Tales from the Trail

Andrew Longstreth in New York interviewed the former Attorney General.

Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he was grateful for the killing of Osama bin Laden even if he would have preferred it to have happened under the Bush administration.

“It was an important day,” Gonzales told Reuters on Wednesday. “We worked very hard to make this come about. I wished it happened under the Bush administration. But I’m grateful it happened when it did.”

Before Gonzales became attorney general, he served as White House counsel. In that position, he ordered a legal memo that was used to justify harsh interrogation techniques of terrorism suspects.

While Gonzales declined to weigh in on the effectiveness of such techniques and said he had no idea whether they helped commandos to find and kill bin Laden, he insisted they were legal and that was paramount to former President George Bush.

“What mattered to him was that they were lawful,” Gonzales said. “If he had been told they were unlawful, it wouldn’t have mattered whether they were effective or not.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta is no stranger to Washington political drama, and he showed on Friday that he wasn’t going to watch from the sidelines while Congress threw stones at his spy agency.

No names were used, but Panetta left no doubt he was responding to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s charge that the CIA misled Congress about interrogation tactics such as waterboarding that were used on terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a publicly released note to CIA employees headlined “Turning Down the Volume,”   Panetta said the political debate on interrogation “reached a new decibel level yesterday when the CIA was accused of misleading Congress.”