Bush Defends Domestic Spying

    Bush said "absolutely" he has the legal authority to order such surveillance, and cited Article 2 of the Constitution, which he said gives him the responsibility and authority to deal with an enemy that declares war against the United States. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Congress also gave him the authority to use force against Al Qaeda, he noted, to tackle an "unconventional enemy," some of whom lived in U.S. cities and communities while planning attacks.

    "We need to recognize that dealing with Al Qaeda is not simply a matter of law enforcement. It requires dealing with an enemy that declared war against the United States of America," Bush said.

    "After Sept. 11, one question my administration had to answer was, how, using the authority I have, how do we effectively detect enemies hiding in our midst and prevent them from striking them again? We know that a two-minute phone conversation from someone linked to Al Qaeda here and to Al Qaeda overseas can cost millions of American lives," he added, saying some of the Sept. 11 hijackers made several phone calls overseas before the attacks.

    He said the Sept. 11 commission — charged with probing the intelligence failures surrounding the attacks four years ago that left 3,000 people dead — said the United States intelligence community needs to better "connect the dots" before the enemy can attack again.

    "So, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, I authorized the interception of communication with people with known links to Al Qaeda and people linked to known terror organizations," Bush said, adding that he has reauthorized the program more than 30 times "and I will continue to do so for so long as our nation faces the continued threat of an enemy that wants to kill our American citizens".

    The program is reviewed "constantly" to ensure it is effective and not infringing on Americans' civil liberties, the president added. He also said congressional leaders have been briefed on the program more than a dozen times

    He stressed that the program is limited to known Al Qaeda terrorists and for calls made from the United States to somewhere overseas, and vice versa. Calls between two U.S. cities are not monitored, he said

    Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Monday that the NSA program had yielded intelligence results that would not have been available otherwise in the War on Terror.

    He stressed that it is not a blanket spying program of ordinary Americans but of overseas communications of potential Al Qaeda suspects in the United States.

    "This is not a situation of domestic spying," the attorney general said.

    "Our position is that the authorization to use military force which was passed by the Congress shortly after Sept. 11 constitutes that authority," Gonzales continued. It "does give permission for the president of the United States to engage in this kind of very limited, targeted electronic surveillance against our enemy."

    Gen. Michael Hayden, the deputy national intelligence director who was head of the NSA when the program began, said, "I can say unequivocally we have got information through this program that would not otherwise have been available."