January 2, 2006
Bush Defends Legality of Domestic Spy Program
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Jan. 1 - President Bush today continued to defend both the legality and necessity of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, and he denied that he had misled the public last year when he asserted that any government wiretap required a court order.
"I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking, and that's what we're doing," Mr. Bush told reporters in San Antonio, Tex., as he visited wounded soldiers at the Brooke Army Medical Center.
"They attacked us before, they'll attack us again if they can," he said of terror groups. "And we're going to do everything we can to stop them."
Mr. Bush's strong defense of the N.S.A. program, which he authorized in 2002 to allow some domestic eavesdropping without court warrants, came as Senator Charles E. Schumer called on the administration to make available current and former high-level officials to explain the evolution of the secret program.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who leads the judiciary committee, has already pledged to make hearings into the N.S.A. program one of his highest priorities.
In a letter to Senator Specter today, Senator Schumer, a New York Democrat, who also serves on the Judiciary Committee, said the committee should explore "significant concern about the legality of the program even at the very highest levels of the Department of Justice."
The New York Times reported today that when James B. Comey was deputy attorney general, he refused to sign on to the recertification of the program in March 2004.
That prompted two of Mr. Bush's most senior aides - Andrew Card, his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency hospital visit to the Attorney General John Ashcroft to try to persuade him to give his authorization, as required by White House procedures for the program.
Officials with knowledge of the episode said that Mr. Ashcroft also appeared reluctant to sign on to the continued use of the program, and that Justice Department concerns appear to have led in part to the temporary suspension of the program for several months. Following a secret audit, new protocols were put in place at the N.S.A. to better determine how the agency established the targets of its eavesdropping operations, officials have said.
Asked today about internal opposition, President Bush said: "This program has been reviewed, constantly reviewed, by people throughout my administration. And it still is reviewed.
"Not only has it been reviewed by Justice Department officials, it's been reviewed by members of the United States Congress," he said. "It's a vital, necessary program."
But Senator Schumer, in an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," said the White House should have to explain the apparent internal dissent over the program.
"I hope the White House won't hide behind saying 'executive privilege, we can't discuss this'," Mr. Schumer said. "That's the wrong attitude. A discussion, perhaps a change in the law, those are all legitimate. Unilaterally changing the law because the vice president or president thinks it's wrong without discussing the change, that's not the American way."
But Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, said on the same television program that Mr. Bush had acted within the Constitution to protect the country from another terror attack. He said the focus now should be on identifying who had disclosed the existence of the classified operation.
The Justice Department said on Friday that it had opened an investigation into the disclosure of the N.S.A. program, which was first reported by The New York Times on Dec. 15. Mr. McConnell said of the public disclosure, "This needs to be investigated, because whoever leaked this information has done the U.S. and its national security a great disservice."
As President Bush continued to defend the program at his appearance in San Antonio, he was asked about a remark he made in Buffalo in 2004 at an appearance in support of the Patriot Act, in which he discussed government wiretaps.
"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap," Mr. Bush said at the appearance, "a wiretap requires a court order." He added: "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."
Democrats have seized on the remark, made more than two years after Mr. Bush authorized the N.S.A. to conduct warrantless wiretaps, in charging that the president had misled the public.
Asked about that today, Mr. Bush said: "I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the N.S.A. program.
"The N.S.A. program is a necessary program. I was elected to protect the American people from harm. And on Sept. 11, 2001, our nation was attacked. And after that day, I vowed to use all the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people, which is what I have been doing, and will continue to do."
Mr. Bush also emphasized that the program was "limited" in nature and designed to intercept communications from known associates of Al Qaeda to the United States. He said several times that the eavesdropping was "limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States."
That assertion is at odds with press accounts and the public statements of his senior aides, who say that the authorization for the program requires that one end of a communication - either incoming or outgoing - be outside the United States. The White House, clarifying the president's remarks after his appearance, said later that either end of the communication can in fact be outside the United States.
Despite a prohibition on eavesdropping on phone calls or e-mail messages that are regarded as purely domestic, The Times has reported that the N.S.A. has accidentally intercepted what are thought to be a small number of communications in which both ends were on American soil, due to technical confusion over what constitutes an "international" call.
Officials also say that the N.S.A., beyond actual eavesdropping on up to 500 phone numbers and e-mail addresses at any one time, has conducted much larger data-mining operations on vast volumes of communication within the United States to identify possible terror suspects.
To accomplish this, the agency has reached agreements with major American telecommunications companies to gain access to some of the country's biggest "switches," carrying phone and e-mail traffic into and out of the country.
