The Bush administration will tell the Senate today that the National Security Agency's programme for terrorist surveillance has been badly distorted by media reports, and that the scheme is a strictly limited one aimed at al-Qaeda members and affiliated groups.In the first Senate hearing on the controversial programme, which was set up secretly in 2002 and revealed publicly in December, Alberto Gonzales, the attorney-general, will say that the press accounts "are in almost every case, in one way or another, misinformed, confused or wrong," according to Time magazine, which has obtained documents outlining the planned testimony.
"Contrary to the speculation reflected in some media reporting, the terrorist surveillance programme is not a dragnet that sucks in all conversation and uses computer searches to pick out calls of interest," Mr Gonzales will say in response to questions raised by Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. "No communications are intercepted unless first it is determined that one end of the call is outside of the country, and professional intelligence experts have probable cause [that is, 'reasonable grounds to believe'] that a part to the communication is a member or agent of al-Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organisation."
But that appears to conflict with a detailed report in yesterday's Washington Post, based on anonymous interviews with US intelligence officials. The report said that only some 5,000 Americans had had their conversations recorded or e-mails read since the programme was launched following the September 11 terrorist attacks. However, in order to identify those targets, hundreds of thousands of calls and e-mails are first scanned and subject to computer filtering in order to identify the smaller number deemed suspicious.
The administration programme has been highly controversial because President George W. Bush has ordered that surveillance of Americans take place without a court warrant, bypassing a 1978 law that explicitly required one from a special court before intelligence could be gathered on US citizens on US soil. Many Democrats in Congress and some Republicans have said the programme violates the law, but the administration has claimed the president retains inherent power to order warrantless wiretapping.
In a television interview yesterday Mr Specter questioned the administration's claim that the authorisation of military force by Congress after the 9/11 attacks gave the president the right to conduct the domestic surveillance. This argument was "strained and unrealistic", he said, adding that the programme appeared to be a "flat violation" of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He had urged the administration to take the programme to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which considers surveillance and physical search orders from the Department of Justice and US intelligence agencies. This body, he said, would be well qualified to assess the legality of the programme and its judgment would set the minds of many Americans at rest.