William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t, April 20, 2007
The testimony given Thursday by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing to investigate the firing of eight Unites States attorneys, deserves a place of high honor in the Gibberish Hall of Fame. It was astonishing in its vapidity, almost to a point beyond description. The emptiness of Gonzales’s answers, after several hours, became the political version of a Zen koan. They simply stopped my mind.
It was, in the main, an unspeakably gruesome performance. The aspect most commentators immediately seized on was the amazing number of questions Mr. Gonzales answered with either “I don’t recall,” or some permutation thereof. Estimates put the final count somewhere between 74 and 100 “dunno” replies, an amount truly Reaganesqe in stature.
There was no bristling give-and-take during this hearing, no fiery debate, no “Have you no sense of decency” moment when the rogue official is brought snarling to bay. Indeed, the only time tempers flared was when exasperated senators became fed up with Gonzales’s inability to answer virtually any of the questions put to him. The annoyed senators, Republican and Democratic alike, at several points rained condescendingly rhetorical questions upon him in extremis, expecting no answers because they knew none were ever going to come.
Judiciary Committee member Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican senator from Oklahoma, dropped one of the more devastating bricks of the day after slogging through Gonzales’s feeble display. “It was handled incompetently,” said Coburn of the firings that inspired this hearing, if not of the testimony he’d just endured. “The communication was atrocious, it was inconsistent. It’s generous to say that there were misstatements; that’s a generous statement. And I believe you ought to suffer the consequences that these others have suffered. And I believe the best way to put this behind us is your resignation.”
The sentiment was repeated in the waning moments of the hearing by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who said: “Mr. Attorney General, at the beginning of the hearing, we laid out the burden of proof for you to meet, to answer questions directly and fully, to show that you were truly in charge of the Justice Department, and most of all, to convincingly explain who, when and why the eight US attorneys were fired. You’ve answered ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I can’t recall’ to close to a hundred questions.”
“You’re not familiar with much of the workings of your own department,” continued Schumer. “And we still don’t have convincing explanations of the who, when and why in regard to the firing of the majority of the eight US attorneys. Thus, you haven’t met any of these three tests. I don’t see any point in another round of questions. And I urge you to re-examine your performance and, for the good of the department and the good of the country, step down.”