History > 2005 > USA > Laws > President

John Sherffius

cartoon

St Louis, MO        Cagle

16.12.2005

http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/sherffius.asp

Editorial

Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency

December 23, 2005
The New York Times

George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.

Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.

It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.

The president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.

Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile shield that doesn't work but makes military contractors rich. Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had recently amassed a fortune.

The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after 9/11, taking advantage of a national consensus that the president should have additional powers to use judiciously against terrorists.

Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately, pushing the intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing the legal briefs justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea that the president can designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain them indefinitely, and a secret program allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. And when Senator John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American military prisons, Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at C.I.A. prisons.

There are finally signs that the democratic system is trying to rein in the imperial presidency. Republicans in the Senate and House forced Mr. Bush to back the McCain amendment, and Mr. Cheney's plan to legalize torture by intelligence agents was rebuffed. Congress also agreed to extend the Patriot Act for five weeks rather than doing the administration's bidding and rushing to make it permanent.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court refused to allow the administration to transfer Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been held by the military for more than three years on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks, from military to civilian custody. After winning the same court's approval in September to hold Mr. Padilla as an unlawful combatant, the administration abruptly reversed course in November and charged him with civil crimes unrelated to his arrest. That decision was an obvious attempt to avoid having the Supreme Court review the legality of the detention powers that Mr. Bush gave himself, and the appeals judges refused to go along.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have insisted that the secret eavesdropping program is legal, but The Washington Post reported yesterday that the court created to supervise this sort of activity is not so sure. It said that the presiding judge was arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges and that several judges on the court wanted to know why the administration believed eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants was legal when the law specifically required such warrants.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are tenacious. They still control both houses of Congress and are determined to pack the judiciary with like-minded ideologues. Still, the recent developments are encouraging, especially since the court ruling on Mr. Padilla was written by a staunch conservative considered by President Bush for the Supreme Court.

Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency, NYT, 23.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/23/opinion/23fri1.html


 

Rex Babin

cartoon

California -- The Sacramento Bee        Cagle        19.12.2005

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U.S. Constitution
http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution.html

Administration Cites War Vote in Spying Case

December 20, 2005
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 - President Bush and two of his most senior aides argued Monday that the highly classified program to spy on suspected members of terrorist groups in the United States grew out of the president's constitutional authority and a 2001 Congressional resolution that authorized him to use all necessary force against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Offering their most forceful and detailed defense of the program in a series of briefings, television interviews and a hastily called presidential news conference, administration officials argued that the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was not written for an age of modern terrorism. In these times, Mr. Bush said, a "two-minute phone conversation between somebody linked to Al Qaeda here and an operative overseas could lead directly to the loss of thousands of lives."

Mr. Bush strongly hinted that the government was beginning a leak investigation into how the existence of the program was disclosed. It was first revealed in an article published on The New York Times Web site on Thursday night, though some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists had been omitted.

"We're at war, and we must protect America's secrets," Mr. Bush said. "And so the Justice Department, I presume, will proceed forward with a full investigation."

He also lashed out again, as he did Saturday, at Democrats and Republicans in the Senate who have blocked the reauthorization of the broad antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, saying they voted for it after the Sept. 11 attacks "but now think it's no longer necessary."

Several of the senators responded that Mr. Bush would not accept amendments to the act that they say are necessary to protect civil liberties and that he would not accept a short-term renewal of the existing law while negotiations continue.

In the first of a series of appearances Monday to defend the intelligence operations, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told reporters that "this electronic surveillance is within the law, has been authorized" by Congress. "That is our position," he added.

Officials with knowledge of the program have said the Justice Department did two sets of classified legal reviews of the program and its legal rationale. Mr. Gonzales declined to release those opinions Monday.

Two of the key Democrats who had been briefed on the program said Monday that they had been told so little that there was no effective Congressional oversight for it.

In a highly unusual move, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia released a letter he sent to Vice President Dick Cheney on July 17, 2003, complaining that "given the security restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities." The letter was handwritten because secrecy rules prevented him from giving it to anyone to type.

On Monday Mr. Rockefeller said that after he sent his letter to Mr. Cheney, "these concerns were never addressed, and I was prohibited from sharing my views with my colleagues."

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said, "I am skeptical of the attorney general's citation of authority, but I am prepared to listen."

Mr. Specter, who has said he will hold hearings on the program soon after the confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominee, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., said he did not believe the president's decision to inform a handful of members of Congress was sufficient.

"I think it does not constitute a check and balance," he said. "You can't have the administration and a select number of members alter the law. It can't be done."

Mr. Specter also predicted that the domestic spying debate would spill over into Judge Alito's confirmation. On Monday, he sent the judge a letter saying he intended to ask "what jurisprudential approach" the judge would use in determining if the president had authority to establish the program.

"The fat's in the fire," Mr. Specter said. "This is going to be a big, big issue. There's a lot of indignation across the country, from what I see."

Mr. Bush, Mr. Gonzales and Lt. Gen. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nation's second-ranking intelligence official and a former director of the National Security Agency, which conducted the surveillance, stepped around questions about why officials decided not to use emergency powers they have under the existing foreign surveillance law. The law allows them to tap international communications of people in the United States and then go to a secret court up to 72 hours later for retroactive permission.

"The whole key here is agility," General Hayden said, adding that the aim "is to detect and prevent."

Administration officials, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the information, suggested that the speed with which the operation identified "hot numbers" - the telephone numbers of suspects - and then hooked into their conversations lay behind the need to operate outside the old law.

Soon after Mr. Bush spoke, three senior Democrats influential on national security matters - Senators Carl Levin of Michigan, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin - assailed the president for bypassing the court that Congress set up a quarter-century ago to make sure intelligence agencies do not infringe on the privacy of Americans.

"He can go to the court retroactively," Mr. Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told reporters, referring to the 72-hour rule.

Mr. Bush - who initially resisted a public investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks and the intelligence failures in Iraq - used his news conference Monday to discourage Congress from publicly delving into the program, saying that "public hearings on programs will say to the enemy, 'Here's what they do, adjust.' " He repeatedly cited the case of Osama bin Laden, who was widely reported to have stopped using a satellite telephone after news reports that intelligence agencies were listening in.

The White House briefing itself was unusual, with two of the administration's most senior officials discussing legal and operational details of what Mr. Gonzales described as "probably the most classified program that exists in the United States government."

Mr. Gonzales said the president had "the inherent authority under the Constitution" as commander in chief to authorize the program. He also argued that the legal rationale followed the logic in a Supreme Court decision last year in the case of an enemy combatant named Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen who was detained in Afghanistan on the battlefield.

In addition, Mr. Gonzales said the administration believed that Congress gave the president clear and broad authorization to attack Al Qaeda in a resolution passed on Sept. 14, 2001, that set the stage for the invasion of Afghanistan. That resolution authorized the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

Many members of Congress say that in authorizing the military invasion of Afghanistan days after the Sept. 11 attacks, they never intended or envisioned that the authority could be applied to searches without warrants within the United States.

Mr. Gonzales and General Hayden were careful to emphasize that the surveillance program was "limited" in scope.

"People are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors," Mr. Gonzales said. In fact, he said, it was "very, very important to understand" that the program is limited to calls and communications between the United States and foreign countries.

"What we're trying to do is learn of communications, back and forth, from within the United States to overseas members of Al Qaeda," he said. "And that's what this program is about."

He added: "This is not about wiretapping everybody. This is about a very concentrated, very limited program focused on gaining information about our enemy."

As the administration has argued since the disclosure of the program Thursday night, Mr. Gonzales and General Hayden said the normal system for issuing warrants for a domestic surveillance operation - required in 1978 in a program that grew out of the improper surveillance of political dissidents - was inadequate in some cases.

Regarding a possible leak investigation, which would be handled by the Justice Department, Mr. Gonzales said: "This is really hurting national security, this has really hurt our country, and we are concerned that a very valuable tool has been compromised. As to whether or not there will be a leak investigation, we'll just have to wait and see."

When questions at the news conference turned to Iraq, Mr. Bush urged reporters to look at rationales he offered for invading the country that went beyond its suspected caches of weapons of mass destruction, including his vision of creating democratic havens in the Middle East. But he acknowledged that the failure to find weapons in Iraq made it difficult to make the case "in the public arena" that countries like Iran are pursuing nuclear weapons, as Mr. Bush has charged.

He said, "People will say, if we're trying to make the case on Iran, well, the intelligence failed in Iraq, therefore how can we trust the intelligence in Iran?" Later, he added, "It's no question that the credibility of intelligence is necessary for good diplomacy."

Eric Schmitt and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting for this article.

    Administration Cites War Vote in Spying Case, NYT, 20.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/politics/20spy.html

Nick Anderson        Kentucky -- The Louisville Courier-Journal        Cagle        22.12.2005

http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/andersonNICK.asp

President George W. Bush as a king.

Drew Sheneman

New Jersey -- The Newark Star Ledger        Cagle        20.12.2005

http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/sheneman.asp

President George W. Bush as King George.

'01 Resolution Is Central to '05 Controversy

December 20, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON and LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 - At the heart of the debate over the legality of the program to eavesdrop on the international communications of American citizens without a court order is a Congressional resolution passed a week after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings that authorized the president to use force against those responsible for the attacks.

President Bush cited the resolution, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, on Monday at his news conference. So did Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who in a session with reporters said the Congressional measure, in addition to the president's inherent power as commander in chief, gave the government the power "to engage in this kind of signals intelligence."

The resolution itself is a single sentence, adopted unanimously by the Senate and with only one dissenting vote in the House of Representatives. It provides the president with sweeping but vaguely defined authority "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

The resolution makes no mention of surveillance activity. Nor does it specify what is supposed to happen when American citizens, not themselves suspected of violating any law, come to the government's attention through actions taken under the resolution's terms.

"Nobody, nobody thought when we passed a resolution to invade Afghanistan and to fight the war on terror - including myself who voted for it - that this was an authorization to allow a wiretapping against the law of the United States," Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said in an interview on the "Today" show Monday.

The precise limits on how much authority presidents may wield in a crisis has never been settled with absolute clarity, despite occasions when courts have served as referees in a contest of wills between the executive branch and Congress. This particular dispute is highly likely to remain in the political realm, because it is difficult to imagine how a challenge to the monitoring program could make its way into federal court. Any challenge would have to be brought by a person who had been a subject of the secret monitoring.

At his news conference on Monday, Mr. Bush was unapologetic, declaring that he would continue the electronic monitoring program as long as necessary.

The government's legal rationale for relying on the 2001 resolution is contained in classified legal opinions, but the thinking was outlined by Mr. Gonzales on Monday at his news conference. He referred to the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen who challenged his detention as an enemy combatant.

The government's primary argument in the case was that the president's inherent authority as commander in chief obviated the need for any authorization by Congress. As an alternative argument, the government maintained that the resolution provided all the necessary authority, despite its omission of any reference to detention.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor agreed, in a plurality opinion she wrote for three other members of the court, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer. "Congress has in fact authorized Hamdi's detention" through the use-of-force resolution, Justice O'Connor said. Justice Clarence Thomas agreed in a separate opinion that provided a fifth vote for the theory.

But the O'Connor opinion was fairly nuanced, addressed only to what it called the "limited category" of individuals who fought with the Taliban against the United States in Afghanistan. And four other justices rejected the notion that the resolution could be read to authorize detention of an American citizen.

Justices David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the resolution should be applied only in the context in which it was adopted, the use of military force. "Since the Force Resolution was adopted one week after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it naturally speaks with some generality, but its focus is clear, and that is on the use of military power," the two justices said.

Justices Antonin Scalia and John Paul Stevens, in another separate opinion, also read the resolution narrowly, as not authorizing detention.

Prof. Peter Raven-Hansen, an authority on national security law at George Washington University Law School, said Monday that previous Congressional resolutions on the use of force had focused on powers to be exercised by the president on the battlefield or in close conjunction with military action.

"They are not an authorization for the homeland where law enforcement agencies are available and the courts are open to permit the surveillance of Americans that the president might think necessary," Professor Raven-Hansen said in an interview.

In addition, he said, the monitoring operation conflicted with provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows surveillance of suspected terrorists in the United States for three days without prior approval from a special court, as long as the approval is obtained later. "This completely transcends these statutory limits," he said.

Attorney General Gonzales, discussing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act at his news conference, said the law applied "unless otherwise authorized by statute or by Congress." The use-of-force resolution, he continued, "constitutes that other authorization, that other statute by Congress, to engage in this kind of signals intelligence."

Asked at the news conference why the administration had not sought explicit legislative authorization through an amendment to the foreign intelligence law, he replied that "we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible."

    '01 Resolution Is Central to '05 Controversy, NYT, 20.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/politics/20legal.html

Bush Says U.S. Spy Program

Is Legal and Essential

December 19, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 - President Bush offered a vigorous and detailed defense of his previously secret electronic-surveillance program today, calling it a legal and essential tool in the battle against terrorism and saying that whoever disclosed it had committed a "shameful act."

Mr. Bush said the surveillance would continue, that it was being conducted under appropriate safeguards and that Congress had been kept informed about it. He rejected any suggestion that the surveillance program was symptomatic of unchecked power in the presidency.

The president also called on the Senate to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, whose government-surveillance powers Mr. Bush said were vital in keeping up with terrorist plots. Some of the very same lawmakers who criticized American intelligence agencies for failing to "connect the dots" before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are now blocking renewal of the Patriot Act, Mr. Bush said.

Surveillance dominated Mr. Bush's hourlong news conference at the White House, and Mr. Bush said he fully understood the concerns of some lawmakers that civil liberties might be infringed upon. But those concerns are simply not justified, the president said.

"Leaders in the United States Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this program," Mr. Bush said. "And it has been effective in disrupting the enemy while safeguarding our personal liberties. This program has targeted those with known links to Al Qaeda."

The program, which Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to carry out, is consistent both with the Constitution and the laws of the United States, he said, and is reviewed every 45 days or so to prevent abuses. He said he assumed that the Justice Department would try to find out who had leaked details of the program.

"My personal opinion is, it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war," Mr. Bush said. "The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales also defended the program today. "Our position is that the authorization to use military force, which was passed by the Congress after Sept. 11, constitutes that authority," he said.

The surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail messages caused a furor when it was disclosed last week by The New York Times, because it has been conducted without warrants. But Mr. Bush noted that it has been used only to monitor communications between someone in the United States and someone else in another country - not to intercept calls between, say, Houston and Los Angeles.

But Mr. Bush said his administration would not hesitate to intercept purely domestic messages, under warrants obtainable from a special court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, whenever necessary to combat an enemy who is quick, clever and lethal.

The president held the news conference the morning after the speech in which he defended his policy on Iraq and urged patience on behalf of the American people. Three Democratic senators, Carl Levin of Michigan, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, scheduled a midday news conference at the Capitol to rebut Mr. Bush on Iraq and other issues.

Mr. Bush interrupted a questioner to swat down any suggestion that, as he himself put it, he was trying to assume "dictatorial powers" in the campaign against terrorism. And with some heat in his voice he criticized those senators who have so far blocked renewal of the USA Patriot Act.

"I want senators from New York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas to explain why these cities are safer" without the extension, he said. Several Democratic senators, Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader; Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, both of New York; and Barbara Boxer of California, were among those who helped to block the legislation in the Senate last week.

"In a war on terror we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment," Mr. Bush said.

    Bush Says U.S. Spy Program Is Legal and Essential, NYT, 19.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/politics/19cnd-prexy.html

Justices Are Urged to Dismiss Padilla Case

December 18, 2005
The New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 - It would be "wholly imprudent" for the Supreme Court to hear Jose Padilla's challenge to his military detention as an enemy combatant, the Bush administration told the court in urging the justices to dismiss Mr. Padilla's case as moot now that the government plans to try him on terrorism charges in a civilian court.

In a brief filed late Friday, the administration argued that Mr. Padilla's indictment last month by a federal grand jury has given him the "very relief" he sought when he filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in federal court. Any Supreme Court decision now on his petition, which a federal appeals court rejected in September, "will have no practical effect" on Mr. Padilla, the brief said.

Lawyers for Mr. Padilla, a United States citizen who was arrested at O'Hare airport in Chicago in May 2002 and transferred to military custody, filed his Supreme Court appeal in October. Ordinarily, the court would have acted by now, but the justices gave the government until Friday to file its response. Mr. Padilla's lawyers will now have a chance to respond to the administration's brief before the court decides early next year whether to hear the case.

As the administration filed its Supreme Court brief, Mr. Padilla's five-member legal team filed a brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., asking that court to keep jurisdiction over Mr. Padilla's case long enough for the Supreme Court to act on it.

For its part, the administration is urging the Fourth Circuit to do just the opposite: to vacate its September decision that upheld presidential authority to keep Mr. Padilla in open-ended detention and to "recall the mandate," depriving the decision of any legal force.

Since the Fourth Circuit had handed the administration a sweeping victory in that decision, the request would seem to run counter to the administration's interests. But the request, if granted, would have the effect of ensuring that the Supreme Court would be unable to review Mr. Padilla's case because there would be no decision to review.

That amounts to "the extraordinary action of interfering with the Supreme Court's consideration of the case" while Mr. Padilla's appeal is pending, his lawyers told the Fourth Circuit. The government should not be allowed to claim the case is moot, the brief said, because the administration has not withdrawn Mr. Padilla's designation as an enemy combatant and has refused to foreclose the prospect of sending him back to military detention if he is acquitted in a civilian trial.

The lawyers told the Fourth Circuit that in its treatment of Mr. Padilla, "the government has repeatedly altered its factual allegations to suit its goals, and it has actively manipulated the federal courts to avoid accountability for its actions."

If the Supreme Court denies review, the brief continued, the appeals court should recall the mandate and vacate its decision at that point so as not to reward "the government's egregious conduct and gamesmanship in the federal courts."

The unusual dueling briefs in the Fourth Circuit on the status of the case were occasioned by the appeals court's refusal to acquiesce to the administration's request last month to transfer Mr. Padilla's custody from the military to civilian authorities.

Instead, the appeals court ordered the sides to submit briefs on what should become of the September decision "in light of the different facts that were alleged by the president to warrant Padilla's military detention and held by this court to justify that detention, on the one hand, and the alleged facts on which Padilla has now been indicted, on the other."

While administration officials initially maintained that Mr. Padilla was a Qaeda operative on a mission to detonate a "dirty bomb" and blow up apartment buildings, the indictment last month omitted mention of those accusations, instead charging him with providing "material support" to terrorists.

    Justices Are Urged to Dismiss Padilla Case, NYT, 18.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/national/nationalspecial3/18padilla.html

In Address,

Bush Says He Ordered Domestic Spying

December 18, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 - President Bush acknowledged on Saturday that he had ordered the National Security Agency to conduct an electronic eavesdropping program in the United States without first obtaining warrants, and said he would continue the highly classified program because it was "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists."

In an unusual step, Mr. Bush delivered a live weekly radio address from the White House in which he defended his action as "fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities."

He also lashed out at senators, both Democrats and Republicans, who voted on Friday to block the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, which expanded the president's power to conduct surveillance, with warrants, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The revelation that Mr. Bush had secretly instructed the security agency to intercept the communications of Americans and terrorist suspects inside the United States, without first obtaining warrants from a secret court that oversees intelligence matters, was cited by several senators as a reason for their vote.

"In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment," Mr. Bush said forcefully from behind a lectern in the Roosevelt Room, next to the Oval Office. The White House invited cameras in, guaranteeing television coverage.

He said the Senate's action "endangers the lives of our citizens," and added that "the terrorist threat to our country will not expire in two weeks," a reference to the approaching deadline of Dec. 31, when critical provisions of the current law will end.

His statement came just a day before he was scheduled to make a rare Oval Office address to the nation, at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, celebrating the Iraqi elections and describing what his press secretary on Saturday called the "path forward."

Mr. Bush's public confirmation on Saturday of the existence of one of the country's most secret intelligence programs, which had been known to only a select number of his aides, was a rare moment in his presidency. Few presidents have publicly confirmed the existence of heavily classified intelligence programs like this one.

His admission was reminiscent of Dwight Eisenhower's in 1960 that he had authorized U-2 flights over the Soviet Union after Francis Gary Powers was shot down on a reconnaissance mission. At the time, President Eisenhower declared that "no one wants another Pearl Harbor," an argument Mr. Bush echoed on Saturday in defending his program as a critical component of antiterrorism efforts.

But the revelation of the domestic spying program, which the administration temporarily suspended last year because of concerns about its legality, came in a leak. Mr. Bush said the information had been "improperly provided to news organizations."

As a result of the report, he said, "our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies and endangers our country."

As recently as Friday, when he was interviewed by Jim Lehrer of PBS, Mr. Bush refused to confirm the report the previous evening in The New York Times that in 2002 he authorized the spying operation by the security agency, which is usually barred from intercepting domestic communications. While not denying the report, he called it "speculation" and said he did not "talk about ongoing intelligence operations."

But as the clamor over the revelation rose and Vice President Dick Cheney and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, went to Capitol Hill on Friday to answer charges that the program was an illegal assumption of presidential powers, even in a time of war, Mr. Bush and his senior aides decided to abandon that approach.

"There was an interest in saying more about it, but everyone recognized its highly classified nature," one senior administration official said, speaking on background because, he said, the White House wanted the president to be the only voice on the issue. "This is directly taking on the critics. The Democrats are now in the position of supporting our efforts to protect Americans, or defend positions that could weaken our nation's security."

Democrats saw the issue differently. "Our government must follow the laws and respect the Constitution while it protects Americans' security and liberty," said Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and the Senate's leading critic of the Patriot Act.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has said he would conduct hearings on why Mr. Bush took the action.

"In addition to what the president said today," Mr. Specter said, "the Judiciary Committee will be interested in its oversight capacity to learn from the attorney general or others in the Department of Justice the statutory or other legal basis for the electronic surveillance, whether there was any judicial review involved, what was the scope of the domestic intercepts, what standards were used to identify Al Qaeda or other terrorist callers, and what was done with this information."

In a statement, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, said she was advised of the president's decision shortly after he made it and had "been provided with updates on several occasions."

"The Bush administration considered these briefings to be notification, not a request for approval," Ms. Pelosi said. "As is my practice whenever I am notified about such intelligence activities, I expressed my strong concerns during these briefings."

In his statement on Saturday, Mr. Bush did not address the main question directed at him by some members of Congress on Friday: why he felt it necessary to circumvent the system established under current law, which allows the president to seek emergency warrants, in secret, from the court that oversees intelligence operations. His critics said that under that law, the administration could have obtained the same information.

The president said on Saturday that he acted in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks because the United States had failed to detect communications that might have tipped them off to the plot. He said that two of the hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, "communicated while they were in the United States to other members of Al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn't know they were here, until it was too late."

As a result, "I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations," Mr. Bush said. "This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security."

Mr. Bush said that every 45 days the program was reviewed, based on "a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland."

"I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the Sept. 11 attacks, and I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from Al Qaeda and related groups," Mr. Bush said. He said Congressional leaders had been repeatedly briefed on the program, and that intelligence officials "receive extensive training to ensure they perform their duties consistent with the letter and intent of the authorization."

The Patriot Act vote in the Senate, a day after Mr. Bush was forced to accept an amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, that places limits on interrogation techniques that can be used by C.I.A. officers and other nonmilitary personnel, was a setback to the president's assertion of broad powers. In both cases, he lost a number of Republicans along with almost all Democrats.

"This reflects a complete transformation of the debate in America over torture," said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. "After the attacks, no politician was heard expressing any questions about the executive branch's treatment of captured terrorists."

Mr. Bush's unusual radio address is part of a broader effort this weekend to regain the initiative, after weeks in which the political ground has shifted under his feet. The Oval Office speech on Sunday, a formal setting that he usually tries to avoid, is his first there since March 2003, when he informed the world that he had ordered the Iraq invasion.

White House aides say they intend for this speech to be a bookmark in the Iraq experience: As part of the planned address, Mr. Bush appears ready to at least hint at reductions in troop levels.

There are roughly 160,000 American troops in Iraq, a number that was intended to keep order for Thursday's parliamentary elections.

The American troop level was already scheduled to decline to 138,000 - what the military calls its "baseline" level - after the election.

But on Friday, as the debate in Washington swirled over the president's order, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, hinted that further reductions may be on the way.

"We're doing our assessment, and I'll make some recommendations in the coming weeks about whether I think it's prudent to go below the baseline," General Casey told reporters in Baghdad.

    In Address, Bush Says He Ordered Domestic Spying, NYT, 18.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/politics/18bush.html

Transcript

President Bush's Address

December 17, 2005
The New York Times

Following is a transcription of President Bush’s weekly radio address yesterday as recorded by The New York Times.

As president, I took an oath to defend the Constitution and I have no greater responsibility than to protect our people, our freedom and our way of life.

On Sept. 11, 2001, our freedom and way of life came under attack by brutal enemies who killed nearly 3,000 innocent Americans. We’re fighting these enemies across the world. Yet in this first war of the 21st century, one of the most critical battlefronts is the home front. And since Sept. 11, we’ve been on the offensive against the terrorists plotting within our borders.

One of the first actions we took to protect America after our nation was attacked was to ask Congress to pass the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act tore down the legal and bureaucratic wall that kept law enforcement and intelligence authorities from sharing vital information about terrorist threats. And the Patriot Act allowed federal investigators to pursue terrorists with tools they already used against other criminals.

Congress passed this law with a large bipartisan majority, including a vote of 98 to 1 in the United States Senate. Since then, America’s law enforcement personnel have used this critical law to prosecute terrorist operatives and supporters and to break up terrorist cells in New York, Oregon, Virginia, California, Texas and Ohio.

The Patriot Act has accomplished exactly what it was designed to do. It is protecting American liberty and saved American lives. Yet key provisions of this law are set to expire in two weeks.

The terrorist threat to our country will not expire in two weeks. The terrorists want to attack America again and inflict even greater damage than they did on Sept. 11. Congress has a responsibility to ensure that law enforcement and intelligence officials have the tools they need to protect the American people.

The House of Representatives passed reauthorization of the Patriot Act, yet a minority of senators filibustered to block the renewal of the Patriot Act when it came up for a vote yesterday. That decision is irresponsible and it endangers the lives of our citizens.

The senators who are filibustering must stop their delaying tactics and the Senate must vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

In the war on terror we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment. To fight the war on terror, I’m using authority vested in me by Congress, including the joint authorization for use of military force, which passed overwhelmingly in the first week after Sept. 11. I’m also using constitutional authority vested in me as commander in chief.

In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks.

This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies.

Yesterday, the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have.

And the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies and endangers our country.

As the 9/11 Commission pointed out, it was clear that terrorists inside the United States were communicating with terrorists abroad before the Sept. 11 attacks. And the commission criticized our nation’s inability to uncover links between terrorists here at home and terrorists abroad.

Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet in the Pentagon, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, communicated while they were in the United States, to other members of Al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn’t know they were here until it was too late.

The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after Sept. 11 helped address that problem in a way that is fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities.

The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time.

And the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad.

The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every 45 days. Each review is based on a fresh intelligment assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland.

During each assessment, previous activities under the authorization are reviewed. The review includes approval by our nation’s top legal officials, including the attorney general and the counsel to the president.

I have reauthorized this program more than 30 times since the Sept. 11 attacks and I intend to do so for as long as our nation faces a continuing threat from Al Qaeda and related groups.

The N.S.A.’s activities under this authorization are thoroughly reviewed by the Justice Department and N.S.A.’s top legal officials, including N.S.A.’s general counsel and inspector general.

Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it. Intelligence officials involved in this activities also receive extensive training to ensure they perform their duties consistent with the letter and intent of the authorization.

This authorization is a vital tool in our war against the terrorists. It is critical to saving American lives. The American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties. And that is exactly what I will continue to do so long as I’m the president of the United States.

    President Bush's Address, NYT, 17.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/politics/17text-bush.html

News Analysis

Behind Power,

One Principle as Bush Pushes Prerogatives

December 17, 2005
The New York Time
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - A single, fiercely debated legal principle lies behind nearly every major initiative in the Bush administration's war on terror, scholars say: the sweeping assertion of the powers of the presidency.

From the government's detention of Americans as "enemy combatants" to the just-disclosed eavesdropping in the United States without court warrants, the administration has relied on an unusually expansive interpretation of the president's authority. That stance has given the administration leeway for decisive action, but it has come under severe criticism from some scholars and the courts.

With the strong support of Vice President Dick Cheney, legal theorists in the White House and Justice Department have argued that previous presidents unjustifiably gave up some of the legitimate power of their office. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, made it especially critical that the full power of the executive be restored and exercised, they said.

The administration's legal experts, including David S. Addington, the vice president's former counsel and now his chief of staff, and John C. Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003, have pointed to several sources of presidential authority.

The bedrock source is Article 2 of the Constitution, which describes the "executive power" of the president, including his authority as commander in chief of the armed forces. Several landmark court decisions have elaborated the extent of the powers.

Another key recent document cited by the administration is the joint resolution passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, authorizing the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for Sept. 11 in order to prevent further attacks.

Mr. Yoo, who is believed to have helped write a legal justification for the National Security Agency's secret domestic eavesdropping, first laid out the basis for the war on terror in a Sept. 25, 2001, memorandum that said no statute passed by Congress "can place any limits on the president's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and nature of the response."

That became the underlying justification for numerous actions apart from the eavesdropping program, disclosed by The New York Times on Thursday night. Those include the order to try accused terrorists before military tribunals; the detention of so-called enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret overseas jails operated by the Central Intelligence Agency; the holding of two Americans, Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, as enemy combatants; and the use of severe interrogation techniques, including some banned by international agreements, on Al Qaeda figures.

Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, declined to comment for this article. But Bradford A. Berenson, who served as associate counsel to President Bush from 2001 to 2003, explained the logic behind the assertion of executive power.

"After 9/11 the president felt it was incumbent on him to use every ounce of authority available to him to protect the American people," Mr. Berenson said.

He said he was not familiar with the N.S.A. program, in which the intelligence agency, without warrants, has monitored international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of people inside the United States. He said that he could not comment on whether the program was justified, but that he believed intelligence gathering on an enemy was clearly part of the president's constitutional war powers.

"Any program like this would have been very carefully analyzed by administration lawyers," Mr. Berenson said. "It's easy, now that four years have passed without another attack, to forget the sense of urgency that pervaded the country when the ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoking."

But some legal experts outside the administration, including some who served previously in the intelligence agencies, said the administration had pushed the presidential-powers argument beyond what was legally justified or prudent. They say the N.S.A. domestic eavesdropping illustrates the flaws in Mr. Bush's assertion of his powers.

"Obviously we have to do things differently because of the terrorist threat," said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, former general counsel of both N.S.A. and the Central Intelligence Agency, who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. "But to do it without the participation of the Congress and the courts is unwise in the extreme."

Even if the administration believes the president has the authority to direct warrantless eavesdropping, she said, ordering it without seeking Congressional approval was politically wrongheaded. "We're just relearning the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate," said Ms. Parker, now dean of the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law.

Jeffrey H. Smith, who served as C.I.A. general counsel in 1995 and 1996, said he was dismayed by the N.S.A. program, which he said was the latest instance of legal overreach by the administration.

"Clearly the president felt after 9/11 that he needed more powers than his predecessors had exercised," Mr. Smith said. "He chose to assert as much power as he thought he needed. Now the question is whether that was wise and consistent with our values."

William C. Banks, a widely respected authority on national security law at Syracuse University, said the N.S.A. revelation came as a shock, even given the administration's past assertions of presidential powers.

"I was frankly astonished by the story," he said. "My head is spinning."

Professor Banks said the president's power as commander in chief "is really limited to situations involving military force - anything needed to repel an attack. I don't think the commander in chief power allows" the warrantless eavesdropping, he said.

Mr. Berenson, the former White House associate counsel, said that in rare cases, the presidents' advisers may decide that an existing law violates the Constitution "by invading the president's executive powers as commander in chief."

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 typically requires warrants for the kind of eavesdropping carried out under the special N.S.A. program. Whether administration lawyers argued that that statute unconstitutionally infringed the president's powers is not known.

But Mr. Smith, formerly of the C.I.A., noted that when President Carter signed the act into law in 1978, he seemed to rule out any domestic eavesdropping without court approval.

"The bill requires, for the first time, a prior judicial warrant for all electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes in the United States" if an American's communications might be intercepted, President Carter said when he signed the act.

By asserting excessive powers, Mr. Smith said, President Bush may provoke a reaction from Congress and the courts that ultimately thwarts executive power.

"The president may wind up eroding the very powers he was seeking to exert," Mr. Smith said.

    Behind Power, One Principle as Bush Pushes Prerogatives, NYT, 17.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/politics/17legal.html

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts

December 16, 2005
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.

The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.

Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

Dealing With a New Threat

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

The eavesdropping program grew out of concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation's intelligence agencies were not poised to deal effectively with the new threat of Al Qaeda and that they were handcuffed by legal and bureaucratic restrictions better suited to peacetime than war, according to officials. In response, President Bush significantly eased limits on American intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the military.

But some of the administration's antiterrorism initiatives have provoked an outcry from members of Congress, watchdog groups, immigrants and others who argue that the measures erode protections for civil liberties and intrude on Americans' privacy.

Opponents have challenged provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the focus of contentious debate on Capitol Hill this week, that expand domestic surveillance by giving the Federal Bureau of Investigation more power to collect information like library lending lists or Internet use. Military and F.B.I. officials have drawn criticism for monitoring what were largely peaceful antiwar protests. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were forced to retreat on plans to use public and private databases to hunt for possible terrorists. And last year, the Supreme Court rejected the administration's claim that those labeled "enemy combatants" were not entitled to judicial review of their open-ended detention.

Mr. Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States - including American citizens, permanent legal residents, tourists and other foreigners - is based on classified legal opinions that assert that the president has broad powers to order such searches, derived in part from the September 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing him to wage war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, according to the officials familiar with the N.S.A. operation.

The National Security Agency, which is based at Fort Meade, Md., is the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, so intent on remaining out of public view that it has long been nicknamed "No Such Agency." It breaks codes and maintains listening posts around the world to eavesdrop on foreign governments, diplomats and trade negotiators as well as drug lords and terrorists. But the agency ordinarily operates under tight restrictions on any spying on Americans, even if they are overseas, or disseminating information about them.

What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.

Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in the United States by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.

Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so.

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.

A White House Briefing

After the special program started, Congressional leaders from both political parties were brought to Vice President Dick Cheney's office in the White House. The leaders, who included the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, learned of the N.S.A. operation from Mr. Cheney, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, who was then the agency's director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence, and George J. Tenet, then the director of the C.I.A., officials said.

It is not clear how much the members of Congress were told about the presidential order and the eavesdropping program. Some of them declined to comment about the matter, while others did not return phone calls.

Later briefings were held for members of Congress as they assumed leadership roles on the intelligence committees, officials familiar with the program said. After a 2003 briefing, Senator Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who became vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that year, wrote a letter to Mr. Cheney expressing concerns about the program, officials knowledgeable about the letter said. It could not be determined if he received a reply. Mr. Rockefeller declined to comment. Aside from the Congressional leaders, only a small group of people, including several cabinet members and officials at the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, know of the program.

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the program's legality. But nothing came of his inquiry. "People just looked the other way because they didn't want to know what was going on," he said.

A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. "My first reaction was, 'We're doing what?' " he said. While he said he eventually felt that adequate safeguards were put in place, he added that questions about the program's legitimacy were understandable.

Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.

The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant - intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups - and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say.

Administration officials counter that they sometimes need to move more urgently, the officials said. Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.

The N.S.A. domestic spying operation has stirred such controversy among some national security officials in part because of the agency's cautious culture and longstanding rules.

Widespread abuses - including eavesdropping on Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists - by American intelligence agencies became public in the 1970's and led to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which imposed strict limits on intelligence gathering on American soil. Among other things, the law required search warrants, approved by the secret F.I.S.A. court, for wiretaps in national security cases. The agency, deeply scarred by the scandals, adopted additional rules that all but ended domestic spying on its part.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, though, the United States intelligence community was criticized for being too risk-averse. The National Security Agency was even cited by the independent 9/11 Commission for adhering to self-imposed rules that were stricter than those set by federal law.

Concerns and Revisions

Several senior government officials say that when the special operation began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.

A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants.

One official familiar with the episode said the judge insisted to Justice Department lawyers at one point that any material gathered under the special N.S.A. program not be used in seeking wiretap warrants from her court. Judge Kollar-Kotelly did not return calls for comment.

A related issue arose in a case in which the F.B.I. was monitoring the communications of a terrorist suspect under a F.I.S.A.-approved warrant, even though the National Security Agency was already conducting warrantless eavesdropping.

According to officials, F.B.I. surveillance of Mr. Faris, the Brooklyn Bridge plotter, was dropped for a short time because of technical problems. At the time, senior Justice Department officials worried what would happen if the N.S.A. picked up information that needed to be presented in court. The government would then either have to disclose the N.S.A. program or mislead a criminal court about how it had gotten the information.

Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal. The House on Wednesday approved a plan to reauthorize crucial parts of the law. But final passage has been delayed under the threat of a Senate filibuster because of concerns from both parties over possible intrusions on Americans' civil liberties and privacy.

Under the act, law enforcement and intelligence officials are still required to seek a F.I.S.A. warrant every time they want to eavesdrop within the United States. A recent agreement reached by Republican leaders and the Bush administration would modify the standard for F.B.I. wiretap warrants, requiring, for instance, a description of a specific target. Critics say the bar would remain too low to prevent abuses.

Bush administration officials argue that the civil liberties concerns are unfounded, and they say pointedly that the Patriot Act has not freed the N.S.A. to target Americans. "Nothing could be further from the truth," wrote John Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and his co-author in a Wall Street Journal opinion article in December 2003. Mr. Yoo worked on a classified legal opinion on the N.S.A.'s domestic eavesdropping program.

At an April hearing on the Patriot Act renewal, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., "Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?"

"Generally," Mr. Mueller said, "I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens."

President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said.

The Legal Line Shifts

Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.

The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions.

For example, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Mr. Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer, wrote an internal memorandum that argued that the government might use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies in order to intercept telephonic communications and observe the movement of persons but without obtaining warrants for such uses."

Mr. Yoo noted that while such actions could raise constitutional issues, in the face of devastating terrorist attacks "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties."

The next year, Justice Department lawyers disclosed their thinking on the issue of warrantless wiretaps in national security cases in a little-noticed brief in an unrelated court case. In that 2002 brief, the government said that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

Administration officials were also encouraged by a November 2002 appeals court decision in an unrelated matter. The decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which sided with the administration in dismantling a bureaucratic "wall" limiting cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, cited "the president's inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance."

But the same court suggested that national security interests should not be grounds "to jettison the Fourth Amendment requirements" protecting the rights of Americans against undue searches. The dividing line, the court acknowledged, "is a very difficult one to administer."

Barclay Walsh contributed research for this article.

    Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts, NYT, 16.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html

President Backs McCain Measure on Inmate Abuse

December 16, 2005
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Under intense bipartisan Congressional pressure, President Bush reversed course on Thursday and reluctantly backed Senator John McCain's call for a law banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody.

A day after the House overwhelmingly endorsed Mr. McCain's measure, the White House took a deal that the senator had been offering for weeks as way to end the legislative impasse, essentially giving intelligence operatives the same legal defense afforded military interrogators who are accused of violating the regulations.

For Mr. Bush, it was a stinging defeat, considering that his party controls both houses of Congress and both chambers had defied his threatened veto to support Mr. McCain's measure resoundingly. It was a particularly significant setback for Vice President Dick Cheney, who since July has led the administration's fight to defeat the amendment or at least exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from its provisions.

Mr. McCain's measure would establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of prisoners and ban the kind of abusive treatment of prisoners that was revealed in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.

"We've sent a message to the world that the United States is not like the terrorists," Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, said as he sat next to Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. "What we are is a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior and treatment of all people no matter how evil or bad they are."

Mr. Bush sought to make the best of an awkward political situation by inviting Mr. McCain, his longtime political rival and the nation's most famous former prisoner of war, to the White House to thank him for a measure that the president had opposed for months as Congressional meddling. On Thursday Mr. Bush said it was important legislation "to achieve a common objective: that is to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture."

Soon after Mr. McCain left the White House, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, who has negotiated with the senator for weeks, said that as a result of the negotiations the law would apply "equally to men and women in uniform and for civilians who are involved in dealing with detainees and interrogations."

The agreement will also extend to intelligence officers a protection now afforded to military personnel, who if accused of violating interrogation rules can defend themselves if a "reasonable" person could have concluded they were following a lawful order. But Mr. Hadley conceded that the administration was unable to get a grant of immunity for C.I.A. interrogators, which he said "was a legitimate thing to consider in this context."

The effect of the agreement, Mr. Hadley said, would be to cement in law what he insisted had been the administration's policy: that the United States would "not use cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment at home or abroad."

The immediate effect of the measure, if passed, is hard to predict. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who was at the heart of last year's uproar over whether the administration had allowed torture in the fight against terror, said on CNN that Mr. McCain's amendment "provides additional clarification, in terms of what are the limits of interrogating dangerous terrorists."

"Obviously, we'll study the law carefully," Mr. Gonzales said. "And to the extent that we have to conform our conduct in any way, we will do so. People need to understand what the limits are. And if people don't meet those limits, they're going to be investigated and they're going to be held accountable."

The White House announcement was not the end of what has become a long-running drama on Capitol Hill.

Less than an hour after Mr. McCain and Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee, stood with the president, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter of California, announced that he would block the deal as part of a military budget bill unless the White House provided a letter containing specific assurances that the measure would not diminish intelligence-gathering capabilities.

"Right now, in my mind, there's a question," Mr. Hunter said.

Asked if the intelligence authorities had told him that Mr. McCain's measure would harm their ability to do their work, he said: "The answer to that is yes. That's why we're here."

On the other side of the Capitol, Mr. Hunter's counterpart, Mr. Warner, was scrambling to patch the rift by working with the White House to release the letter Mr. Hunter had requested. By Thursday evening, Mr. Hunter was reassured in writing by John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, that American intelligence-gathering operations would not suffer under Mr. McCain's measure, and he consented to the deal, said Josh Holly, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Warner said he was optimistic that his bill would pass. But just in case, he was exploring another option: attaching the newly drafted McCain language to a $453 billion military spending bill, also pending before the Senate. The bill already includes the original McCain provisions, and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, said he would accept the language negotiated by the White House.

The entire episode left Mr. McCain shrugging his shoulders, possibly because he knows that his measure has veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress. The Senate has backed Mr. McCain's amendment, 90 to 9, and the House voted Wednesday, 308 to 122, to support it.

Mr. McCain said he would prefer to see his measure attached to the military budget bill, a policy measure, but would be satisfied so long as it passed.

At the C.I.A., whose use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists was at the core of the debate, the official response was circumspect. "The C.I.A. understands its legal obligations and of course complies with U.S. policy," said Jennifer Dyck, the agency's chief spokeswoman.

But A. John Radsan, who served as assistant general counsel of the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004, said he believed that "the C.I.A. is the loser in this." While agency officers may benefit from greater clarity about the rules of interrogation, Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, had joined Mr. Cheney in arguing that the agency needed the flexibility to use harsh tactics in some cases.

The McCain amendment removes the "gray zone" of tactics less severe than torture but harsher than those allowed by the Army Field Manual, said Mr. Radsan, now at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul.

Jeffrey H. Smith, who served as C.I.A. general counsel from 1995 to 1996, said he believed there was a gap between Mr. Goss and other top managers, who sided with Mr. Cheney, and many lower-level officers who felt uncomfortable with any perception that they had been allowed to use techniques bordering on torture.

"I think the overall reaction of the rank-and-file officers will be relief that this issue is behind them and the rules are clear," Mr. Smith said.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Scott Shane and David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.

    President Backs McCain Measure on Inmate Abuse, NYT, 16.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16detain.html

A hooded protester dressed to represent a detainee
of the U.S. government demonstrates against torture
outside the White House in Washington November 22, 2005.
House of Representatives negotiators have largely accepted
Sen. John McCain's amendment banning the torture
and inhumane treatment of detainees,
but talks on other provisions could undermine the measure,
congressional aides said on Wednesday.

REUTERS/Jason Reed

U.S. House and Senate seek deal on torture amendment
R        7.12.2005
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=
2005-12-08T024831Z_01_KNE803336_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-TORTURE-CONGRESS.xml 

Bush Relents on Detainee Policy,

Backing McCain's Proposal

December 15, 2005
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The White House, after weeks of resistance, agreed today to Senator John McCain's call for a law specifically banning cruel or inhuman treatment of terror suspects anywhere in the world, administration and congressional officials said.

A formal announcement was expected this afternoon; there were reports that Mr. McCain might be joining President Bush for an announcement at the White House.

Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said that White House and congressional negotiators were poised to reconcile two goals, "treating people humanely and at same time maintaining an effective intelligence-gathering system."

"We think we're going to be successful," he said in remarks broadcast on CNN. "We think we're about ready to do something that's good for the country." Mr. Hunter's comments appeared particularly significant because he had reportedly opposed earlier language under discussion.

It was the second time in less than 24 hours that congressional concerns about torture - and the damage to America's image wrought by allegations of secret C.I.A. detentions and interrogations - had overwhelmed an administration intent on keeping an array of tools to wage a difficult, high-stakes battle against terrorism.

Late Wednesday, in a rare bipartisan rebuke to the administration, the House of Representatives voted, 308 to 122, to endorse a measure by Mr. McCain to bar cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world.

That vote was nonbinding. But with 107 Republican legislators joining Democrats in support of the measure - introduced by Representative John Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who recently made a high-profile call for an early withdrawal from Iraq - it doubtless added to the pressure on the White House.

The Arizona senator's political clout - he was a presidential candidate in 2000 - and his past as a former naval aviator who was tortured in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, have given his determined stance against torture particular resonance in Congress.

While details of the agreement remained uncertain, it appeared that the tremendous global outcry over allegations of secret prisoner transfers and interrogations, and its increasingly powerful echoes in Congress, had succeeded in bending the administration to compromise.

The agreement also appeared likely to give greater legal foundation to remarks made earlier this month in Europe by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who faced enormous pressure over allegations of secret C.I.A. detention camps and transfers.

She said that the United States would not take part in torture on its own territory or overseas. But her seemingly carefully crafted comments during that trip gave rise to sharp debate over whether they left any loopholes.

Mr. McCain has met repeatedly in recent weeks with the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, to negotiate a solution to the tensions over torture.

A key sticking point has been whether an agreement would equally cover all branches of government - including the military, the C.I.A., and also government contractors.

Vice President Dick Cheney had made an unusual appeal to Republican senators to provide an exemption for the C.I.A. The White House even threatened to veto the sweeping military-spending bill to which the Senate version of Mr. McCain's amendment was attached. The House version omitted those provisions from its version of the $453 billion spending bill.

Mr. McCain's language proved difficult for lawmakers to oppose, particularly at a time when opinion polls show that torture and detainee issues have seriously eroded the United States image abroad.

Reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, and allegations of misconduct by troops at the United States detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had fueled the push for more precise ban on torture.

Throughout the debate, the White House has insisted that the United States does not engage in torture.

    Bush Relents on Detainee Policy, Backing McCain's Proposal, NYT, 15.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/politics/15cnd-detain.html

President Renews His Campaign

to Overhaul Immigration Policies

November 29, 2005
The New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

TUCSON, Nov. 28 - President Bush kicked off a new effort on Monday to unite Republicans behind an overhaul of immigration laws. He emphasized the need to choke off the flow of illegal immigrants while trying to address conservatives' concerns about his plan to grant temporary legal status to millions of illegal workers already in the United States.

On the first of two days of appearances in two border states, Arizona and Texas, Mr. Bush tried to stake out a middle ground on an issue that has divided Republicans, saying the nation did not have to choose between upholding its immigration laws and being compassionate to the millions of workers who travel here desperate to make a living.

His emphasis was unmistakably on the elements that most concern conservatives in his party. They are demanding more forceful steps to hold back the waves of people who flow across the Mexican border and are deeply opposed to anything that smacks of amnesty for people who have entered illegally.

"Illegal immigration's a serious challenge," Mr. Bush said, flanked by two black Border Patrol helicopters in a hangar at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base here. "And our responsibility is clear. We are going to protect the border."

Mr. Bush listed initiatives that he said were helping, including returning illegal immigrants from Mexico to their hometowns rather than simply sending them back across the border and moving to end the practice of releasing illegal immigrants in the United States in the expectation, usually dashed, that they will appear for court hearings.

He approvingly cited programs to build walls and fences in some areas, spoke of how technology was helping catch people sneaking across the border and pushed budget increases he has supported.

The president cast his original proposal for a temporary guest worker program as a safety valve that would reduce illegal immigration and sought to ease concerns among some conservatives that it would amount to amnesty for lawbreakers. His plan would let millions of illegal immigrants obtain legal status for a fixed but as yet undetermined period, but would then require them to return to their home countries, a provision that many immigration experts say is unworkable and unrealistic.

"We're going to secure the border by catching those who enter illegally and hardening the border to prevent illegal crossings," Mr. Bush said. "We're going to strengthen enforcement of our immigration laws within our country. And together with Congress, we're going to create a temporary worker program that'll take pressure off the border, bring workers from out of the shadows and reject amnesty."

He signaled that he would oppose any effort to limit changes in immigration policy to an increase in border security. In doing so, he suggested that the White House preferred the approach being taken by Senate Republican leaders who have promised to develop a broad approach to immigration and border security to that being taken by House Republican leaders who plan to bring up a bill just on border security.

In the audience were the two Arizona senators, both Republicans: John McCain, who has co-sponsored a plan to give participants in the guest worker program a path to citizenship, and Jon Kyl, who has co-sponsored a bill to deny temporary workers a path to citizenship.

Their bills are among proposals on Capitol Hill that include building a wall along the entire Mexican border, using military forces to patrol the border, creating a volunteer marshal program to help patrols and increasing fines for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

"Listen, there's a lot of opinions on this proposal," Mr. Bush said. "I understand that. But people in this debate must recognize that we will not be able to effectively enforce our immigration laws until we create a temporary worker program."

In taking on the issue, Mr. Bush has found himself caught between two powerful forces. On one side is business, which pleads for a system that will ensure employers' access to workers who are willing to take jobs that they say they cannot fill with Americans or legal immigrants.

On the other side are conservatives who say the big problem is a porous border that is creating huge law enforcement problems and adding to the costs of social welfare, education and other programs.

Democrats are highlighting the Republicans' divisions, pressing Mr. Bush not to acquiesce to conservatives and asking him to address the full range of immigration issues.

"As Congress finally begins to address this problem, I hope that you will stand up to the right wing of your party and stand up for what is right," Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is minority leader, said in a letter sent on Monday to Mr. Bush.

Mr. Reid continued, "Democrats support immigration policies that will reunite families, provide for continued American economic growth, protect the rights of American workers, secure economic stability for our neighbors to the south and honor the values of the United States of America as a nation of immigrants."

Immigration is among the trickiest issues on Mr. Bush's domestic agenda, and it is in some ways similar to what President Bill Clinton faced in pushing for an overhaul of the welfare system a decade ago.

As Mr. Clinton did with welfare, Mr. Bush became immersed in immigration as governor. Just as Mr. Clinton wanted to use toughening the welfare system as a way to break with liberal orthodoxy and lay claim to the political center, Mr. Bush and his advisers have always viewed addressing immigration in a way sensitive to immigrants as an opportunity to strengthen his party's appeal to Hispanics, a fast-growing segment of the population.

Just as Mr. Clinton had to risk outrage among Democrats in signing a Republican welfare bill just months before he faced re-election in 1996, Mr. Bush finds himself navigating between factions of his party and at risk of having opened a debate that he can no longer control at a time his political fortunes have been sinking and he is increasingly reliant on his conservative base for support.

    President Renews His Campaign to Overhaul Immigration Policies, NYT, 29.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/29/politics/29bush.html

Bush to Press Immigration Plan in Arizona

November 28, 2005
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:03 p.m. ET
The New York Times

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- President Bush said Monday he wants to crack down on those who enter the country illegally but also give out more visas to foreigners with jobs, a dual plan he hopes will appease the social conservatives and business leaders who are his core supporters.

''The American people should not have to choose between a welcoming society and a lawful society,'' Bush said from the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base about an hour from the Mexican border. ''We can have both at the same time.''

The touchy issue of immigration has divided lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he will bring up the issue early next year. The House hopes to tackle some border security measures before adjourning for the year, but little time remains and it has other issues on its plate.

Bush also pitches his plan in El Paso, Texas, on Tuesday. Texas and Arizona are home to GOP senators who have been vocal on the need to change immigration laws but who aren't entirely sold on Bush's vision.

The idea for temporary worker visas has been especially divisive and is stalled in Congress. Bush said he does not support amnesty for illegal immigrants, but he does want to give workers a way to earn an honest living doing jobs that other Americans are unwilling to do and issue more green cards.

''Listen, there's a lot of opinions on this proposal,'' Bush said. ''I understand that, but people in this debate must recognize that we will not be able to effectively enforce our immigration laws until we create a temporary worker program.''

Also Monday in Phoenix, Bush sought to counter calls by some in Congress for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces. ''We will stay until the job is done, not a day longer. We will get the job done in Iraq,'' Bush told 1,300 people at a fund-raiser that was expected to bring in $1.4 million for Republican Sen. Jon Kyl's re-election campaign.

The president also promoted his plans to make tax cuts permanent, praised his Supreme Court picks -- new Chief Justice John Roberts and associate justice nominee Samuel Alito -- and pitched his immigration and border security proposals.

Earlier in Tucson, Bush spoke to a supportive audience that included border patrol agents and military troops. He was flanked by two black Customs and Border Protection helicopters and giant green and yellow signs that said ''Protecting America's Borders.''

He said he is providing border agents with cutting-edge technology like overhead surveillance drones and infrared cameras, while at the same time constructing simple physical barriers to entry.

The president's push on border security and immigration comes a month after Bush signed a $32 billion homeland security bill for 2006 that contains large increases for border protection, including 1,000 additional Border Patrol agents.

Bush has been urging Congress to act on a guest worker program for more than a year. Under his plan, undocumented immigrants would be allowed to get three-year work visas. They could extend that for an additional three years, but would then have to return to their home countries for a year to apply for a new work permit.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., along with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., has proposed providing illegal immigrants in the United States visas for up to six years. After that, they must either leave the United States or be in the pipeline for a green card, which indicates lawful permanent residency.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Kyl support an alternative proposal that would require illegal immigrants to return to their home country to apply for a temporary worker program.

McCain and Kyl appeared with Bush, while Kennedy issued a statement criticizing the president for talking about immigration reform without acting after nearly five years in office. And it wasn't just Democrats saying that -- Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said Americans ''are tired of talk and ready for action.''

And, she added, ''We have no business discussing guest worker programs until we can actually prevent illegal entry.''

On the Net:

http://www.whitehouse.gov 

    Bush to Press Immigration Plan in Arizona, 28.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush.html

Bush signs law

to up flood insurance borrowing

Mon Nov 21, 2005 11:21 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush signed into law legislation drastically raising the borrowing authority of the government's flood insurance program to $18.5 billion from $3.5 billion to cover claims from Hurricane Katrina and other flood disasters, the White House said on Monday.

Run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Flood Insurance Program recently has been swamped with more claims from storms than the total it has paid out since it began in 1968.

Congress approved the expanded borrowing authority last week after lawmakers said the flood insurance program needed more cash.

The program covers more than 4.7 million policies for homes, businesses and other nonresidential property owners. It is allowed to borrow from the U.S. Treasury to cover claims not covered by its premiums.

"I have reviewed your request for approval to issue notes to the Secretary of the Treasury in excess of $3.5 billion, but not to exceed $18.5 billion, for the National Flood Insurance Program and am hereby granting approval for you to do so," Bush said in a memorandum to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA.

The director of the national flood insurance program, David Maurstad, has warned that claims from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could top $22 billion, and previously asked for a $5 billion increase just to get the program through November.

A Senate aide said the $18.5 billion Congress approved on Friday should sustain the program through February.

Bush signs law to up flood insurance borrowing, R, 21.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-22T042116Z_01_MCC215617_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-HURRICANES-INSURANCE.xml