World > >Terrorism & Security
posted January 3, 2006 at 10:00 a.m.

Debate over eavesdropping grows

Bush defends program again, but critics in Senate still vow hearings.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

The debate over whether it was appropriate or legal for President Bush to authorize wiretaps without warrants continued over the New Year's weekend. As President Bush was strongly defending his actions and the decision to allow the wiretapping in the name of national security, two new twists to the story have given his critics more ammunition.

On Sunday The New York Times reported that an extraordinary meeting had taken place in a Washington hospital in 2004. Two of President Bush's top aides – Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general – had gone to John Ashcroft, then attorney general, in his hospital room to ask him to overturn the decision of his deputy, James B. Comey. Mr. Comey, the Times reported, had refused to sign off on the central aspects of the domestic spying program because he had concerns about its legality and oversight.

Newsweek reports that Mr. Ashcroft refused to overturn his deputy's decision, which means the White House may have gone ahead with the program without the support of the Justice Department at that time.


01/02/05 Iran rejects Russian uranium enrichment offer 12/30/05 US to increase 'aid' to Iraqi police 12/29/05 Padilla's lawyers, Justice Dept. ask high court to hear appeal

Sign up to be notified daily: Find out more. Subscribe via RSS: What is this?

The Washington Post reported Sunday that information captured by the National Security Agency in the program authorized by the President had been shared with other agencies in the US government.

At least one of those organizations, the [Defense Intelligence Agency], has used NSA information as the basis for carrying out surveillance of people in the country suspected of posing a threat, according to two sources. A DIA spokesman said the agency does not conduct such domestic surveillance but would not comment further. Spokesmen for the FBI, the CIA and the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, declined to comment on the use of NSA data.

The Post points out it was the revelation in the 1970s that the US military was using NSA intercepts to maintain files on US peace activists that led to Congress restricting the NSA's ability to intercept American's communications. Jason Leopold, writing on the progressive site truthout.org, notes Monday that the first hint that domestic spying was taking place actually came several months ago, during the confirmation hearings for John Bolton, US ambassador to the United Nations.

At the hearing in late April, Bolton, a former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, told Congress that since 2001 he had asked the NSA on 10 different occasions to reveal to him the identities of American citizens who were caught in the NSA's raw intelligence reports in what appears to be a routine circumventing of the rules governing eavesdropping on the American public. It turned out that Bolton was just one of many government officials who learned the identities of Americans caught in the NSA intercepts. The State Department asked the NSA to unmask the identities of American citizens 500 times since May 2001.
Newsweek revealed earlier this year that the NSA disclosed to senior White House officials and other policymakers at federal agencies the names of as many as 10,000 American citizens the agency obtained while eavesdropping on foreigners. The Americans weren't involved in any sort of terrorist activity, nor did they pose any sort of threat to national security, but had simply been named while the NSA was conducting wiretaps.

But over the weekend President Bush once again strongly defended his actions and the spying program. The Associated Press reports that Mr. Bush called the program vital to thwarting terrorist attacks and said that making the leak about the program public had caused "great harm to the nation."

"This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America and, I repeat, limited," Bush told reporters after visiting wounded troops at Brooke Army Medical Center [in San Antonio, Texas]. "I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking."

YOUR VIEWS

Did President Bush overstep his bounds by authorizing domestic wiretapping without court approval?

Share your thoughts and read what others are saying.

AP reported last week that the Justice Department will hold an investigation into the leak about the classified spying program that formed the basis of the original story in The New York Times in mid-December. The Christian Science Monitor reports that moderate Senate Republicans are teaming up with Democrats to increase congressional oversight of these programs and to hold hearings on this and other similar issues of presidential power.

"When the Bill of Rights is involved, it's time to go into it very deeply," says [Sen. Arlen] Specter [(R) of Pennslyvania, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee]. "The public has a right to know as much as possible. It's hard to see how a resolution on the use of force can be extended to the conduct involved here."

Time magazine reported Sunday that even some of the President's staunchest supporters are questioning the decision to eavesdrop without warrants, not only in the short-term, but because of the long-term implications.

"There is a test of Republicans on this," says activist Grover Norquist, normally a White House ally. "The country will let you get away with this in the wake of 9/11, but that doesn't make it right." And even if Republicans are prepared to bless Bush's program, they know it theoretically would have to mean extending such sweeping Executive power to, say, a President Hillary Clinton.

Newsweek notes that US presidents have a history of choosing to " violate individual rights over the risk of losing a war."

When the French threatened American sovereignty on the high seas in 1798, John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, blatantly punishing free speech as traitorous. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus (the rule giving citizens a right to take their grievances to court). During World War I, Woodrow Wilson allowed officials to prosecute anyone for criticizing the government. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt allowed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to promiscuously wiretap, and ordered Japanese-Americans placed in internment camps. As the Vietnam War dragged on and domestic dissent arose, Richard Nixon��citing his Democratic predecessors FDR and Lyndon Johnson��authorized bugging and wiretapping against domestic "subversives." None of these steps, it should be pointed out, made the nation appreciably safer.