s testimony, but defended the N.S.A. program. Mr. Snow also noted that the Justice Department placed the program under the supervision of a special intelligence court earlier this year, which department officials said placed the program on an even firmer legal footing.

“Jim Comey can talk about whatever reservations he may have had, but the fact is that there were strong protections in there,” Mr. Snow said. “This is a program that saved lives, that is vital for national security, and furthermore has been reformed in a bipartisan way that is in keeping with everybody.”

Sure seems like Tony Snow thought Comey was talking about the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

UPDATE II: In his testimony today, Gonzales claimed that he corrected his June 5th statement (quoted above) two days later when his spokesman contacted Dan Eggen of the Washington Post. That must be a reference to this June 7th story by Dan Eggen, which contains the following graf roughly two-thirds of the way into the story:

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the surveillance program "was always subject to rigorous oversight and review. . . . We have acknowledged that there have been disagreements about other intelligence activities, as one would expect."

I don't know what that means, but if that was intended to clarify that Comey was in fact testifying about some other surveillance program that has not yet been disclosed, it clearly did not accomplish its goal. If you read the rest of the story, it's clear that Dan Eggen himself didn't interpret the statement that way because he ends the article this way:

Bush confirmed the existence of the surveillance effort after news reports in December 2005, saying it was authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was vital to protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. The program has since been put under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees clandestine eavesdropping in the United States.

Clearly Eggen was under the impression that "the program" Comey testified about was the same program the president had confirmed the existence of in December 2005.