Security factors hemmed Gonzales's testimony, White House says

WASHINGTON -- The White House offered a vigorous defense of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales yesterday, insisting that he had not given misleading testimony to Congress, but that national security factors prevented further clarification for now.

"He has testified truthfully and tried to be very accurate," the chief White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said of Gonzales' testimony this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Snow said repeatedly that Gonzales had not been contradicted by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, as has been widely reported, on whether there were serious disagreements within the Bush administration on its secret surveillance program.

Snow said, in effect, that Gonzales had been constrained in what he could say because there was a danger he would divulge classified material. "I understand it's difficult to parse, because what you have involved here are matters of classification," Snow said. "Sometimes it's going to lead people to talk very carefully, and there's going to be plenty of room for interpretation or conclusion."

The latest controversy over Gonzales' credibility arose on Thursday afternoon, when Mueller told the House Judiciary Committee that a 2004 internal dispute that nearly caused the resignations of several top Justice Department officials, including himself, was over the propriety of the surveillance program, run by the National Security Agency.

Mueller's account appeared to conflict starkly with Gonzales' version of events, in which he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was no disagreement about the program.

In insisting that there was no real contradiction, Snow said Gonzales was just not able to explain further "because to do so would compromise American security."

Moreover, Snow said, the attorney general's critics knew Gonzales was at a disadvantage, and sought to exploit the situation.

"You've got an interesting situation when members of Congress, knowing that somebody is constrained by matters of classification, they can ask very broad questions," Snow said. "And those are questions that they know the person sitting on the other side cannot answer thoroughly in an open session."