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The White House said Friday that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was referring to a very specific surveillance program in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee and, therefore, his testimony does not contradict that of FBI Director Robert Mueller. In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Thursday, Mueller said internal White House disagreements arose surrounding the legality of a National Security Agency program. Democrats claimed Gonzales testified that no such disputes occurred and, therefore, lied in his testimony. White House spokesman Tony Snow backed Gonzales’s testimony, saying that “there has never been at any juncture along the line any disagreement about the propriety or legality” of the program Gonzales referred to. “In 2004, the Department of Justice and the White House all agreed that there was a legal basis for intercepting conversations or communications involving al Qaeda or al Qaeda affiliates in the United States and overseas,” Snow said. “There’s no dispute about that.” Snow added that the program that Gonzales referred to in his testimony, the terrorist surveillance program (TSP), is just one of many surveillance activities in which the United States is engaged and, therefore, Mueller may not have been referring to the same program that Gonzales was. “Now, when you talk about the terrorist surveillance program, there are many intelligence activities in the American government,” Snow said. “We’re talking about a very thin slice, limited to exactly what I was telling you about, which is monitoring communications between al Qaeda or suspected al Qaeda affiliates, one in the United States, one overseas.” “Notice yesterday the director of the FBI never once used ‘terrorist surveillance program,’” Snow added. “It was used in questions to him and he always said … National Security Agency programs.” |
