Washington – Senate Democrats on Thursday angrily accused the Bush administration of mounting a public relations campaign to defend the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program while withholding details of the secret eavesdropping from congressional oversight committees.
An annual hearing on national security threats, led for the first time by John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, was overtaken by harsh partisan debate about the program. In response to the Democrats’ complaints, Republicans and the administration’s top intelligence officials said the real problem was leaks about NSA eavesdropping and other classified matters.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, compared the administration’s disclosures of limited information about the NSA program to what he described as a similarly misleading use of intelligence before the war in Iraq.
“I am deeply troubled by what I see as the administration’s continued effort to selectively release intelligence information that supports its policy or political agenda while withholding equally pertinent information that does not do that,” Rockefeller said.
Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan suggested that the administration’s public accounts of the NSA program were contradictory, noting that President Bush had described NSA’s interception, without court warrants, of “a few” messages, while Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, had referred to “thousands” of messages.
In a statement issued later Thursday, the committee’s Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, lambasted Rockefeller and other Democrats for derailing the discussion about security threats with their concerns about the NSA program.
“I am concerned that some of my Democrat colleagues used this unique public forum to make clear that they believe the gravest threat we face is not Osama bin Ladin and al-Qaeda, but rather the president of the United States,” Roberts said. “There is no doubt in my mind there are marching orders to the minority members of this committee to question and attack, at every opportunity, the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, attorney general and now members of our intelligence agencies.”
At the four-hour hearing, Negroponte and other senior intelligence officials made clear that the decision to limit briefings on the NSA program to just eight members of Congress – the leaders of the Senate and House and the heads of the intelligence committees from both parties – had been made by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. He also objected to the Democrats’ characterization of the program.
“This was not about domestic surveillance,” Negroponte said. “It was about dealing with the terrorist threat in the most agile and effective way possible.”
While the Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a public hearing next week to explore legal issues surrounding the NSA program, the entire Senate intelligence committee has not yet been briefed on the program.
Roberts tried to head off the Democratic attack by announcing that the committee will be briefed in closed session on the NSA program Feb. 9 by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Gen. Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence. In addition, he said, the committee will hold a closed business session Feb. 16 to discuss whether to hold further hearings or open an inquiry into the NSA program, as Rockefeller has urged.
Roberts and other Republicans said that the most serious issue was the unauthorized leak of sensitive information on intelligence.
Porter Goss, the CIA director, concurred, asserting that leaks have done “very severe” damage to national security and declared that the leakers will be found.
“I’ve called in the FBI, the Department of Justice,” Goss said. “It is my aim and it is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present, being asked to reveal who is leaking this information.”
In one pointed exchange, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., asked Negroponte whether there were any other “intelligence collection” programs that had not been revealed to the full intelligence committees.
The intelligence chief hesitated, then replied: “Senator, I don’t know if I can comment on that in open session.”