Beware Alberto Gonzalez.(Insider Report)

David Henderson is both a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. In August 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, he hosted White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez at a class attended by young military officers. During his remarks, Gonzalez sought to justify going to war without a congressional declaration, something already being planned by the administration. He also supported the government's decision to imprison U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism without charging them with a crime or allowing them a lawyer.

Writing about the meeting in the San Francisco Chronicle, Henderson said that he "counted 13 questions from the military officers and one faculty colleague [and] 12 were hardball questions that challenged Gonzalez's expansive claims for presidential power." At one point, Gonzalez sought to reassure his questioners: "Condi Rice and others and I don't want the president to look like some monster who destroyed our freedom," he said. "Trust us." Henderson promptly reminded him that the "Constitution is not based on trust, but on distrust."

Henderson's words of admonition proved to be perceptive. In the immediate ...