Government officials employ various tactics to avoid actually saying anything at intelligence hearings, mostly by fogging up the room with references to national security and with vague generalities. It’s part of a dance, which the public and the media may grumble about but which we also expect.
Outright lying is another matter.
On March 12, James Clapper, director of national intelligence, testified at an open congressional hearing. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, asked him whether the National Security Agency collects “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”
His answer: “No sir.” Then he added: “Not wittingly.”
It was a lie, as everyone now knows from the articles about the N.S.A.’s data-mining program.
Mr. Wyden knew it wasn’t true at the time, since he is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and is privy to secret briefings from people like, well, Mr. Clapper.
On Sunday, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Mr. Clapper about the exchange.
“First, I have great respect for Senator Wyden,” Mr. Clapper said, using a Washington code phrase to indicate that he has no respect for the senator. “I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked ‘when are you going to start–stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is, meaning not answerable necessarily, by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful or least untruthful manner, by saying, ‘No.’”
Mr. Clapper further explained his least-untruthiness by saying he thought Mr. Wyden was asking whether the N.S.A. was actually listening to phone conversations (which Mr. Wyden clearly was not). “Going back to my metaphor, what I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers of those books in the metaphorical library,” he said. “To me collection of U.S. persons data would mean taking the books off the shelf, opening it up and reading it.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein defended Mr. Clapper, saying “you can misunderstand the question.” But what’s so muddy about “any type of data at all"? Besides, Mr. Wyden said in a statement on Tuesday that he actually sent the question to Mr. Clapper’s office a day in advance, and even gave him a chance to amend his answer. He had plenty of time to consider what, precisely, Mr. Wyden wanted to know.
