History > 2007 > USA > Surveillance agencies

CIA, NI, NSA, IARPA (I)

New Agency Develops Spy Tools

May 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:04 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Using a new laptop and a satellite link, FBI agents can find out within two minutes whether the fingerprint from a newly captured suspect overseas matches a terrorist database in Virginia.

Intelligence officials are running documents in languages such as Arabic through a new computer program called ''English Now.'' It converts the foreign characters into the Roman alphabet and makes words such as Baghdad, President Bush or Osama bin Laden jump out to spies who can't read Arabic.

The language software and the fingerprint-recognition system are examples of new spy gear that the national intelligence director's office bought last year. They may seem like tools that should have been available years ago, but the government isn't noted for its ability to quickly develop new technology.

A fledging center called IARPA is hoping to change that. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity will try to develop groundbreaking technology for the 16 spy agencies.

One potential tool sounds like it comes from an episode of Star Trek: ''cloaking'' technology that can bend radar around an object to make it appear it's not there. Others include power sources shrunk using nanotechnology and quantum computers that can speed code-breaking, says IARPA acting director Steve Nixon.

''The world has changed in dramatic ways with globalization of technology,'' Nixon said in an interview. ''These are the things that might not get done otherwise.''

But not everyone is convinced this is the right way to make new spy tools. The House Intelligence Committee has questions about whether the government truly needs it.

''Much of this research is already going on,'' said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee's panel on technical intelligence. She said IARPA raises questions about the role of new National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, who was supposed to coordinate U.S. intelligence agencies -- not get into their daily operations.

''Is it to fund these things and pull them into the DNI's office and give itself its own turf and projects and pet rocks?'' she asked.

There is even resistance within the CIA itself, according to officials who spoke about the concerns privately. The agency gets money that is supposed to go for spy tools that can be shared across the government. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano denied any friction, saying the agency welcomes ideas that promote collaboration on new technology.

In the last half-century, U.S. spy agencies have made technical breakthroughs large and small. In the 1970s, the CIA shared its lithium-iodine batteries with the medical field, which now uses them in pacemakers. Its scientists developed microdot cameras that can produce images so small that they can be hidden in the period of this sentence. They also built a life-size robotic dragonfly that could have been used for surveillance, if only it could have handled crosswinds.

If IARPA can clear some crucial hurdles, including convincing its congressional skeptics, the new office will be modeled after a similar agency that develops gee-whiz toys for the Pentagon.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was created after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, driving home the U.S. competitive disadvantage in space. Since then, DARPA researchers have brought the United States much-heralded advances including stealth technology, global positioning systems and the Internet.

But it also brought controversy. The agency's Total Information Awareness data-mining program was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to use technology to find terrorists; critics saw it as a step toward Big Brother-style mass government surveillance. Congress eliminated the program's funding at DARPA in 2003, but portions were moved to secret accounts at other agencies.

The new intelligence organization will be significantly smaller than DARPA, which has a $3 billion annual budget. It will be based at the University of Maryland and staffed with 56 intelligence professionals from the CIA and from McConnell's organization.

Rather than funding IARPA in the House intelligence budget bill passed this month, lawmakers directed technology dollars to centers developing tools that can be shared across government, including offices within the CIA, National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

The measure included criticism of McConnell's office for failing to provide details on how IARPA will work and raised questions about whether it would harm existing research for spy tools.

Nixon says IARPA won't have labs and electron microscopes, but will sponsor research at universities, national labs and other organizations.

IARPA is thinking broadly, he said. It won't limit itself to hard sciences, but will also tackle social-science problems such as finding tools for language research or to help analysts measure cultural habits of another society. He also said the organization will work on privacy protection. NSA and other agencies want to be able to make better use of foreign intelligence information from overseas, which often contains information on U.S. citizens.

Given the lack of oversight in intelligence agencies, ''this is an area where the research community has to step gingerly,'' said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.

New Agency Develops Spy Tools, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Better-Spy-Tools.html

Advisers Fault

Harsh Methods in Interrogation

May 30, 2007
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, May 29 — As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.

Some of the study participants argue that interrogation should be restructured using lessons from many fields, including the tricks of veteran homicide detectives, the persuasive techniques of sophisticated marketing and models from American history.

The science board critique comes as ethical concerns about harsh interrogations are being voiced by current and former government officials. The top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, sent a letter to troops this month warning that “expedient methods” using force violated American values.

In a blistering lecture delivered last month, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “immoral” some interrogation tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.

But in meetings with intelligence officials and in a 325-page initial report completed in December, the researchers have pressed a more practical critique: there is little evidence, they say, that harsh methods produce the best intelligence.

“There’s an assumption that often passes for common sense that the more pain imposed on someone, the more likely they are to comply,” said Randy Borum, a psychologist at the University of South Florida who, like several of the study’s contributors, is a consultant for the Defense Department.

The Bush administration is nearing completion of a long-delayed executive order that will set new rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. The order is expected to ban the harshest techniques used in the past, including the simulated drowning tactic known as waterboarding, but to authorize some methods that go beyond those allowed in the military by the Army Field Manual.

President Bush has insisted that those secret “enhanced” techniques are crucial, and he is far from alone. The notion that turning up pressure and pain on a prisoner will produce valuable intelligence is a staple of popular culture from the television series “24” to the recent Republican presidential debate, where some candidates tried to outdo one another in vowing to get tough on captured terrorists. A 2005 Harvard study supported the selective use of “highly coercive” techniques.

But some of the experts involved in the interrogation review, called “Educing Information,” say that during World War II, German and Japanese prisoners were effectively questioned without coercion.

“It far outclassed what we’ve done,” said Steven M. Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator and trainer, who has studied the World War II program of interrogating Germans. The questioners at Fort Hunt, Va., “had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the language flawlessly,” and prepared for four to six hours for each hour of questioning, said Mr. Kleinman, who wrote two chapters for the December report.

Mr. Kleinman, who worked as an interrogator in Iraq in 2003, called the post-Sept. 11 efforts “amateurish” by comparison to the World War II program, with inexperienced interrogators who worked through interpreters and had little familiarity with the prisoners’ culture.

The Intelligence Science Board study has a chapter on the long history of police interrogations, which it suggests may contain lessons on eliciting accurate confessions. And Mr. Borum, the psychologist, said modern marketing may be a source of relevant insights into how to influence a prisoner’s willingness to provide information.

“We have a whole social science literature on persuasion,” Mr. Borum said. “It’s mostly on how to get a person to buy a certain brand of toothpaste. But it certainly could be useful in improving interrogation.”

Robert F. Coulam, a research professor and attorney at Simmons College and a study participant, said that the government’s most vigorous work on interrogation to date has been in seeking legal justifications for harsh tactics. Even today, he said, “there’s nothing like the mobilization of effort and political energy that was put into relaxing the rules” governing interrogation.

The director of the science board project, Robert A. Fein, a forensic psychologist at Harvard, declined to speak on the record.

In a prologue to the December report, the first of a planned series, Mr. Fein said the shortage of research meant that many American interrogators were “forced to ‘make it up’ on the fly,” resulting in “unfortunate cases of abuse.”

But associates say Mr. Fein does not want to antagonize intelligence officials, whom he hopes to persuade to bring the reality check of research to bear on interrogation practices.

Defenders of the harshest interrogations, particularly as practiced by the C.I.A. at secret overseas sites, say they were carefully devised and have produced valuable intelligence. An agency spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the program “has generated a rich volume of intelligence that has helped the United States and other countries disrupt terrorist activities and save innocent lives.”

He said the agency’s interrogators were “seasoned, well trained, and have the linguistic resources they need,” and added, “The agency learned terrorist interrogation after 9/11, but — based on the effectiveness of this fully legal program — it learned it well.”

A. B. Krongard, who was the executive director of the C.I.A., the No. 3 post at the agency, from 2001 to 2004, agreed with that assessment but acknowledged that the agency had to create an interrogation program from scratch in 2002.

He said officers quickly consulted counterparts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other countries to compile a “catalog” of techniques said to be effective against Arab and Muslim prisoners. They added other methods drawn from those that American troops were trained to withstand in case of capture.

Mr. Krongard even recalls receiving a proposal for help with questioning Qaeda suspects from an American dentist who said he “could create pain no human being could withstand.”

The agency rejected such ideas as ludicrous. But administration lawyers approved a list of harsh methods that have drawn widespread condemnation.

In an April lecture, Philip D. Zelikow, the former adviser to Ms. Rice, said it was a grave mistake to delegate to attorneys decisions on the moral question of how prisoners should be treated.

Mr. Zelikow, who reviewed the C.I.A. detention program as the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, said the “cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral.”

Many of the techniques that have come in for such criticism were based on those used in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training, or SERE, in which for decades American service members were given a sample of the brutal treatment they might face if captured.

Because the training was developed during the cold war, the techniques later adopted by the C.I.A. and Special Operations officers in Iraq were based, at least in part, on how the Soviet Union and its allies were believed to treat prisoners. Such techniques included prolonged use of stress positions, exposure to heat and cold, sleep deprivation and even waterboarding.

A report on detainee abuse by the Defense Department’s inspector general, completed in August but declassified and released May 18, gives new details of how the military training was “reverse engineered” for use by American interrogators. It says that as early as 2002, some SERE trainers and some military intelligence officers vehemently objected to the use of the techniques, but their protests were ignored.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he found the report “very troubling” and intended to hold hearings on how the SERE training methods became the basis for interrogation. “They were put to a purpose that was never intended,” Mr. Levin said.

Mr. Kleinman, the former Air Force interrogator who took part in the “Educing Information” study, said the mistakes of the past five years “have made interrogation synonymous in many people’s minds with torture.” But he said the group wanted to redirect the debate toward the future of interrogation.

“Our intention is not to point fingers at anyone,” he said. “We’re just saying we have to bring interrogation up to the level of professionalism in other intelligence disciplines.”

    Advisers Fault Harsh Methods in Interrogation, NYT, 30.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/washington/30interrogate.html?hp

Terror Suspect Claims Torture

May 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:23 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Pakistani terrorism suspect denied any connection to al-Qaida and said he was tortured and his family was hounded by U.S. authorities, according to a transcript released Tuesday by the Pentagon.

Majid Khan, in a lengthy written statement, said the CIA and the Defense Department tortured him after his capture in Pakistan as well as when he was transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

''I swear to God this place in some sense worst than CIA jails. I am being mentally torture here,'' said Khan in a statement read by his personal representative about his time in Guantanamo. ''There is extensive torture even for the smallest of infractions.''

Khan, who grew up in Maryland and is the only U.S. resident among 15 detainees the government considers most dangerous, also described suicide attempts where he ''chewed my artery which goes through my elbow.''

    Terror Suspect Claims Torture, R, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Guantanamo-Terror-Suspect.html

Tenet: CIA warned of 'anarchy' in Iraq

27.4.2007
USA Today
By Scott Lindlaw, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — The CIA warned the Bush White House seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the U.S. could face a thicket of bad consequences, starting with "anarchy and the territorial breakup" of the country, former CIA Director George Tenet writes in a new book.

CIA analysts wrote the warning at the start of August 2002 and inserted it into a briefing book distributed at an early September meeting of President Bush's national security team at Camp David, he writes.

The agency analysis painted what Tenet calls additional "worst-case" scenarios: "a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic anti-pathy toward the United States"; "regime-threatening instability in key Arab states"; and "major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance."

While the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been widely criticized for being wrong about much of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, the analysis Tenet describes concerning postwar scenarios seems prescient. Iraq is buffeted by brutal sectarian violence and there are suggestions that the country be partitioned into ethnic zones.

However, Tenet cautions against concluding that the CIA predicted many of the difficulties that followed. "Doing so would be disingenuous," because the agency saw them as possible scenarios, not certainties, he writes. "The truth is often more complex than convenient."

The analysis also presaged an intelligence community conclusion last year that the Iraq war was fueling Islamic resentment toward the United States and giving rise to a new generation of terror operatives.

Tenet's recollection of the memo also comes at a time when Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress are locked in a high-stakes dispute over war funding and whether to set hard timetables for ending the war.

A copy of the book, "At the Center of the Storm," was purchased by an Associated Press reporter Friday at a retail outlet, ahead of its scheduled Monday release. Tenet served as CIA chief from 1997 to 2004.

The book is highly critical of Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials, who Tenet argues rushed the United States into war in Iraq without serious debate — a charge the White House rejected on Friday. Beyond that, he contends, the administration failed to adequately consider what would come in the war's aftermath.

"There was precious little consideration, that I'm aware of, about the big picture of what would come next," Tenet writes. "While some policymakers were eager to say that we would be greeted as liberators, what they failed to mention is that the intelligence community told them that such a greeting would last only for a limited period."

The former CIA director offers a litany of questions that went unasked:

•"What impact would a large American occupying force have in an Arab country in the heart of the Middle East?"

•"What kind of political strategy would be necessary to cause the Iraqi society to coalesce in a post-Saddam world and maximize the chances for our success?"

•"How would the presence of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, and the possibility of a pro-West Iraqi government, be viewed in Iran? And what might Iran do in reaction?"

Tenet laments that "there seemed to be a lack of curiosity in asking these kinds of questions, and the lack of a disciplined process to get the answers before committing the country to war."

Tenet assigns his own agency part of the blame, saying the intelligence community should have strived to answer the questions not asked by the administration.

The memoir paints a portrait of constant tension between the CIA and the office of Cheney, who Tenet says stretched the intelligence to serve his own belief that war was the right course.

It alarmed Tenet and surprised even Bush, the author says, when Cheney issued his now-famous declaration that, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

Chastising Cheney nearly five years later, Tenet writes: "Policymakers have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts." Here again, Tenet blames himself for not pulling Cheney aside and telling him the WMD assertion was "well beyond what our analysis could support."

For the first time, Tenet offers an account of his own view of a historic moment in the run-up to war: Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 speech before the United Nations, with Tenet sitting just behind him.

"That was about the last place I wanted to be," Tenet recalls. "It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn't hold up," he says of the performance, in which Powell charged Iraq had WMD stockpiles.

"One by one, the various pillars of the speech, particularly on Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs, began to buckle," he writes. "The secretary of state was subsequently hung out to dry in front of the world, and our nation's credibility plummeted."

    Tenet: CIA warned of 'anarchy' in Iraq, UT, 27.4.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-04-27-tenet-anarchy_N.htm

Ex-C.I.A. Chief, in Book, Assails Cheney on Iraq

April 27, 2007
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, April 26 — George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

The 549-page book, “At the Center of the Storm,” is to be published by HarperCollins on Monday. By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Mr. Tenet admits that he made his famous “slam dunk” remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on President Bush’s decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.

A copy of the book was purchased at retail price in advance of publication by a reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.

As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.”

Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” He expresses regret that the document was not more nuanced, but says there was no doubt in his mind at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. “In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible,” he writes.

Despite such sweeping indictments, Mr. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Mr. Tenet a Presidential Medal of Freedom, is portrayed personally in a largely positive light, with particular praise for the his leadership after the 2001 attacks. “He was absolutely in charge, determined, and directed,” Mr. Tenet writes of the president, whom he describes as a blunt-spoken kindred spirit.

But Mr. Tenet largely endorses the view of administration critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda.

Mr. Tenet describes helping to kill a planned speech by Mr. Cheney on the eve of the invasion because its claims of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq went “way beyond what the intelligence shows.”

“Mr. President, we cannot support the speech and it should not be given,” Mr. Tenet wrote that he told Mr. Bush. Mr. Cheney never delivered the remarks.

Mr. Tenet hints at some score-settling in the book. He describes in particular the extraordinary tension between him and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, in internal debate over how the president came to say erroneously in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.

He describes an episode in 2003, shortly after he issued a statement taking partial responsibility for that error. He said he was invited over for a Sunday afternoon, back-patio lemonade by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state. Mr. Powell described what Mr. Tenet called “a lively debate” on Air Force One a few days before about whether the White House should continue to support Mr. Tenet as C.I.A. director.

“In the end, the president said yes, and said so publicly,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “But Colin let me know that other officials, particularly the vice president, had quite another view.”

He writes that the controversy over who was to blame for the State of the Union error was the beginning of the end of his tenure. After the finger-pointing between the White House and the C.I.A., he wrote, “My relationship with the administration was forever changed.”

Mr. Tenet also says in the book that he had been “not at all sure I wanted to accept” the Medal of Freedom. He agreed after he saw that the citation “was all about the C.I.A.’s work against terrorism, not Iraq.”

He also expresses skepticism about whether the increase in troops in Iraq will prove successful. “It may have worked more than three years ago,” he wrote. “My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”

Mr. Tenet says he decided to write the memoir in part because the infamous “slam dunk” episode had come to define his tenure at C.I.A.

He gives a detailed account of the episode, which occurred during an Oval Office meeting in December 2002 when the administration was preparing to make public its case for war against Iraq.

During the meeting, the deputy C.I.A. director, John McLaughlin, unveiled a draft of a proposed public presentation that left the group unimpressed. Mr. Tenet recalls that Mr. Bush suggested that they could “add punch” by bringing in lawyers trained to argue cases before a jury.

“I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context,” Mr. Tenet writes. “If I had simply said, ‘I’m sure we can do better,’ I wouldn’t be writing this chapter — or maybe even this book.”

Mr. Tenet has spoken rarely in public, and never so caustically, since stepping down in July 2004.

Asked about Mr. Tenet’s assertions, a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, defended the prewar deliberations on Thursday. “The president made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein for a number of reasons, mainly the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s own actions, and only after a thorough and lengthy assessment of all available information as well as Congressional authorization,” the spokesman said.

The book recounts C.I.A. efforts to fight Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Mr. Tenet’s early warnings about Osama bin Laden. He contends that the urgent appeals of the C.I.A. on terrorism received a lukewarm reception at the Bush White House through most of 2001.

“The bureaucracy moved slowly,” and only after the Sept. 11 attacks was the C.I.A. given the counterterrorism powers it had requested earlier in the year.

Mr. Tenet confesses to “a black, black time” two months after the 2001 attacks when, sitting in front of his house in his favorite Adirondack chair, he “just lost it.”

“I thought about all the people who had died and what we had been through in the months since,” he writes. “What am I doing here? Why me?” Mr. Tenet gives a vigorous defense of the C.I.A.’s program to hold captured Qaeda members in secret overseas jails and to question them with harsh techniques, which he does not explicitly describe.

Mr. Tenet expresses puzzlement that, since 2001, Al Qaeda has not sent “suicide bombers to cause chaos in a half-dozen American shopping malls on any given day.”

“I do know one thing in my gut,” he writes. “Al Qaeda is here and waiting.”

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.

    Ex-C.I.A. Chief, in Book, Assails Cheney on Iraq, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/washington/27intel.html?hp

C.I.A. Awaits Rules on Interrogation of Terror Suspects

March 25, 2007
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, March 24 — A sharp debate within the Bush administration over the future of the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program has left the agency without the authority to use harsh interrogation techniques that the White House said last fall were necessary in questioning terrorism suspects, according to administration and Congressional officials.

The agency for months has been awaiting approval for rules that would give intelligence operatives greater latitude than military interrogators in questioning terrorism suspects but would not include some of the most controversial interrogation procedures the spy agency has used in the past.

But the internal debate has left the C.I.A. program in limbo as top officials struggle over where to set boundaries in the treatment of people suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. Until the debate is resolved, C.I.A. interrogators are authorized to use only interrogation procedures approved by the Pentagon.

The C.I.A.’s proposed interrogation rules are part of the first major overhaul of the agency’s detention and interrogation program since the agency began jailing terrorism suspects in 2002. The agency has already decided to abandon some past interrogation techniques — among them “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of drowning — that human rights groups and some lawmakers have argued are torture.

Although it is unclear whether the C.I.A. has any prisoners in custody, the White House has not repeated its earlier statements that the secret prisons are empty. The C.I.A.’s proposed interrogation methods remain highly classified, but they may include exposure to extreme temperatures and sleep deprivation.

Much of the debate over the interrogation rules has not been made public. A draft of an executive order providing broad guidelines for interrogators was rejected this year by State Department officials, who argued that the language was too expansive and could leave the Bush administration open to challenges, including some from American allies, that the White House was legalizing practices that violated a provision of the Geneva Conventions.

The Supreme Court ruled last year that all prisoners in American captivity must be treated in accordance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners.

The struggle is evidence of shifting dynamics within the administration and a rethinking of some of the most polarizing policies enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to fight terrorism worldwide.

Late last year, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates forced a debate within the administration about whether to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and now some senior officials are questioning how far the C.I.A. interrogation program should go beyond the Army Field Manual for interrogations, which the Pentagon uses to train military interrogators.

It has been six months since President Bush signed a bill authorizing the secret C.I.A. interrogations — a measure the White House promoted as a critical tool to obtain information from high-level terrorism suspects.

Several officials said the C.I.A. had not yet needed to press the White House for the legal authority because there was no one in C.I.A. custody who had required the “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

Still, C.I.A. officials have maintained that it is important to get the detention program on a solid legal footing and to give clarity to operatives in the field about what is permissible and what is not.

“At the end of the day, the director — any director — of C.I.A. must be confident that what he has asked an agency officer to do under this program is lawful,” the agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, wrote in a note to agency employees last September. “That’s the story here.”

Some officials said that while the C.I.A. would probably be able to get legal approvals if the agency captured someone it wished to interrogate, doing so could take precious time. The intelligence value of detainees sometimes diminishes quickly.

“You want established, clear rules in place,” said one American official with knowledge of the debate over interrogations. “You don’t want agency officials having to call back to headquarters for ‘Mother may I?’ ”

The Supreme Court decision forced the White House to press Congress for new authority both to try terrorism suspects using military commissions and to detain and interrogate high-level suspects in secret C.I.A. jails abroad.

When President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act last October, the White House released a statement calling the C.I.A. detention program “one of the most successful intelligence efforts in American history.” The new authority, Mr. Bush said, will “ensure that we can continue using this vital tool to protect the American people for years to come.”

But since passage of the bill, top officials have been wrestling with the executive order and a separate legal opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that would authorize the C.I.A. interrogation techniques and explain why the techniques comply with the standards of the Geneva Conventions.

Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the executive order was expected in “the next few weeks.”

“The administration has been engaged in a deliberative and thoughtful interagency process,” Mr. Johndroe said. “This process required additional time as new officials, including the defense secretary, director of national intelligence and White House counsel were brought into the deliberations.”

The Military Commissions Act states that the president “shall” issue an executive order setting out broad guidelines for the interrogation of detainees. Administration officials said the Justice Department had already determined that the language did not compel the White House to issue such an order, but that the administration still planned to complete the document.

Some human rights groups remain skeptical that, even with the Justice Department’s blessing, the new interrogation rules would meet international standards governing the treatment of detainees.

Specifically, they point to a series of Office of Legal Counsel memos written in 2002 in which Justice Department lawyers took a broad view of what is permissible under international conventions barring torture, and said they feared that the office could again authorize interrogation techniques that violate international law.

“I would hope that the O.L.C. has learned its lesson and that they’re not trying to split hairs and draw fine distinctions to undermine the spirit of U.S. law,” said John Sifton, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.

Some lawmakers have expressed anger that the White House, after pushing Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act last year, has yet to issue the executive order.

“Given the speed with which this bill was pushed through Congress last year, the president should have lived up to his obligations under the law by now,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an e-mail message.

“Providing legal clarity for our interrogators was one of the key factors in my decision to support the Military Commissions legislation,” Mr. Rockefeller said.

Both Mr. Rockefeller and Representative Silvestre Reyes, the Texas Democrat who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, have questioned the need for the C.I.A.’s secret prison network and have pledged to make oversight of the agency’s detention and interrogation program a priority during this session of Congress.

The interrogation of high-level terrorism suspects in C.I.A. prisons is one of the most criticized aspects of the Bush administration’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The prison network was cloaked in secrecy until President Bush confirmed its existence during a speech last September, when he announced that the 14 remaining inmates in C.I.A. prisons would be transferred to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.

But President Bush defended the C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques as “safe and lawful and necessary,” and said the spy agency would continue to detain and question high-level terrorism suspects in the future.

    C.I.A. Awaits Rules on Interrogation of Terror Suspects, NYT, 25.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/washington/25interrogate.html?hp

Appeals Court Upholds Dismissal of Abuse Suit

March 3, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

A German citizen who says he was kidnapped and abused by the Central Intelligence Agency cannot seek redress in court because his lawsuit would expose state secrets, a United States Court of Appeals ruled yesterday in Richmond, Va.

There is substantial evidence that the plaintiff in the suit, Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was subjected to the C.I.A.’s practice of extraordinary rendition, in which terrorism suspects are seized and sent for interrogation to other countries.

In June 2006, a report issued by the Council of Europe concluded that Mr. Masri’s account of having been abducted and mistreated was substantially accurate. In January, a German court issued arrest warrants for 13 people it said were involved in the matter. Prosecutors would not identify the suspects.

The Central Intelligence Agency has never acknowledged any role in Mr. Masri’s detention.

Mr. Masri said in his suit that he was seized by local law enforcement officials while on vacation in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve in 2003. After 23 days, he said, he was handed over to C.I.A. operatives, who flew him to a secret C.I.A. prison near Kabul, Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, Mr. Masri said, he was held in a small, filthy cell where he was drugged, beaten and interrogated. At the end of May 2004, he was released in a remote part of Albania.

In December 2005, Mr. Masri sued George Tenet, a former director of the C.I.A., three private companies, and employees of the agency and the companies. He said that Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. operatives had violated the Constitution’s due process clause, and that all of the defendants were liable under a federal law that allows some injury suits for violations of international laws prohibiting arbitrary detention and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

In May 2006, Judge T. S. Ellis III, of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., dismissed the suit under the so-called state secrets privilege. The privilege can require courts to limit or dismiss suits that might disclose information harmful to national security. The decision yesterday, by the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, affirmed that ruling.

“We recognize the gravity of our conclusions that el-Masri must be denied a judicial forum for his complaint,” Judge Robert B. King wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court. “The inquiry is a difficult one, for its pits the judiciary’s search for truth against the executive’s duty to maintain the nation’s security.”

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Mr. Masri, said there was enough public information about his ordeal to allow his suit to be adjudicated without endangering national security. The appeals court disagreed, saying that Mr. Masri could not win his case without exposing “how the C.I.A. organizes, staffs and supervises its most sensitive intelligence operations.”

Furthermore, the court continued, the defendants “could not properly defend themselves without using privileged evidence.”

Judge King gave examples of the problems the defendants would face. “If, for example, the truth is that el-Masri was detained by the C.I.A. but his description of his treatment is inaccurate, that fact could be established only by disclosure of the actual circumstances of his detention, and its proof would require testimony by the personnel involved.”

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the A.C.L.U., said that the court’s decision had been “truly unbelievable” and that his group was “very seriously looking at all the avenues before us” for an appeal to the full appeals court or to the United States Supreme Court.

“Actions like this are reminiscent of third world countries,” Mr. Romero said. “It’s just not tenable to have the C.I.A. unaccountable for its most egregious violations of human rights.”

    Appeals Court Upholds Dismissal of Abuse Suit, NYT, 3.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/world/europe/03masri.html

Spy Chief to Appear Before Senate Panel

February 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:16 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's newly installed spy chief, Mike McConnell, told CIA personnel at a town-hall style meeting last week that he intends to establish personal relationships with Congress.

He has his first chance Tuesday as he appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee to lay out threats facing the United States around the globe. Among them are Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Muslim extremists operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Both Republicans and Democrats alike have grown uneasy about the situation in Iraq and the growing tension with Iran over its nuclear program and U.S. claims that the government in Tehran is meddling in Iraq.

The hearing comes as Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., has pledged that lawmakers would step up efforts to force the Bush administration to change course in Iraq. ''The president needs a check and a balance,'' Levin said Sunday on NBC-TV's ''Meet the Press'' program.

But there is little consensus about how exactly to proceed. Democrats have failed to rally around any swift action since they were swept into power in November by voters who wanted to see a new course in Iraq and an end to the war.

McConnell, who is still in his first month as national intelligence director, was to appear alongside Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Thomas Fingar, who heads the analysts at the National Intelligence Council.

------

On the Net:

Senate Armed Services Committee: http://armed-services.senate.gov

    Spy Chief to Appear Before Senate Panel, NYT, 27.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Global-Threats.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Bush Is Not Above the Law

January 31, 2007
The New York Times
By JAMES BAMFORD
Washington

LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.

But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

The ruling was the result of a suit, in which I am one of the plaintiffs, brought against the National Security Agency by the American Civil Liberties Union. It was a response to revelations by this newspaper in December 2005 that the agency had been monitoring the phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans for more than four years without first obtaining warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

In the past, even presidents were not above the law. When the F.B.I. turned up evidence during Watergate that Richard Nixon had obstructed justice by trying to cover up his involvement, a special prosecutor was named and a House committee recommended that the president be impeached.

And when an independent counsel found evidence that President Bill Clinton had committed perjury in the Monica Lewinsky case, the impeachment machinery again cranked into gear, with the spectacle of a Senate trial (which ended in acquittal).

Laws are broken, the federal government investigates, and the individuals involved — even if they’re presidents — are tried and, if found guilty, punished. That is the way it is supposed to work under our system of government. But not this time.

Last Aug. 17, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the United States District Court in Detroit issued her ruling in the A.C.L.U. case. The president, she wrote, had “undisputedly violated” not only the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, but also statutory law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Enacted by a bipartisan Congress in 1978, the FISA statute was a response to revelations that the National Security Agency had conducted warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. To deter future administrations from similar actions, the law made a violation a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and five years in prison.

Yet despite this ruling, the Bush Justice Department never opened an F.B.I. investigation, no special prosecutor was named, and there was no talk of impeachment in the Republican-controlled Congress.

Justice Department lawyers argued last June that warrants were not required for what they called the administration’s “terrorist surveillance program” because of the president’s “inherent powers” to order eavesdropping and because of the Congressional authorization to use military force against those responsible for 9/11. But Judge Taylor rejected both arguments, ruling that even presidents must obey statutory law and the Constitution.

On Jan. 17, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales unexpectedly declared that President Bush had ended the program, deciding to again seek warrants in all cases. Exactly what kind of warrants — individual, as is required by the law, or broad-based, which would probably still be illegal — is as yet unknown.

The action may have been designed to forestall a potentially adverse ruling by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati, which had scheduled oral arguments on the case for today. At that hearing, the administration is now expected to argue that the case is moot and should be thrown out — while reserving the right to restart the program at any time.

But that’s a bit like a bank robber coming into court and arguing that, although he has been sticking up banks for the past half-decade, he has agreed to a temporary halt and therefore he shouldn’t be prosecuted. Independent of the A.C.L.U. case, a criminal investigation by the F.B.I. and a special prosecutor should begin immediately. The question that must finally be answered is whether the president is guilty of committing a felony by continuously reauthorizing the warrantless eavesdropping program for the past five years. And if so, what action must be taken?

The issue is not original. Among the charges approved by the House Judiciary Committee when it recommended its articles of impeachment against President Nixon was “illegal wiretaps.” President Nixon, the bill charged, “caused wiretaps to be placed on the telephones of 17 persons without having obtained a court order authorizing the tap, as required by federal law; in violation of Sections 241, 371 and 2510-11 of the Criminal Code.”

Under his program, President Bush could probably be charged with wiretapping not 17 but thousands of people without having obtained a court order authorizing the taps as required by federal law, in violation of FISA.

It is not only the federal court but also many in Congress who believe that a violation of law has taken place. In a hearing on Jan. 18, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said, “For years, this administration has engaged in warrantless wiretapping of Americans contrary to the law.”

His view was shared by the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who said of Mr. Bush, “For five years he has been operating an illegal program.”

And Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, noted that much of the public was opposed to the program and that it both hurt the country at home and damaged its image abroad. “The heavy criticism which the president took on the program,” he said, “I think was very harmful in the political process and for the reputation of the country.”

To allow a president to break the law and commit a felony for more than five years without even a formal independent investigation would be the ultimate subversion of the Constitution and the rule of law. As Judge Taylor warned in her decision, “There are no hereditary kings in America.”

James Bamford is the author of two books on the National Security Agency, “The Puzzle Palace” and “Body of Secrets.”

    Bush Is Not Above the Law, NYT, 31.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/opinion/31bamford.html

Secrecy Is at Issue

in Suits Opposing Spy Program

January 26, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

The Bush administration has employed extraordinary secrecy in defending the National Security Agency’s highly classified domestic surveillance program from civil lawsuits. Plaintiffs and judges’ clerks cannot see its secret filings. Judges have to make appointments to review them and are not allowed to keep copies.

Judges have even been instructed to use computers provided by the Justice Department to compose their decisions.

But now the procedures have started to meet resistance. At a private meeting with the lawyers in one of the cases this month, the judges who will hear the first appeal next week expressed uneasiness about the procedures, said a lawyer who attended, Ann Beeson of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lawyers suing the government and some legal scholars say the procedures threaten the separation of powers, the adversary system and the lawyer-client privilege.

Justice Department officials say the circumstances of the cases, involving a highly classified program, require extraordinary measures. The officials say they have used similar procedures in other cases involving classified materials.

In ordinary civil suits, the parties’ submissions are sent to their adversaries and are available to the public in open court files. But in several cases challenging the eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers have been submitting legal papers not by filing them in court but by placing them in a room at the department. They have filed papers, in other words, with themselves.

At the meeting this month, judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit asked how the procedures might affect the integrity of the files and the appellate records.

In response, Joan B. Kennedy, a Justice Department official, submitted, in one of the department’s unclassified filings, a detailed seven-page sworn statement last Friday defending the practices.

“The documents reviewed by the court have not been altered and will not be altered,” Ms. Kennedy wrote, and they “will be preserved securely as part of the record of this case.”

Some cases challenging the program, which monitored international communications of people in the United States without court approval, have also involved atypical maneuvering. Soon after one suit challenging the program was filed last year in Oregon, Justice Department lawyers threatened to seize an exhibit from the court file.

This month, in the same case, the department sought to inspect and delete files from the computers on which lawyers for the plaintiffs had prepared their legal filings.

The tactics, said a lawyer in the Oregon case, Jon B. Eisenberg, prompted him to conduct unusual research.

“Sometime during all of this,” Mr. Eisenberg said, “I went on Amazon and ordered a copy of Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ because I needed a refresher course in bizarre legal procedures.”

A federal district judge in the case, Garr M. King, invoked another book after a government lawyer refused to disclose whether he had a certain security clearance, saying information about the clearance was itself classified.

“Frankly, your response,” Judge King said, “is kind of an Alice in Wonderland response.”

Questions about the secret filings may figure in the first appellate argument in the challenges, before the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, on Wednesday. The three judges who will hear the appeal met with lawyers for the Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union on Jan. 8 in a judge’s chambers in Memphis.

“The court raised questions about the procedures the government had used to file classified submissions in the case and the propriety and integrity of those procedures,” said Ms. Beeson, associate legal director of the A.C.L.U., which represents the plaintiffs in the appeal.

“They were also concerned about the independence of the judiciary,” given that “the Justice Department retains custody and total control over the court filings.” Ms. Beeson said.

Nancy S. Marder, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and an authority on secrecy in litigation, said the tactics were really extreme and deeply, deeply troubling.

“These are the basics that we take for granted in our court system,” Professor Marder said. “You have two parties. You exchange documents. The documents you’ve seen don’t disappear.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Dean Boyd, said employees involved in storing the classified documents were independent of the litigators and provided “neutral assistance” to courts in handling sensitive information. The documents, Mr. Boyd said, are “stored securely and without alteration.”

The appellate argument in Cincinnati will almost certainly also concern the effects of the administration announcement last week that it would submit the program to a secret court, ending its eavesdropping without warrants.

In a brief filed on Thursday, the government said the move made the case against the program moot.

Ms. Beeson of the A.C.L.U. said the government was wrong.

At least one case, the one in Oregon, is probably not moot. It goes beyond the other cases in seeking damages from the government, because the plaintiffs say they have seen proof that they were wiretapped without a warrant.

In August 2004, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which was investigating an Oregon charity, al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, inadvertently provided a copy of a classified document to a foundation lawyer, Lynne Bernabei.

That document indicated, according to court filings, that the government monitored communications between officers of the charity and two of its lawyers without a warrant in spring 2004.

“If I gave you this document today and you put it on the front page of The New York Times, it would not threaten national security,” Mr. Eisenberg, a lawyer for the foundation, said. “There is only one thing about it that’s explosive, and that’s the fact that our clients were wiretapped.”

Ms. Bernabei circulated the document to two directors of the charity, at least one of them in Saudi Arabia, and to three other lawyers. She discussed them with two more lawyers. A reporter for The Washington Post, David B. Ottaway, also reviewed the document.

The full significance of the document was apparently not clear to any recipient, more than a year before The New York Times disclosed the existence of the N.S.A. program in December 2005.

The F.B.I. learned of the disclosure almost immediately in August 2004, Judge King said at a court hearing last year, but made no effort to retrieve copies of the document for about six weeks.

When it did, everyone it asked apparently returned all copies of the document. In a statement reported in The Post in March, for instance, Mr. Ottaway said he the F.B.I. had told him that the document had “highly sensitive national security information.”

“I returned it after consulting with Washington Post editors and lawyers, and concluding that it was not relevant to what I was working on at the time,” Mr. Ottaway said.

In a sworn statement in June, a lawyer who had the document, Asim Ghafoor, said the bureau took custody of his laptop computer “in order that the document might be ‘scrubbed’ from it.”

The computer was returned weeks later.

In February 2006, the charity and the two lawyers who say they were wiretapped sued to stop the program, requesting financial damages. They attached a copy of the classified document, filing it under seal. They have not said how they came to have a copy.

Three weeks later, the lawyers for the foundation received a call from two Justice Department lawyers. The classified document “had not been properly secured,” the lawyers said, according to a letter from the plaintiffs’ lawyers to the judge.

As Mr. Eisenberg recalled it, the government lawyers said, “The F.B.I. is on its way to the courthouse to take possession of the document from the judge.”

But Judge King, at a hurriedly convened hearing, would not yield it, and asked, “What if I say I will not deliver it to the F.B.I.?”

A Justice Department lawyer, Anthony J. Coppolino, gave a measured response, saying: “Your Honor, we obviously don’t want to have any kind of a confrontation with you. But it has to be secured in a proper fashion.”

The document was ultimately deposited in a “secure compartmented information facility” at the bureau office in Portland.

In the meantime, copies of the document appear to have been sent abroad, and the government concedes that it has made no efforts to contact people overseas who it suspects have them.

“It’s probably gone many, many places,” Judge King said of the document at the August hearing. “Who is it secret from?”

A Justice Department lawyer, Andrew H. Tannenbaum, replied, “It’s secret from anyone who has not seen it.”

He added, “The document must be completely removed from the case, and plaintiffs are not allowed to rely on it to prove their claims.”

Judge King wondered aloud about the implications of that position, saying, “There is nothing in the law that requires them to purge their memory.”

Mr. Eisenberg, in an interview, said that was precisely the government position. “They claim they own the portions of our brains that remember anything,” he said.

In a decision in September, Judge King ruled that the plaintiffs were not entitled to review the document again but could rely on their recollections of it. In October, they filed a motion for summary judgment, a routine step in many civil litigations. In a sealed filing, they described the classified document.

Government lawyers sent Judge King a letter saying the plaintiffs had “mishandled information contained in the classified document” by, among other actions, preparing filings on their own computers.

In a telephone conference on Nov. 1, Judge King appeared unpersuaded. “My problem with your statement,” he told Mr. Tannenbaum, “is that you assume you are absolutely correct in everything you are stating, and I am not sure that you are.”

Mr. Boyd of the Justice Department said the government “continues to explore with counsel ways in which the classified information may be properly protected without any intrusion on the attorney-client privilege.”

    Secrecy Is at Issue in Suits Opposing Spy Program, NYT, 26.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/washington/26nsa.html

Court to oversee wiretap program

Updated 1/18/2007 7:08 AM ET
USA Today
By Donna Leinwand

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration said Wednesday that it will allow an independent court to oversee its controversial surveillance program in which the National Security Agency has electronically eavesdropped on Americans and others without obtaining court warrants.

The move, announced by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, comes amid increasing criticism from Democrats and some Republicans in Congress who say the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program has infringed on privacy rights and wrongly bypassed a special court of federal judges that secretly monitors classified intelligence-gathering within the USA.

Established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the panel issues what essentially are secret search warrants to FBI, CIA and other federal agents who want to set up wiretaps or other electronic surveillance in cases in which national security is thought to be at stake. The court's workload has soared since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; last year it approved more than 2,000 requests for surveillance, the Justice Department says.

The administration, however, repeatedly has questioned whether the FISA court could move quickly enough to approve surveillance requests to respond to emerging threats. After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush secretly issued an executive order authorizing NSA terrorism investigators to conduct warrantless surveillance on communications coming into or going out of the USA. It's unclear how many people have been subject to such surveillance, or what threats have been targeted.

The NSA program was disclosed by The New York Times in December 2005, prompting a vigorous debate over whether the administration was trying to avoid judicial oversight and violating the Constitution in its efforts to prevent terrorism. Gonzales and other officials continue to say the warrantless surveillance program is legal, but say they now are satisfied the FISA court can respond quickly to developing threats. They say it has dramatically cut its backlog of surveillance requests and the time it takes to approve them.

In a letter to leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales said the NSA program now will answer to the FISA court. He said that on Jan. 10, the court issued orders authorizing the government to monitor phone calls and e-mails into and out of the USA in cases in which one of the parties is suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups. The FISA court will review each request for surveillance, he said.

The White House's reversal on warrantless searches came as Gonzales was preparing for tough questions today from the Judiciary Committee, which like the rest of Congress swung to Democratic control after the November elections. Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has been particularly critical of the NSA surveillance program. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the panel's top Republican, also has criticized the program and said he still has questions about whether it is legal.

House Intelligence Committee member Jane Harman, D-Calif., said the administration's move was long overdue. "We could have been here a year ago," she said. "America operates under the rule of law, and eavesdropping on Americans in America must comply with our laws and Constitution."

In 2005, the FISA court approved all 2,072 applications for surveillance the government submitted, a Justice Department report says. However, the court altered the requests in 61 of the cases, the report says.

Contributing: Kevin Johnson, David M. Jackson

Court to oversee wiretap program, UT, 18.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-17-spying_x.htm