In Address, Bush Says
He Ordered Domestic Spying
By DAVID E. SANGER,
NYTimes on the Web, December 18, 2005
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Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press
President
Bush delivered his radio address in the Roosevelt Room. In the live
address, he criticized senators who voted not to renew the
antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act. |
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."
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Manuel
Balce Ceneta/Associated Press
In an
unusual live radio address, President Bush defended a classified
eavesdropping program |
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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 suspected terrorists 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 is
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 "No one wants another Pearl Harbor," an argument Mr. Bush echoed on
Saturday in defending his program as a critical component of defending against
terror attacks.
But the revelation of the domestic spying program -- which the administration
temporarily suspended last year because of concerns within the government 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 domestic 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 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 himself 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."
Not surprisingly, 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 committee, said on Friday that "there is no doubt this is inappropriate"
and that he would conduct hearings to determine why Mr. Bush took the action.
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." That review
involves the attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, and Mr. Bush's counsel,
Harriet E. Miers, whom Mr. Bush unsuccessfully tried to nominate to the Supreme
Court this year.
"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 president 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, coming 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 non-military 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." That has now
"changed fundamentally," Mr. Malinowski said, a view that even some of Mr.
Bush's aides and former aides echoed.
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 evening, 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 the troop levels in Iraq, which he has said in a
series of four recent speeches on Iraq strategy could be the ultimate result if
Iraqi security forces are able to begin to perform more security operations
currently conducted by American forces.
Currently, there are roughly 160,000 American troops in Iraq, a number that was
intended to keep order for Friday's parliamentary elections, which were
conducted with little violence and an unexpectedly heavy turnout of Sunnis, the
ethnic minority that ruled the country under Mr. Hussein's reign. The
American troop level was already scheduled to decline to 138,000 -- what the
military calls its "baseline" level of troops -- after the election.
But on Friday, as the debate in Washington swirled over the president's order to
the N.S.A., 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 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.
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