Gonzo ensnared yet again.

What does one have to do to get rid of a bumbling liar passing himself off as an Attorney General in this country? No seriously. Alberto Gonzales has proved himself to be so phenomenally inept that I really question the fact that he ever studied law at all. He is the most blatant public liar I have ever come across and yet...and yet, he remains Attorney General. In a piece published today in The Washington Post, John Solomon discloses a bombshell – Gonzo lied again:

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

But guess what? Information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act now shows that the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that effectively said that there had been exactly that - verified cases of civil liberties abuses - six days prior to that statement. The copy of the report sent to Gonzales by the FBI said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

I know the right thinks "to hell with civil liberties," but civil liberties are actually the cornerstone of the United States Constitution that George Bush, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have collectively been in the process of shredding. The abuses that were reported to Gonzales range from erroneous wiretaps and surveillance carried out on the wrong person because a phone number was wrongly transmitted, to information about particular individuals being sent by mistake to third parties. In some cases, the FBI retroactively wrote new national Security Letters, that instrument which now allows them to basically avoid having to obtain warrants to listen in on your conversations or read your emails, after they had blundered in order to cover up their tracks.

All this Gonzales knew when he proclaimed that he knew nothing. Having used up his one form of defense, the hot-shot lawyer that he is, he will almost certainly reply to inquiries about this matter with that second, most cunning of answers to difficult questions, gleaned by years of law school and practice: "I don't recall."