Bush, NSA and Civil Liberties

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Feingold said it was "absurd" that Bush said he relied on his inherent power as president to authorize the wiretaps.
"If that's true, he doesn't need the Patriot Act because he can just make it up as he goes along. I tell you, he's President George Bush, not King George Bush. This is not the system of government we have and that we fought for," Feingold told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

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On Capitol Hill, the White House proposed a resolution that would give the president authority to "deter and prevent any related future acts of terrorism and aggression against the United States." Members from both parties objected that the language was too broad.

"It would have given him authority to do anything he wanted, anytime, anywhere," recalls Rep. Peter DeFazio (news, bio, voting record), D-Ore. The wording was revised.

The new version said: "The President is authorized 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."

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"There's nothing in there that gave the president the authority to override the law," says Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif. She has asked four legal scholars if they believe Bush has admitted an "impeachable offense."

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Cheney said such measures were necessary because the United States needed to "aggressively go after terrorists" and that they had "saved thousands of lives."

"It is, I'm convinced, one of the reasons we haven't been attacked in the past four years," Cheney said.

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"For the last few days, I have witnessed the president, the vice president, the secretary of state and the attorney general repeatedly misrepresent the facts," Rockefeller said in a written statement.

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Another lawmaker who knew about the program, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, asked National Intelligence Director John Negroponte Tuesday to declassify a letter she wrote to the administration years ago expressing her "strong concerns," as well as the White House response.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, discounted the administration's contention that the program was necessary to ensure a swifter response than the FISA court would allow.

"That's why our law allows a president to go right away and apply for those warrants retroactively within 72 hours," she told CNN.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean went so far as to compare the program to "the dark days of President Nixon."

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"Previous administrations, as well as the court that oversees national security cases, agreed with President Bush's position that a president legally may authorize searches without warrants in pursuit of foreign intelligence."

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Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, discounted the administration's contention that the program was necessary to ensure a swifter response than the FISA court would allow.

"That's why our law allows a president to go right away and apply for those warrants retroactively within 72 hours," she told CNN.

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"There's nothing in there that gave the president the authority to override the law," says Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif. She has asked four legal scholars if they believe Bush has admitted an "impeachable offense."

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Further, the Justice Department has acknowledged the right of to President to follow this action.

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Previous administrations, as well as the court that oversees national security cases, agreed with President Bush's position that a president legally may authorize searches without warrants in pursuit of foreign intelligence.

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The surveillance court, made up of 11 judges from across the nation, was created in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The legislation mandates that intelligence agencies seeking to monitor domestic conversations must ask the court for a warrant.

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The Bush administration argues the NSA program is exempt from that requirement.

Several FISA court judges are raising concerns about the program, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the briefing.
Those concerns include questions about whether the Bush administration has overreached its authority, and whether information that might have been gathered illegally was used to obtain warrants from the court, the newspaper said in Thursday's editions.

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Many Democrats and civil rights advocates say the program is not lawful because it was not explicitly authorized by legislation.

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The memo dealt with whether government officials should have blanket protection from lawsuits when authorizing wiretaps. "I do not question that the attorney general should have this immunity," Alito wrote. "But for tactical reasons, I would not raise the issue here."

Despite Alito's warning that the government would lose, the Reagan administration took the fight to the Supreme Court in the case of whether Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, could be sued for authorizing a warrantless domestic wiretap to gather information about a suspected terrorist plot. The FBI had received information about a conspiracy to destroy utility tunnels in Washington and kidnap Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser.

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That case ultimately led to a 1985 ruling by the Supreme Court that the attorney general and other high level executive officials could be sued for violating people's rights, in the name of national security, with such actions as domestic wiretaps.

"The danger that high federal officials will disregard constitutional rights in their zeal to protect the national security is sufficiently real to counsel against affording such officials an absolute immunity," the court held.

However, the court said Mitchell was protected from suit, because when he authorized the wiretap he did not realize his actions violated the Fourth Amendment.

The decision was consistent with the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in 1972 that it was unconstitutional for the government to conduct wiretaps without court approval despite the Nixon administration's argument that domestic anti-war groups and other radicals were a threat to national security.

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... the president's authority on eavesdropping will be central issues when the Senate Judiciary Committee opens confirmation hearings on Alito's nomination Jan. 9.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record) of Vermont, the top Democrat on the committee, said the latest documents "fill in more blanks and deepen the impression of activism that colors Judge Alito's career" and raise issues critical to the panel.

"One of the most important, and one of the most timely, is the issue of unchecked presidential authority and the particular issue of warrantless eavesdropping on the American people," Leahy said.

Another committee Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record) of New York, released a letter to Alito in which he questioned whether the nominee believes in absolute immunity for the attorney general and other government officials "from suits based on even willful unconstitutional acts."

Schumer vowed to question Alito on the issue and warned that if he refused to answer questions, it would make it harder for members of the panel to support his confirmation.

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Bush’s explanation is riddled with lies. He says our enemies are watching and threatens The New York Times, which broke the spying story, with legal action. It takes a vivid imagination to believe that Osama bin Laden and his buddies are keeping up with the niceties of FISA courts and would otherwise have no idea their phones might be tapped. Bush says he talks to Congress all the time and that there was plenty of congressional oversight. Not true. The Gang of Eight (leaders of both parties in the House and Senate, plus the chair and ranking members of the Intelligence Committees) were forbidden to take notes or discuss what they were told with colleagues or staff. Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s hand-written letter to Cheney expressed uneasiness about the program. Rockefeller couldn’t have its legality evaluated by staff. He couldn’t even have the letter typed because of the secrecy. That hardly qualifies as congressional oversight.

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Wednesday, some members of a Florida anti-war group called "The Truth Project" demanded that the Pentagon turn over all information collected about their group.

And Florida Senator Bill Nelson wrote Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, asking how this peaceful group could be listed a "threat" in a previously secret Pentagon database.

"When the Pentagon starts going into a Quaker meeting house in Florida, then it's a question of invasion of privacy," says Nelson, R-Fl

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"This document, it's a clue that shows the level of surveillance, the level of domestic surveillance that the U.S. military is now involved in," says Bill Arkin, an NBC News military analyst.

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Mr. Bush chose not to avail himself of the tool that Congress has provided for the purpose of eavesdropping - The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed in 1978 as a reaction to President Nixon's domestic spying. That Act permits the president to apply in secret to a special court for a warrant. The administration is authorized to begin surveillance for 72 hours while waiting for the warrant, which is almost always granted.

In his defiance, there may be peril for the president, as President Nixon discovered when the House Judiciary Committee voted three articles of impeachment against him, one of them for abusing the power of three agencies - the FBI, CIA, and IRS. Nixon took the position that he was using inherent presidential powers granted by the Constitution.

The Constitution says that the president shall exercise the "executive power" and shall be commander in chief of the armed forces, but it doesn't spell out what those powers are. Some presidents have come up with what they call the "inherent power" of the presidency, which tends to be what they make it.

Historians have said that President Lincoln freed the slaves, blockaded Southern ports, and instituted a draft all without constitutional authority. President Reagan invoked "inherent powers" to justify the illegal sale of missiles to Iran and the illegal financing of the civil war in Nicaragua. Short of impeachment, the Congress has no way of stopping a willful president except to deny him funds. That, of course, is unlikely, especially with a Republican-controlled Congress.

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. . . according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

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. . . the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, i many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.

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For the most part, this is a site of conservative Christians and republicans.

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de·moc·ra·cy n., pl. de·moc·ra·cies. 1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. 2. A political or social unit that has such a government. 3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power. 4. Majority rule. 5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.

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dic·ta·tor·ship, n. 1. A government in which a single leader or party exercises absolute control over all citizens and every aspect of their lives: a. autocracy b. absolutism 2. A political doctrine advocating the principle of absolute rule: a. despotism b. autocracy c. totalitarianism d. authoritarianism e. absolutism 3. Absolute power, especially when exercised unjustly or cruelly: a. tyranny b. despotism c. autocracy d. totalitarianism

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Government records show that the Bush administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval.

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A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.

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"They wanted to expand the number of people they were eavesdropping on, and they didn't think they could get the warrants they needed from the court to monitor those people," said Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" and "The Puzzle Palace: Inside America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization." "The FISA court has shown its displeasure by tinkering with these applications by the Bush administration."

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To win a court-approved wiretap, the government must show "probable cause" that the target of the surveillance is a member of a foreign terrorist organization or foreign power and is engaged in activities that "may" involve a violation of criminal law.

No 'probable cause'

Faced with that standard, Bamford said the Bush administration had difficulty obtaining FISA court-approved wiretaps on dozens of people within the United States who were communicating with targeted al Qaeda suspects inside the United States.

"The court wouldn't find enough 'probable cause' to give the Bush administration wiretap warrants on everybody that talks to or e-mails the terror suspect that they were trying to target," Bamford said.

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The judges modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation. In 20 of the first 21 annual reports on the court's activities up to 1999, the Justice Department told Congress that "no orders were entered (by the FISA court) which modified or denied the requested authority" submitted by the government.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004, the most recent years for which public records are available.

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The judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.

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"FISA is very important in the war on terror, but it doesn't provide the speed and the agility that we need in all circumstances to deal with this new kind of threat," Gonzales said.

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Bamford, 59, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran, likens the Bush administration's domestic surveillance without court approval to Nixon-era abuses of intelligence agencies.

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"NSA prides itself on learning the lessons of the 1970s and obeying the legal restrictions imposed by FISA," Bamford said. "Now it looks like we're going back to the bad old days again."

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday supported government eavesdropping to prevent terrorism but said a major controversy over presidential powers could have been avoided by obtaining court warrants.

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Which of the referenced articles is from the conservative branch of the news media? Is there a conservative branch?

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I have only read the headline of the most recently referenced article, but I am personally delighted to know that secret surveillance is up since 9/11 . . . Only those with something to hide and those looking for excuses to attack our leaders fear surveilance.

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Please be specific as to what issue was resolved on this topic. If you mean that Mr. Bush authorized tapping the phones of suspected terrorists, he was authorized by Congress to do what was necessary to defend our country and tapping those phone calls is necessary if we are to avert another 9/11. If that type of wire taps had been in place before 9/11, we might never have experienced the murder of thousands of our citizens.

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Refering to statements by our leaders as lies is a conclusion, not a fact and it veers from the dignity of debate. Most of the articles referenced in this discussion are examples of conclusions reached by the liberal media unsupported by fact. Newsmen are supposed to report fact. It should be left up to the reader to reach conclusion.

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Only those with something to hide and those looking for excuses to attack our leaders fear surveilance. I am one of the first to defend our freeedoms, but no one is free to plot another attack on our country. Nor should they be.

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The terrorists themselves have repeatedly stated they represent the nation of Islam. Just as Texas and New york are states of the United States, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran are states of the Islamic nation. The real issue, however, is that we are at war. We are free to say what we like, but attacking our country from within is simply wrong.

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Only when one is losing a debate is it necessary to use insults. There is nothing undignified about differing opinions. No one has called anyone a name or insulted anyone except our President who has been called various names including liar.

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Originally posted by Casey:
Sigh....
There is no one on this thread who is a "Bush basher."

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". . . it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they (NSA) are not even following the government's very basic rules for Web privacy."

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - The bond market's signal of slower economic growth ahead sent shivers through financial markets this week and raised questions about the strength of the current expansion.

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"This could be the Enron of lobbying," Ring told the colleague.

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At the heart of this thickening veil are direct presidential orders and former Attorney General John Ashcroft's blanket assurance of legal defense to any agency erring on the side of secrecy in sealing off documents. This reversed the Clinton administration's "presumption of disclosure" when it came to public requests. The 9/11 commission has already pointed out that this general retreat from the intent of the law hardly discourages terrorists; in fact, it was the government's internal failure to share information that contributed to that tragedy.

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So I would ask the group: Do you believe that the commander-in-chief powers can trump international law and domestic statutes in our struggle against terrorism? Why or why not?

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The Iraq war was a tragedy in danger of becoming a disaster, as the Bush administration pressed its efforts to assemble a parliament and a government and avert a civil war.

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It was also not a good year for civil liberties. We heard the disclosure of the wiretapping of Americans without seeking warrants and learned about the secret prisons abroad for terror suspects and the mistreatment of prisoners under interrogation.

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"The leaking of classified information is a serious issue," said the spokesman, Trent Duffy.

"The fact is that Al Qaeda's playbook is not printed on Page 1, and when America's is, it has serious ramifications. You don't need to be Sun Tzu to understand that," he said, referring to the Chinese warrior who wrote "The Art of War."

The president last week denounced in strong language the leaking of information about the agency's program, saying: "My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."

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"President Bush broke the law and lied to the American people when he unilaterally authorized secret wiretaps of U.S. citizens," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "But rather than focus on this constitutional crisis, Attorney General Gonzales is cracking down on critics of his friend and boss. Our nation is strengthened, not weakened, by those whistle-blowers who are courageous enough to speak out on violations of the law.

"Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said his group believed "the priority at this point for the Department of Justice should be the appointment of an independent prosecutor to determine whether federal wiretap laws were violated" by the security agency program, not the leak inquiry.

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Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit law firm that defends whistle-blowers, said his group would not object to a limited investigation of the leak of classified information. "But if they do a blanket witch hunt, which I fear," he said, "it would trample all over good government laws" intended to protect government workers who expose wrongdoing.

"The whole reason we have whistle-blower laws is so that government workers can act as the public's eyes and ears to expose illegality or abuse of power," Mr. Devine said.

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While President Bush has focused his ire on whoever leaked the information, Vice President Cheney, in remarks to reporters on Dec. 20, was critical of The Times as well. Reiterating that the administration had asked the newspaper not to publish the article, Mr. Cheney said: "Eventually they ran it. I think that's unfortunate. I think it damages national security."

A Justice Department official, asked whether the investigation would examine the newspaper's publication of the information in addition to any government employees who might have leaked it, said he could not comment on any aspect of the investigation.

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By endorsing them, the president has finally shown his commitment to bipartisanship in the worst of ways: by installing another undistinguished group of factotums to referee the democratic process.

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This year was marked by skyrocketing energy prices, a slowing economy, hot-and-cold inflation threats and the Federal Reserve steadily raising interest rates — all of which made investors nervous over the state of the economy and kept stocks volatile but ultimately little changed since the end of 2004.

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Instead, thin volume led to volatile movements in stock prices, while crude oil futures climbed back above $60 a barrel, and the bond market began to behave as if the U.S. economy faces trouble.

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DANGEROUS CURVE

On Tuesday, the two-year U.S. Treasury note's yield rose above the benchmark 10-year Treasury note's yield, inverting the yield curve for the first time in five years.

Previous inversions have typically signaled a slowing economy or recession.

In the week to come, investors will likely be mulling over whether this time around, the inverted yield curve means the economy is headed for a slowdown or whether heavy foreign buying of U.S. Treasury debt has distorted its meaning.

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The White House’s site uses what’s known as a Web bug — a tiny graphic image that’s virtually invisible — to anonymously keep track of who’s visiting and when. The bug is sent by a server maintained by an outside contractor, WebTrends Inc., and lets the traffic-analysis company know that another person has visited a specific page on the site.

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A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.

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It is unclear whether the White House ultimately persuaded Mr. Ashcroft to give his approval to the program after the meeting or moved ahead without it.

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Several senior government officials have said that when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with it, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, officials have said.

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Since the revelation last month that President Bush had authorized the NSA to intercept communications inside the United States, public concern has focused primarily on the legality of the NSA eavesdropping. Less attention has been paid to, and little is known about, how the NSA's information may have been used by other government agencies to investigate American citizens or to cross-check with other databases. In the 1960s and 1970s, the military used NSA intercepts to maintain files on U.S. peace activists, revelations of which prompted Congress to restrict the NSA from intercepting communications of Americans.

Looking for patterns
Today's NSA intercepts yield two broad categories of information, said a former administration official familiar with the program: "content," which would include transcripts of a phone call or e-mail, and "non-content," which would be records showing, for example, who in the United States was called by, or was calling, a number in another country thought to have a connection to a terrorist group. At the same time, NSA tries to limit identifying the names of Americans involved.

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Talon is a system that civilian and military personnel use to report suspicious activities around military installations. Information from these reports is fed into a database known as the Joint Protection Enterprise Network, which is managed, as is the Talon system, by the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the newest Defense Department intelligence agency to focus primarily on counterterrorism. The database is shared with intelligence and law enforcement agencies and was found last month to have contained information about peace activists and others protesting the Iraq war that appeared to have no bearing on terrorism.

Military officials acknowledged that such information should have been purged after 90 days and that the Talon system was being reviewed.

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SAN ANTONIO - President Bush on Sunday strongly defended his domestic spying program, saying it's a limited initiative that tracks only incoming calls to the United States.

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The president was asked whether he misled the American people in 2004 when, during an event promoting the Patriot Act, he said that any wiretapping required a court order and that nothing had changed. He made the statement more than two years after he approved the NSA program.

"I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involving the Patriot Act," Bush said. "This is different from the NSA program."

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"He insists that his real motive in conducting the war in Iraq is to democratize one of the least democratic corners of the earth."

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"The president, as commander in chief, feels it's one his most important duties to visit with those who are serving in the armed forces and providing great sacrifice for this important mission," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

"He thanks them for their service. He asks how they're doing. He is always interested in seeing if they are getting the kinds of care they need," Duffy said, adding that not all the troops' injuries were sustained in combat.

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Bush spent the past week relaxing at his ranch where he rode his bike, cleared brush and prepared for his sixth year in office. He and his wife, Laura, and her mother, Jenna Welch, stayed at the ranch on New Year's Eve and had a steak dinner.

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Tribesmen frequently kidnap tourists to force concessions from the government in Yemen, a poor, mountainous nation on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula where state control in outlying areas is shaky.

The hostages are usually freed unharmed, but several were killed in 2000 when Yemeni soldiers carried out a botched raid to free them.

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The hard-hitting spots are part of a recent public-relations barrage aimed at reversing a decline in public support for President Bush's handling of Iraq. But these advertisements aren't paid for by the Republican National Committee or other established White House allies. Instead, they are sponsored by Move America Forward, a media-savvy outside advocacy group that has become one of the loudest -- and most controversial -- voices in the Iraq debate.

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"An organization with a shady tax status participating in partisan activities and saying things that aren't true is a rogue element in American politics."

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The White House didn't return several calls seeking comment. A Republican National Committee spokesman declined to comment.

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The fundamental essence of PNAC's ideology can be found in a White Paper
produced in September of 2000 entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses:
Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century." In it, PNAC outlines
what is required of America to create the global empire they envision.
According to PNAC, America must:
* Reposition permanently based forces to Southern Europe, Southeast Asia
and the Middle East;
* Modernize U.S. forces, including enhancing our fighter aircraft,
submarine and surface fleet capabilities;
* Develop and deploy a global missile defense system, and develop a
strategic dominance of space;
* Control the "International Commons" of cyberspace;
* Increase defense spending to a minimum of 3.8 percent of gross domestic
product, up from the 3 percent currently spent.

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The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a 'global Pax Americana' was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'

The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'.

This 'American grand strategy' must be advanced for 'as far into the future as possible', the report says. It also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission'.

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"There will be a lot of hearings to talk about that, but that's good for democracy," he said. "Just so long as the hearings, as they explore whether or not I had the prerogative to make the decision I make, doesn't tell the enemy what we're doing. See, that's the danger."

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While saying he wanted to bring American troops home, he said, "I don't want them to come home without achieving the victory."

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"The president, as commander in chief, feels it's one his most important duties to visit with those who are serving in the armed forces and providing great sacrifice for this important mission," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

"He thanks them for their service. He asks how they're doing. He is always interested in seeing if they are getting the kinds of care they need," Duffy said, adding that not all the troops' injuries were sustained in combat.

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But should such an institution really be funded by private sources? Inevitably, organizations like Intrepid have raised questions about whether the Bush administration--committed to two wars--is too stretched to properly take care of returning veterans. "It’s surprising to us that there needs to be a facility that’s privately funded, and we hope that the Congress and the Bush administration will recognize that we need to meet these goals of the severely injured," says Peter Gayton, director of veterans affai rs and rehabilitation at the American Legion. “The fact that the Intrepid Center needs to exist shows that the VA is not receiving enough funding."

The debate is being fueled by syndicated radio host Don Imus, who has donated $250,000 and has made raising money for the fund a regular feature on his morning show. On Friday he told listeners he doesn't know why "the government wouldn't just simply pay for [the center], considering the extraordinary amount of money they spend on ... this idiotic war." And later said "We have a tradition in this country, well, going back to the Civil War, in which we send off young people to fight these wars. Stuff happens to them. They lose their arms and legs. And we just discard them. You know, like they are iPods of old telephones or something."

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Jan. 23, 2006 issue - What if we faced a constitutional crisis and hardly anyone noticed? As he quietly mastered the tiresome cat-and-mouse game inside the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Judge Samuel Alito gave few hints of where he stood on a matter that goes to the heart of what it means to live in a republic. With a few exceptions, the media coverage didn't help. It's so much easier to talk about Joe Biden's big mouth or a right-wing Princeton alumni group or Mrs. Alito's tears than to figure out how the country should prevent a president of the United States from castrating the United States Congress.

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Remember, this is not about whether it's right or wrong to wiretap bad guys, though the White House hopes to frame it that way for political purposes. Any rational person wants the president to be able to hunt for Qaeda suspects wherever they lurk. The "momentous" issue (Alito's words) is whether this president, or any other, has the right to tell Congress to shove it. And even if one concedes that wartime offers the president extra powers to limit liberty, what happens if the terrorist threat looks permanent? We may be scrapping our checks and balances not just for a few years (as during the Civil War), but for good.

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Alito embodies the inherent contradiction of the conservative movement. The nominee is an "originalist," which means, as he said last week, that "we should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption." But at that time, the 18th century, the Founders could not have been clearer about the role of Congress in wartime. As James Madison put it, "In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislative and not to the executive branch."

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Fortunately, Sen. Arlen Specter will hold hearings in early February on presidential power. Watch them, please, even if you're tired of this cast of Judiciary Committee characters. Our whole system is on the line.

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Below are the most frequent responses cited by Americans asked this open-ended question by the AP-Ipsos poll: "What is the most important problem facing the country today?" Based on the responses, which do you feel is the top problem? * 13396 responses

Political leaders - 45%
Morality-5%
Energy crisis -3%
Crime/drugs -1%
Education -1%
Environment -2%
Iraq war -27%
Wars, worldwide unrest -5%
Terrorism - 6%
Economy - 4%
Unemployment -1%

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In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

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President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

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Intelligence officials disagree with any characterization of the program's results as modest, said Judith A. Emmel, a spokeswoman for the office of the director of national intelligence. Ms. Emmel cited a statement at a briefing last month by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the country's second-ranking intelligence official and the director of the N.S.A. when the program was started.

"I can say unequivocally that we have gotten information through this program that would not otherwise have been available," General Hayden said. The White House and the F.B.I. declined to comment on the program or its results.

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"It isn't at all surprising to me that people not accustomed to doing this would say, 'Boy, this is an awful lot of work to get a tiny bit of information,' " said Adm. Bobby R. Inman, a former N.S.A. director. "But the rejoinder to that is, Have you got anything better?"

Several of the law enforcement officials acknowledged that they might not know of arrests or intelligence activities overseas that grew out of the domestic spying program. And because the program was a closely guarded secret, its role in specific cases may have been disguised or hidden even from key investigators.

Still, the comments on the N.S.A. program from the law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, many of them high level, are the first indication that the program was viewed with skepticism by key figures at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency responsible for disrupting plots and investigating terrorism on American soil.

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The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks. "There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former F.B.I. official said.

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Some of the officials said the eavesdropping program might have helped uncover people with ties to Al Qaeda in Albany; Portland, Ore.; and Minneapolis. Some of the activities involved recruitment, training or fund-raising.

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But, along with several British counterterrorism officials, some of the officials questioned assertions by the Bush administration that the program was the key to uncovering a plot to detonate fertilizer bombs in London in 2004. The F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials also expressed doubts about the importance of the program's role in another case named by administration officials as a success in the fight against terrorism, an aborted scheme to topple the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch.

Some officials said that in both cases, they had already learned of the plans through interrogation of prisoners or other means.

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F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Qaeda operative." He said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"

"The information was so thin," he said, "and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up."

In response to the F.B.I. complaints, the N.S.A. eventually began ranking its tips on a three-point scale, with 3 being the highest priority and 1 the lowest, the officials said. Some tips were considered so hot that they were carried by hand to top F.B.I. officials. But in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.

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The lawsuits seek to answer one of the major questions surrounding the eavesdropping program: has it been used solely to single out the international phone calls and e-mail messages of people with known links to Al Qaeda, as President Bush and his most senior advisers have maintained, or has it been abused in ways that civil rights advocates say could hark back to the political spying abuses of the 1960's and 70's?

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Five years ago this week, the Bush administration came into office determined to reverse what Vice President Cheney and others regarded as undue limits on presidential power. The administration's power grab has reached such brazen heights that President Bush now claims he is above the law.

For any American who thinks presidents should have the power of czars and kings, this is good news. For the rest of us, it should raise deep concern.

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Though Bush should use all legal means to protect against terror attacks, his "the law is what I say it is" attitude threatens the rights of all Americans and the constitutional system of checks and balances. In the words of former representative Bob Barr, a conservative Republican from Georgia: "President George W. Bush has ... dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will."

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It's up to Congress and the courts to preserve the Founders' careful balancing of executive and legislative power. The Republican-controlled Congress has been reluctant to challenge Bush's excesses, but that might be changing. The Senate Judiciary Committee is planning hearings next month on the warrantless wiretapping. Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and committee members of both parties have joined the growing chorus of skepticism about the legality of the eavesdropping program.

That should send a message to the White House: Unless Bush scales back his administration's power grabs and obeys the laws Congress has written, a constitutional showdown could well be in his future.

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McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.

“I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds,” McClellan said of Gore.

But at the time of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

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On CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Gonzales said Gore’s comments were inconsistent with Clinton administration policy.

“It’s my understanding that during the Clinton administration there was activity regarding physical searches without warrants,” Gonzales said. “I can also say it’s my understanding that the deputy attorney general testified before Congress that the president does have the inherent authority under the Constitution to engage in physical searches without a warrant. And so, those would certainly seem to be inconsistent with what the former vice president was saying today.”

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A legal analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concludes that the Bush administration's limited briefings for Congress on the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping without warrants are "inconsistent with the law."

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