Bush Defends Spy Program and Denies Misleading Public

"WASHINGTON, Jan. 1 - President Bush continued on Sunday to defend both the legality and the necessity of the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, and he denied that he misled the public last year when he insisted that any government wiretap required a court order.

"I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy's thinking, and that's what we're doing," Mr. Bush told reporters in San Antonio as he visited wounded soldiers at the Brooke Army Medical Center.

"They attacked us before, they'll attack us again if they can," he said. "And we're going to do everything we can to stop them."

Mr. Bush's strong defense of the N.S.A. program, which he authorized in 2002 to allow some domestic eavesdropping without court warrants, came as a leading Democratic lawmaker called on the administration to make available current and former high-level officials to explain the evolution of the secret program.

Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has already pledged to make hearings into the program one of his highest priorities.

In a letter to Mr. Specter on Sunday, Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who is also on the committee, said the panel should also explore "significant concern about the legality of the program even at the very highest levels of the Department of Justice."

The New York Times reported Sunday that James B. Comey, then deputy attorney general, refused to sign on to the recertification of the program in March 2004.

That prompted two of Mr. Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel and now the attorney general - to make an emergency hospital visit to John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, to try to persuade him to give his authorization, as required by White House procedures for the program."
NYTimes

You know it's bad when even a true believer like Ashcroft had to be strong armed while in hospital to continue the program.

You know my opinion of the program, and to tell you the truth my opinion of Ashcroft just went up a tiny little notch, mind you it was not ever very high to begin with, but at least it moved in the right direction, though I can't move it too far. He after all signed the thing.