Believe In America.com

butterbean · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2269

WASHINGTON: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was lectured on Capitol Hill on Thursday by senators who were only partly mollified by the Bush administration's concession to allow judicial oversight of its electronic eavesdropping program.

Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who has just become chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told Gonzales that he welcomed the administration's decision, announced Wednesday, to seek approval for eavesdropping from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, "as many of us, many of us, have been saying should have been done years ago."

The administration's decision, Leahy said, is a tiny bit of good news in an otherwise gloomy period.

"In the 32 years since I first came to the Senate — and that was during the era of Watergate and Vietnam — I've never seen a time when their Constitution and fundamental rights as Americans were more threatened, unfortunately, by our own government," he told the attorney general.

Nor did Gonzales get any breaks from Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who has just stepped down as the committee chairman. Specter, too, said he was pleased that the eavesdropping program would now be under review by the intelligence surveillance court.