Members of Congress demanded Friday that President Bush and his administration explain his decision to permit the country’s most secretive intelligence agency to spy on American citizens in the United States after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks without first obtaining warrants.
Democrats and some Republicans denounced the administration’s action, describing it as another example of Bush’s use of the threat of terrorism to assume new legal and intelligence powers and limit civil liberties.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would call congressional hearings. Warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens is “wrong, and it can’t be condoned at all,” he said.
In 2002, according to former officials familiar with the policy, Bush signed an executive order granting new surveillance powers to the National Security Agency, which is responsible for international eavesdropping and whose very existence was long denied by the government.
The president said Friday he could not talk about the matter.
“We do not discuss ongoing intelligence operations to protect the country, and the reason why is that there’s an enemy that lurks, that would like to know exactly what we’re trying to do to stop them,” Bush said in a television interview.
Trying to quickly contain the controversy, Vice President Dick Cheney went to Capitol Hill to confer with the leaders of both chambers as well as the chairman and top Democrat on the intelligence committees. Those present refused to discuss the session.
Specter said he wanted to know details of the eavesdropping: “How NSA utilized their technical equipment, whose conversations they overheard, how many conversations they overheard, what they did with the material, what purported justification there was … and we will go from there.”
In the wake of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pengaton, the administration sought to ease the restrictions on wiretaps and e-mail surveillance to investigate U.S. citizens suspected of ties to terrorists. Ordinarily, the government must gain permission from special courts to turn their surveillance on U.S. citizens, either domestically or overseas.
The surveillance operation was first reported by The New York Times.
“If this article is accurate, it calls into question the integrity and credibility of our nation’s commitment to the rule of law,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees.
The existence of the highly classified NSA program, which involved eavesdropping on the communications of Americans, was confirmed by two former senior U.S. intelligence officials with firsthand knowledge of the effort.
The program was launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and was designed to enable the NSA to monitor communications between American citizens and persons overseas suspected of having ties to terrorist networks.
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One aim was to take swift advantage of fresh leads collected by the CIA overseas, especially in cases when an agency raid led to the seizure of a laptop computer or cellular telephone containing logs of phone numbers.
One former senior intelligence official said it was designed “to enable us to follow up on anything and exhaust all possible leads” when “the threat level couldn’t be any higher.” Much of the NSA’s activity was driven by CIA operations.
“We would say, any call from this number–whether it goes to Brooklyn or Tashkent–listen in on it,” the former official said. “The freedom was needed to follow the traffic, the phone traffic, wherever it went.” The former official, who defended the program, added: “You have to remember that up until the Patriot Act, [NSA eavesdropping experts] had to hang up even if they had Osama bin Laden talking to an American.”
One of the main concerns in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said, was that obtaining warrants was so time-consuming that there was little opportunity to react quickly to fresh intelligence.
At the same time, the officials said there was concern from the very beginning in some quarters that the program might be overstepping 1970s-era laws protecting the civil liberties of Americans.
“You can imagine a program like this was kept in the tightest of compartments,” the second former intelligence official said. But even within those compartments, he said, there was “uneasiness among some folks, wondering whether this does have appropriate authorization.”
Federal law requires the president to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” of all significant intelligence activities. Legal experts and congressional officials said a program monitoring the electronic communications of Americans would be considered the type of program that would require immediate congressional notification.
But some pointed to a loophole in the law that allows a president to withhold information under extreme circumstances. In comments to reporters, Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales said the administration had followed the law, including briefing lawmakers as proxies for the public.
“I certainly respect and understand the need for the American people to understand what their government is doing,” Gonzales said. ” . . . But we also have a corresponding duty to ensure that national security is protected.”