Remember when oil executive testified last November, and Sen Ted Stevens refused to swear them in? And it turned out this wasn't cosmetic because a week later hard evidence came out that everyone of them had lied to direct question of substance -- and if they'd been under oath, that would have made them all liable to prosecution for perjury?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/15/AR2005111501842.html
Well it's becoming a tradition. Today they refused to swear in the Attorney General (see below). There's something absolutely through the looking glass about the highest legal official avoiding certain perjury and getting away with it in broad daylight.
I guess this is what they learned something from the perjury trap they set for Clinton -- never go under oath.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/politics/05cnd-nsa.html
<snip>
There were several minutes of tension early on, after Mr. Specter said it was not necessary for Mr. Gonzales to be placed under oath. Senator Feingold differed.
"Mr. Chairman, I just say that the reason that anyone would want him sworn has to do with the fact that certain statements were made under oath at the confirmation hearing," Mr. Feingold said. "So, it seems to me, logical that since we're going to be asking about similar things, that he should be sworn in this occasion as well."
Mr. Feingold has made it clear he is angry about Mr. Gonzales's response a year ago to Mr. Feingold's question about whether he thought the president could, as commander in chief, authorize searches and wiretaps without warrants. Mr. Gonzales said then that "what we're really discussing is a hypothetical situation."
When Mr. Feingold pushed to have Mr. Gonzales sworn in, Mr. Specter called for a vote. The committee voted, 10 to 8, along party lines not to have Mr. Gonzales sworn in.
Mr. Feingold was clearly angry when his turn came to question Mr. Gonzales. "You wanted this committee and the American people to think that this kind of program wasn't going on," he said. "But it was."
Not so, Mr. Gonzales insisted. Last year, he said, Mr. Feingold asked him whether he thought the president could authorize eavesdropping "in violation of the law," and that the question was therefore hypothetical.
"I was telling the truth then," the attorney general said. "I'm telling the truth now."
<end excerpt>
Michael