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| Home Front: Politix |
| Defense of NSA program planned |
| 2006-01-24 |
| The White House opened a weeklong media blitz Monday in defense of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program, with President Bush saying he found it "amazing" to be accused of breaking the law by ordering a secret program to intercept international calls and e-mail messages. As Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sat beside him, Mr. Bush asked a friendly audience of students here at Kansas State University and members of the military from Fort Riley, "If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?" Mr. Bush's remarks came hours after Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nation's second-ranking intelligence official, laid out new operational details about the program at a speech in Washington, including the destruction of "accidental" interceptions and the security agency's line of command in approving wiretaps without warrants. But General Hayden, who led the security agency at the time of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and has been Mr. Bush's point man on the eavesdropping program, refused to say in the face of often sharp questioning exactly how the agency determined that an American's phone call or e-mail message might "involve Al Qaeda" before eavesdropping on it. "Clearly not every lead pans out from this or any other source," the general said, "but this program has given us information that we would not otherwise have been able to get. It's impossible for me to talk about this any more in a public way without alerting our enemies to our tactics or what we have learned. I can't give details without increasing the danger to Americans. On one level, believe me, I wish that I could. But I can't." General Hayden's presentation, at an hourlong speech and question-and-answer session at the National Press Club that drew a few heated hecklers, was remarkable in that it featured a former director of the supersecret National Security Agency discussing what administration officials say is probably the government's most classified program. Taken together, Mr. Bush's speech in Kansas - part of the Landon Lecture Series that President Richard M. Nixon used 36 years ago to defend his policies in Vietnam - and General Hayden's comments were part of a vigorous White House effort to turn the issue to Mr. Bush's advantage. Among other appearances this week, Dan Bartlett, the communications director, did a round of television interviews Monday morning in defense of the program, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will give a speech on Tuesday on its legal justifications and Mr. Bush is scheduled to visit the security agency in Fort Meade, Md., on Wednesday to discuss the program. Democrats and some Republicans have attacked the program as illegal and unconstitutional, and an analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has strongly questioned its legal underpinnings and the limited briefings that Congressional leaders were given about it. Leading Democrats said Monday that they found the White House's latest line of defense to be unpersuasive, with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader, saying Mr. Bush's speech reflected a refusal to "come clean" with the public. "I am eager for the Bush administration to level with the American people and participate fully and openly in upcoming Congressional hearings," scheduled for Feb. 6 in the Senate, Mr. Reid said. "We can be strong and operate under the rule of law." But the White House, framing the controversy from the perspective of the country's will to fight terrorism, sought on Monday to recast the very language surrounding the debate. Mr. Bush, for the first time, called his decision to authorize the interceptions part of a "terrorist surveillance program," a phrase meant to convey that only members of Al Qaeda and their associates were falling into the net of the security agency. General Hayden took issue with many news reports that have referred to a "domestic spying" program. Saying the program is not really domestic in nature, he emphasized that it was limited to calls and e-mail in which one end of the communication was outside the United States and which "we have a reasonable basis to believe involve Al Qaeda or one of its affiliates." At the same time, General Hayden acknowledged that some purely domestic communications might be accidentally intercepted. The New York Times reported last month that this appeared to have happened in a small number of cases because of the difficulties posed by globalized communications in determining whether a phone call or e-mail message was truly "international." "If there were ever an anomaly, and we discovered that there had been an inadvertent intercept of a domestic-to-domestic call, that intercept would be destroyed and not reported," General Hayden said. He also acknowledged that, in a broadening of security agency operations after Sept. 11 that he said was separate from the eavesdropping program, the agency began sending the Federal Bureau of Investigation large volumes of leads from its operations. The agency "turned on the spigot of N.S.A. reporting to F.B.I. in, frankly, an unprecedented way," he said. Some current and former F.B.I. officials have said the torrent of security agency terrorism information almost always led to dead ends and may have hindered antiterrorism efforts by distracting agents from other assignments. General Hayden said that after starting to send the large volumes of leads after Sept. 11, "we found that we were giving them too much data in too raw form" and quickly made adjustments to the system. But he defended the value of the operation, saying that "it's the nature of intelligence that many tips lead nowhere, but you have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off." Mr. Bush, meanwhile, appeared to expand his argument about the legal justification for his decision to avoid the 1978 law that governs domestic surveillance, saying that it was not only part of his constitutional authority but that the Supreme Court had also backed up his authority. "Federal courts have consistently ruled that a president has authority under the Constitution to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance against our enemies," Mr. Bush said, making no reference to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which sets out the "exclusive" rules for obtaining warrants from a court that operates in secret. "Predecessors of mine have used that same constitutional authority," he said. Mr. Bush cited a recent Supreme Court decision, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, to bolster his argument that bypassing the courts fell within presidential power during the struggle against terrorism. In that case, the administration argued that a resolution passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks, authorizing the use of force in tracking down those responsible, gave the president the right to hold American citizens indefinitely without trial as enemy combatants. It never dealt with domestic spying, and the court rejected the administration's argument on enemy combatants. But Mr. Bush said on Monday that in its ruling the court had recognized that the resolution gave the president "additional authority." In front of the students and members of the Army, he described his interpretation of that authority. "I'm not a lawyer, but I can tell you what it means," he said. "It means Congress gave me the authority to use necessary force to protect the American people, but it didn't prescribe the tactics. It said, 'Mr. President, you've got the power to protect us, but we're not going to tell you how.' " |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |