Cheney was administration's top advocate for warrantless wiretapping

[kurth]

New York Times: Cheney Advocated Warrantless Wiretapping
By VOA News
14 May 2006

Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have been the administration's top advocate for intercepting purely domestic telephone calls and e-mails, without warrants, as part of the war on terror after the September 11 attacks.

The New York Times Sunday quotes two senior intelligence officials as saying Cheney and his legal advisor took an aggressive view of the president's ability to take security measures that raised concerns by others about civil liberties.

The officials, who asked not to be named, say lawyers within the National Security Agency did not believe U.S. law allowed the type of surveillance requested by the vice president.

The officials say it was General Michael Hayden, then the head of the NSA, who reached a compromise with the White House allowing warrantless eavesdropping if one party to a conversation was outside the United States. That decision is expected to come under intense scrutiny later this week during General Hayden's confirmation hearings as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

http://voanews.com/english/2006-05-14-voa15.cfm

[rodeodance]

1. Hayden comes out as the good guy in this story. Both Biden and Hagel

mentioned this story this morning.

Hayden the Hero.

[rodeodance]

2. NYT: Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/washington/14nsa.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

May 14, 2006
Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, May 13 — In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear.

As the program's overseer and chief salesman, General Hayden is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing next week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Criticism of the surveillance program, which some lawmakers say is illegal, flared again this week with the disclosure that the N.S.A. had collected the phone records of millions of Americans in an effort to track terrorism suspects.

By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.