• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Bush Spy Program 'Lawful' and 'Vital' Attorney General Replies to Challenges

Posted on: Tuesday, 7 February 2006, 15:00 CST

By Brian Knowlton

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday defended the Bush administration's secret surveillance program from sharp questioning from Democrats and a leading Republican who challenged the program's legality.

"The terrorist surveillance program is necessary; it is lawful," Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Its continuation is vital to the national defense," he added.

"To end the program now would be to afford our enemy dangerous and potentially deadly new room for operation within our own borders."

Gonzales faced contentious questioning not only from Democrats on the panel but from its Republican chairman, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Specter said he thought the surveillance without court warrant of calls between the United States and terror suspects abroad was illegally circumventing the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

"The president of the United States has the fundamental responsibility to protect the country," Specter said. "The president does not have a blank check."

The hearing got off to a testy start. Specter rejected a Democratic request that Gonzales take an oath, as he has before a way of underscoring their assertion that he misled Congress in January, during his confirmation hearing as attorney general, about whether the administration was undertaking warrantless surveillance. The panel's Republican majority prevailed in a roll-call vote.

Gonzales's arguments for the program were generally those he and other administration officials had advanced earlier. He asserted again that the congressional vote after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to authorize use of necessary military force had given President George W. Bush all the authority he needed, along with his inherent presidential powers, to order surveillance of calls or e- mails to other countries. The authorization of the use of force would be meaningless if the United States lacked the ability to spy on and find its enemies; the idea was not "just shoot at them, hoping that we might hit them," he said.

Some legislators suggested amending the law to make the special oversight court faster. The administration has said that the process of seeking court-ordered warrants is cumbersome and slow in an era when terrorists can strike with disastrous suddenness. Gonzales said he saw no need for amending the law, arguing that the current system worked well.

Democratic committee members prefaced their comments with assurances that their party, too, wanted the administration to have all appropriate tools to fight terror. But they said they were concerned that the White House had unilaterally and illegally seized broad and open-ended powers to surveil people in the United States, without oversight, and with too few protections against abuse or incompetence.

"My concern is the laws of America," said Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the panel's ranking Democrat. "My concern is when we see peaceful Quakers being spied upon, when we see babies and nuns who can't fly in airplanes because they're on a terrorist watchlist put together by your government."

Another Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said that "this administration is effectively saying the attorney general has said it today it doesn't have to follow the law."

She called that "a very slippery slope, it's fraught with consequences."

Leahy and other Democrats said they would be open to amending the FISA law to address the problems the administration sees with it. Leahy, in fact, said the law had been amended four or five times since Sept. 11, 2001. But he asserted that the administration had never approached him or Specter, the ranking members of each party on the panel, with a request for changes.

"If you do not even attempt to persuade Congress to amend the law," Leahy said, "then you're required to follow the law as it's written."

Specter asked whether the administration would consider asking the FISA court to review the outside surveillance. But Gonzales suggested that government officials had already determined its legality to their satisfaction.

Apart from Specter, Republicans mostly defended the program. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa intimated that the outcry about the program since it was revealed in December by The New York Times was largely partisan, and he asked Gonzales about the investigation of the leak to The Times.

Several Democrats expressed concern that the Bush White House was asserting an almost unchecked authority. If these powers were claimed so long as a vaguely defined "war against terror" continued, said Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, that implied a nearly open-ended duration.

Source: International Herald Tribune

More News in this Category