MB Civic

This is how President Bush keeps his promise to deal with Congress in good faith on issues of national security and the balance of powers: He sends the attorney general to the Senate Judiciary Committee to stonewall, obfuscate and spin fairy tales.

Testifying on Tuesday after months of refusing to show up, Alberto Gonzales dodged questions about President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping operation. He refused to say whether it was the only time that Mr. Bush had chosen to ignore the 1978 law on electronic eavesdropping. In particular, he would not say whether it was true that the government had accumulated large amounts of data on Americans’ routine telephone calls. “The programs and activities you ask about, to the extent that they exist, would be highly classified,” Mr. Gonzales intoned.

Mr. Gonzales did answer when he was asked who had derailed a Justice Department investigation, requested by Congress, into Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail without a warrant. Mr. Gonzales said that Mr. Bush himself did it, by refusing to grant the needed security clearances to the lawyers involved.

But even that seeming candor was shrouded in fog. Mr. Gonzales gave the committee documents that argued there was no need to investigate because the eavesdropping was the “subject of extensive oversight by the executive branch and Congress.” Actually, the program is supervised only by the agencies that are running it. The Congressional intelligence committees were not briefed until long after Mr. Bush refused the security clearances.

According to the documents, a “strict limit” had to be put on the number of people given clearances for “non-operational reasons.” That sounds nicely cloak-and-dagger, but does not explain why Mr. Bush granted immediate clearance to the lawyers charged with finding out who told The Times about the wiretapping in the first place.

Mr. Gonzales has turned in this sort of performance before, starting with his confirmation hearing. But this one was particularly galling because the White House was piously promising only last week to stop stonewalling Congress on matters of national security. The bill on domestic spying being considered by the Judiciary Committee gives Mr. Bush everything he wants on the theory that the president intends to submit the wiretapping to judicial review.

Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, said he was “a bit wary” that Mr. Bush really meant it. Talk about understatement.