Gonzales: "We're just making it up as we go along..."

Alberto Gonzales seems to think that consistency isn't that important; that all that matters is that you get to the result you want:

In a letter Tuesday to senators in which he asked to clarify his Feb. 6 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales also seemed to imply that the administration's original legal justification for the spying was not as clear-cut as he indicated three weeks ago.
. . .

In his letter, Gonzales revisited earlier testimony, during which he said the administration immediately viewed a congressional vote in September 2001 to authorize military force against al Qaeda as justification for the NSA surveillance. Bush secretly began the operation in October 2001, the letter said.

On Feb. 6, Gonzales testified that the Justice Department considered the use-of-force vote as a legal green light for the wiretapping "before the program actually commenced."

But in Tuesday's letter, he wrote, "these statements may give the misimpression that the Department's legal analysis has been static over time."

[Bruce] Fein said the letter seems to suggest that the Justice Department actually embraced the use-of-force argument some time later, prompting Gonzales to write that the legal justification "has evolved over time."

In other words, "we're just making s*** up as we go...." So don't ask any questions; it was all for the 'greater good', and if you know what's good for you, you won't ask any more questions. Particularly about whether Gonzales has been truthful in front of Congress, even though they gave him the courtesy of not testifying under oath.

So when he says:

"I did not and could not address ... any other classified intelligence activities."

... just take it with that thought in mind.

Updated 2006/05/18:

And with the news of the last week or so, now we're getting an idea of just what it was he "could not address"....

Of course, you pretty much knew that when you heard this tool of the maladministration say this....