 |
|
||
 |
|||
 |
 |
 |
   |  | |||||||||||||||||||||
White House to brief House, Senate panels on NSA wiretaps
 President Bush denies domestic telephone eavesdropping without court orders on Tuesday. YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSWASHINGTON (CNN) -- Details of a classified government wiretap program will be given to full congressional committees for the first time on Wednesday, senior politicians said. The intelligence committees of both the House and Senate will be briefed on the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program, the chairmen of the panels said. Previously only a handful of senior senators and congressmen were told about the domestic spying operation authorized by the president, which is run outside the court system. The wiretapping will be a "central" topic of discussions of whether to approve Gen. Michael Hayden as the next CIA chief, Sen Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said in a prepared statement. Hayden's hearing is to begin Thursday. Hayden was NSA director when President Bush authorized the then-secret surveillance program after the 9/11 attacks. "It became apparent that in order to have a fully informed confirmation hearing, all members of my committee needed to know the full width and breadth of the president's program," Roberts said in a written statement. "This issue will be central to the committee's deliberations on Gen. Hayden's nomination, and there was no way we could fulfill our collective constitutional responsibilities without that knowledge." House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Michigan, said his committee also will be briefed. Hoekstra called the program "a critical tool in keeping this country safe" and said he hopes the briefing will "put an end to the politics surrounding this issue." The program involves the NSA monitoring, without obtaining a court warrant, the phone calls, e-mails and other communications of people inside the United States and those overseas when at least one of the parties is a suspected terrorist. The classified program was first disclosed by The New York Times in December. Only the "group of eight" in Congress -- the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate and the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees -- had been briefed on the program before its public disclosure. The Bush administration recently agreed to inform an expanded group of intelligence committee members after some lawmakers questioned the president's authority to order the wiretaps outside the judicial review set up by the congressionally approved Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The domestic wiretapping program is separate from an alleged program in which, according to a USA Today report last week, NSA compiles lists of the phone numbers ordinary Americans call. The newspaper reported the NSA doesn't record or listen to conversations. Instead, it said, the agency uses the data, which includes numbers, times and locations, to look for patterns that might suggest terrorist activity. "We neither confirm nor deny it," White House press secretary Tony Snow said of the list program Wednesday on CBS' "The Early Show." Bush on Tuesday reiterated his assertion that the government is not listening to phone calls to or from ordinary Americans without a court order. "What I've told the American people is we'll protect them against an al Qaeda attack," Bush said. "I've also been clear about the fact that we do not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval and this government will continue to guard the privacy of the American people. "But if al Qaeda is calling into the United States, we want to know, and we want to know why." CNN's Pam Benson and Cheryl Bronson contributed to this report. Copyright 2006 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report. 
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
| © 2007 Cable News Network LP, LLLP. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines. Contact us. Site Map. |
|
External sites open in new window; not endorsed by CNN.com
Pay service with live and archived video. 
