Date Posted: Monday, January 23, 2006

President Bush defended spying on U.S. citizens without first obtaining a warrant in order to thwart attacks from al-Qaeda.

MANHATTAN, Kansas, Jan 23 (MASNET & News Agencies) - Embattled President George W. Bush, under fire for ordering unprecedented spying on U.S. citizens, defended the program as limited, legal and critical to thwarting terrorist plots.

One week after Osama bin Laden threatened new attacks inside the United States in an audiotape message, Bush said in a speech at Kansas State University that the government only intercepted communications including a "known al-Qaeda suspect," reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"In other words, we have ways to determine whether or not someone can be an al-Qaeda affiliate or al-Qaeda. And if they're making a phone call in the United States, it seems like to me we want to know why," he said.

With some judicial scholars, and the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, charging that the program likely violates a law requiring court approval for spying on a U.S. citizen, Bush said the program was legal.

"I'm mindful of your civil liberties, and so I had all kinds of lawyers review the process. We briefed members of the United States Congress," he said. "If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?"

Democrats criticized Bush for notifying only eight top lawmakers in Congress about the surveillance program, rather than the full intelligence oversight committees of the Senate and House of Representatives, reports Reuters.

Bush appeared alongside Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who so far has resisted Democratic calls to investigate the eavesdropping program, the news agency reports.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on the program for February 6 at which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will testify.

Bush appeared at Kansas State as part of a White House public relations campaign to defend a National Security Agency (NSA) spying program that has raised an outcry among Democrats and Republicans who say Bush may have overstepped his authority, reports Reuters.

The NSA program, exposed last month by the New York Times, was authorized by Bush to monitor the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of U.S. citizens without first obtaining warrants as a means of aiding in the hunt for al-Qaeda suspects in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the news agency reports.

Lawmakers from both parties have suggested that the program may violate the Constitution and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and have questioned why Bush did not ask them to change it to accommodate his plans.

The law forbids wiretapping or other electronic surveillance unless authorized by a special court, or by another act of Congress.

Pushing back at critics, Bush said the program should be termed a "terrorist surveillance program," saying that allowing the NSA to monitor the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans with suspected ties to terrorists can hardly be considered "domestic spying."

"It's what I would call a terrorist surveillance program," he said.

Bush said that the authorization to use force in Afghanistan allowed him to create the program because "Congress gave me the authority to use necessary force to protect the American people, but it didn't prescribe the tactics."

"One of the ways to protect the American people is to understand the intentions of the enemy," he said. "If they're making phone calls into the United States, we need to know why to protect you."

But Bush's Justice Department took a harder line last week, rejecting any limits on his wartime powers and warning that FISA would be unconstitutional if it were interpreted to "impede" the new surveillance program.

And other administration officials said the war on terrorism has made the federal law on electronic surveillance outdated because the 28-year-old FISA law is not as effective against terrorism, reports Reuters.

"I don't think that anyone can make the claim that the FISA statute is optimized to deal or prevent a 9/11 or deal with a lethal enemy who likely already had combatants inside the United States," said Air Force General Michael Hayden, who was NSA director when Bush authorized the domestic spying program, the news agency reports.

"[For] this particular aspect, this particular challenge - detect and prevent attacks - what we're doing now is operationally more relevant, operationally more effective."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that FISA was created in "a different time period" and did not anticipate technological advances that have occurred in telecommunications in recent decades, reports Reuters.

Hayden, who is now principal deputy to U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte, also stressed that the program dealt strictly with international communications, not those between people inside the United States, and was directed at people he said were associated with al-Qaeda, the news agency reports.

"This isn't a drift-net out there where we're soaking up everyone's communications," Hayden said.

"This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al-Qaeda," he said in remarks delivered at the National Press Club in Washington.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is to deliver a speech on the program Tuesday. And Bush was going to NSA headquarters outside Washington on Wednesday, reports the Associated Press (AP).

Last week, Gonzales sent congressional leaders a 42-page legal defense of the program. Vice President Dick Cheney defended it in New York last Thursday and briefed congressional leaders at the White House on Friday, the news agency reports.

In a wide-ranging question and answer session after his speech, Bush said he would be "aggressive" in efforts to get U.S. beef on Japan's markets and warned that while Washington has "no beef" with Iranians, it cannot allow Tehran to develop a nuclear weapon.

"I also want the Iranian people to hear loud and clear, and that is, we have no beef with you. We are worried about a government ... whose aims and objectives are not peaceful, and, therefore, we don't think that you should have the capacity to make a nuclear weapon," he said.

He also expressed concern with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rhetorical broadside about Israel, saying: "Israel's our ally. We're committed to the safety of Israel, and it's a commitment we will keep."

Asked about relations with China, the U.S. president said that Sino-U.S. relations were "complex" but that he enjoyed "warm" ties with Chinese President Hu Jintao that enabled him to raise potentially difficult issues.

Bush said that he had warned Hu during a visit to Beijing in November that China needed to do something about its soaring trade surplus with the United States or face "a backlash."

The president also said that Beijing was "beginning to move a bit" on repeated U.S. calls to allow its currency to float on international markets.

Bush also rejected "demeaning" accusations that British Prime Minister Tony Blair does his bidding, pointing to disagreements on issues like the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the International Criminal Court, both of which the United States rejects.

"I admire him a lot. He's an independent thinker," said Bush. "Sometimes we disagree on tactics. And we try to work through where we disagree. We've had a lot of disagreements."

Bush also revealed that he had given Blair the option of not backing the U.S. push for war with Iraq.

"I told him one time, I said, 'If you're worried about your government,' I said, 'I don't want your government to fall. And if you're worried about [that], just go ahead and pull out of the coalition so you can save your government," Bush related.

"And he said to me, he said, 'I have made my commitment on behalf of the great country of Britain, and I'm not changing my mind,'" said Bush. "That's why I admire Tony Blair. He'll do the right thing."

McClellan said the questions were not prescreened although they turned out to be friendly, reports the AP.