The latest scandal, the domestic spying program that shot to doll rags every possible U.S. law and Constitutional amendment, too is now conveniently being called the "terrorist surveillance program." Were it not for the fear of puking, one would have laughed at the sickening use of this word.

The only other word that comes a close second, especially in the run ups to and the durations of external fiascos e.g. the upcoming Iran war, is the word 'freedom'. The entire presidential tenure of the current White House incumbent is laced with the two words terra and freedom. Though most Americans have begun to suspect that freedom at home, like any fixed commodity, is depleting by the exact proportion of its alleged export abroad, there are still some out there who heed this incessant chant of terra, terra, terra.

Terra has been used at times as the most well oiled ramrod with which to shove unpalatable legislation down the dissenting Americans' collective throat or, at other times, used as a stick to cow down the anti-war opposition into a mute submission.

In one of his West Point speeches, President Bush announced that the "war on terra will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge." Not very much later, this same president in an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC`s Today show when asked if the war on terror could be won responded with, "I don`t think you can win it." On the one hand this president says that Americans lives can "never be the same" because of his "war on terra" and on the other that in spite of all the sacrifice of Americans' freedom and prosperity, he will not ever win the "war on terra".

How gullible can a people be? This president tells the Americans that the "war on terra" is so vital that they have to sacrifice their freedoms, bankrupt themselves, allow spying on their private lives, change their lives forever and not ask for secrets that he keeps from them. He tells them to stay the course without telling them what the course is. Yet without bating an eye lid, he tells them that the war on terra will continue forever and even at the end of forever, it remains essentially unwinnable.

Ironically, there are still Americans out there that, despite being told that this war on terra is neither winnable nor finite, answer to the call of terra, terra, terra like faithful on a shrine. Is it a secret any more that Americans will be kept in a constant state of fear for as long as the Bush Co. can get away with it because terra, after all, is very, very profitable for certain corporations and power brokers? Is it any secret any more that the only way to stop terrorism is to expose the war on terra as yet another very dangerous US government's war scam?

Does any one need reminding any more that the so called terrorism is a desperate tactic of a desperate people, not an evil ideology? That the root cause of present day terrorism lies in US government's failed foreign policies that maintain the violent occupation of Muslim lands and the cruel subjugation of millions of marginalized Muslims. That stopping terrorism is wholly ineffective until these unjust US government policies are stopped. That, for example, the illegal and immoral continued US occupation of Iraq greatly aggravates the problem by patently authenticating the so called terrorists' claims of repression and brutal occupation of Muslim lands. That this bloody US occupation practically guarantees that Americans and their sidekicks will continue to be targets of violence wherever and whenever possible and that the soon-to-come Iran misadventure is most likely to swell the ranks of these very 'terrorists' like never before.

That all this is happening right before our eyes, with such obvious similarities to the rise of the Hitlers and Mussolinis of the past, is as hugely sardonic as it is unbelievable. For the time being however, riding on the wings of terra, the Americans are being sleep marched into history`s hall of shame. The day may be far but it surely will come when this mass delusion of the Bush supporters will finally evaporate. On that day these Americans are certain to wake up and, in a deafening global chorus of error, error, error, ask themselves the fateful question, "What have we done?"

So on the eve of yet another war that is about to be thrust upon yet another innocent mass of humanity, let us remember that like all empires in the history of human civilization, the Bush Empire too will eventually come to an end. And when that does finally happen, I don`t want to be around for the fear of those involuntary drops of tears when the charlatans are being meted out the Mussolini treatment.

In the meanwhile, however, "Cry terra and let loose the dogs of war."

Anwaar Hussain - eagleeye@emirates.net.ae

Copyrights : Anwaar Hussain

Solzhenitsyn's books -- not just the factual Gulag but also the deep-delving fiction of his middle years, the powerful First Circle and Cancer Ward -- were enormous influences on my own understanding of politics, power and morality. Years later, I was in Moscow when he returned to Russia from his long exile, having outlasted the system of state terror that had consumed so many of his compatriots. However much I had come to disagree with some of his political positions on certain issues, it was a still a moment of triumph for the deeper truths and moral courage that he continued -- and continues -- to represent.

How sickening, then, to find myself last Saturday reading of the precisely the same kind of state terror that Solzhenitsyn described (and survived) once again being inflicted on innocent people -- and this time in my name, under the flag of my country, at the express order of the leaders of my government. Bush is trying to turn us all into the kind of quiet collaborationists and cowed enablers of atrocity that we habitually decry when speaking of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany: "Oh, how could they have let such awful things go on? Why did they stand silently by? How could they swallow all those monstrous lies? I would never have stood for that kind of thing!"

Well, tens of millions of Americans are standing for it right now –- every bit as quiescent as the most head-down, eyes-averted Soviet citizen or German burgher: countenancing, condoning, even celebrating brutal acts of state terror, and swallowing the tyrant's eternal lie that his crimes are committed to protect the people. For a few crumbs of prosperity from the elite's banquet table, for a few flattering fairy tales about national greatness, national goodness and historical destiny, for a few comforting murmurs to chase away the craven fear of madman monsters across the sea, they have sold their priceless birthright of liberty. It's no longer a matter of what crimes Americans will swallow; now the great question of the day is: what won't they swallow? They've walked this far down the road of darkness – how much farther will they go? Will we one day need a Solzhenitsyn to catalogue our shame, our cruelty and our cowardice?

Excerpt from My Years in Captivity, from The Guardian: After that first heavy interrogation they took me into another room and left me there. Guards tied my hands behind my back, hog-tied me so that my hands were shackled to my legs, which were also shackled. Then they put a hood over my head. It was stuffy and hard to breathe, and I was on the verge of asthmatic panic. The perpetual darkness was frightening. A barrage of kicks to my head and back followed. Lying on the ground, with my back arched, and my wrists and ankles chafing against the metal chains, was excruciating. I could never wriggle into a more comfortable position, even for a moment. There was a thin carpet on the concrete floor, and a little shawl for warmth - both completely inadequate.

I lost track of day and night - not only was I usually in the hood but, in any case, the window was boarded up. Eventually, someone came in and removed the hood. I was there in isolation for about a month. Once they kept me from sleeping for about two days and two nights. A guard kept coming in and if I nodded off he woke me. By the end of that I was completely drained and disoriented.

I never knew what was going to happen. Sometimes they'd take me to an outside toilet - used by the military as there wasn't one upstairs. But even then I was hooded, and the hood came off only when I was in the latrine area. There on the wall, in big black letters, were the words "Fuck Islam".

For days on end I was alone in the room. Then they'd come for me and go over and over exactly the same ground: the camps, my role in training, my role in al-Qaeda, my role in financing 9/11. Sometimes it was the CIA, sometimes the FBI; sometimes I didn't even know who they were. All of them wanted a story that didn't exist. There are no words to describe what I felt like. [End excerpt]

And yet, underneath the massive slab of state terrorism, tendrils of human understanding and sympathy do survive between individuals, as was widely evident in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany. Begg describes one such thread formed with what he considered the most unlikely suspect: an old, Bible-reading Alabama redneck, one of the guards responsible for holding him captive – away from his family, away from his life, for no reason, without any evidence, save for wild accusations most likely extracted by torture – for weeks, for months, for years on end.

Excerpt: I made a huge discovery during incarceration, about relating to people. When I first saw Sergeant Foshee, I thought, "He's too old to be in the army; they must be desperate." And when he asked me, in his Alabama drawl, if I was English, I thought, "Another typical raghead-hating, stars-and-bars, KKK-type redneck."

Most of the time, when he was in my room, Foshee sat there reading the Bible, and we didn't speak. I'd heard from other guards that Foshee was racist, didn't like women in the army, hated JFK, lost his temper quickly and ordered people about.

Back in the US he worked as an undercover narcotics agent. But he was also a Vietnam veteran. "Excuse me, Sergeant, do you mind if I ask you something about Vietnam?"

As a teenager I'd been fascinated by the Vietnam War, and even then I'd identified with the underdog. I felt compelled to ask this vet from Nam about his experiences. I must have asked the right question. Foshee loved giving me his recollections, and I couldn't get enough. He described graphically the assaults he'd been in, the friends he'd seen killed, the civilian massacres, and the stress he'd suffered on return to the US. Several of his comrades had been POWs. Then came the inevitable comparison between them and us. Foshee was deeply disturbed by our treatment as detainees. He couldn't understand why we weren't treated as POWs. For us he had a soldier's respect.

"I don't know if you've done anything, but they say this is a war. You should all be sent home, 'cos the war's over. Or you should be treated like POWs. I know there are people here who fought the Soviets for years and even I'm a baby compared with them -- in age and experience. I get so pissed when I see those punkass kids treating y'all that way, when they ain't done a thing for this country." He was talking about soldiers in Echo who had soaked detainees with water, then left the air conditioning on full. To me Foshee was an enigma: his attitudes were clearly Republican, and yet he did not like what he was seeing…

When Foshee heard about the incident [an episode when Begg, maddened by years of pointless confinement, exacerbated by the invasion of his room by a stream of maggots, lost control and trashed his cell] , he was very upset and tried to comfort me with stories of the Hanoi Hilton, how some of his friends had survived torture and solitary - and some hadn't. I had. I made a few friends with guards over the years in US custody, but only one ever earned my respect. [End excerpt]

Moazzam Begg was kidnapped in Pakistan in January 2002. As the Guardian notes in an accompanying story: "During his internment, he spent virtually two years in solitary, was kicked and beaten, suffocated with a bag over his head, stripped naked, chained by his hands to the top of a door and left hanging, and led to believe he was about to be executed." The only "evidence" against him was the statement by a Pakistani captive that his instructor in an al-Qaeda camp had been named "Abu Umamah." This is a common Arabic construction, whereby parents are called after the names of their children: "Abu Umamah" means, "father of Umamah," which was the name of Begg's oldest daughter. (Similarly, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is usually referred to as "Abu Mazen." Although this is often called his "nom de guerre" in the Western press, as if it were the kind of sinister nickname that Bolshevik terrorists took to cloak their true identity – "Stalin," the man of steel, "Molotov," the hammer, etc. – it is in fact just a homely way of saying that Abbas is the father of a boy named Mazen.)

From this tidbit of meaningless information -- there are countless Muslims known as "Abu Umamah" – American interrogators spun a wild fantasy of Begg – a British teacher born and raised in Birmingham, where his secular parents sent him to the Jewish King David School for years – as an international mastermind, a veritable Doctor Evil: "Two FBI agents began the questioning, convinced I was involved in some nefarious web of plots, from planning to assassinate the Pope to masterminding al-Qaeda's finance operation in Europe, or being an instructor in one of its Afghan training camps. They had their perceptions about me and were searching for ways to confirm them - preferably from my own mouth. By now I'd been raised to the status of some rogue James Bond-type figure. They thought I was a graduate from some prestigious British university, that I was fluent in a dozen languages, that I was an expert in computers and several martial arts….Had it not been for this ludicrous situation I'm in, I would have been flattered," I once said to them. "I should ask you to write my résumé - I'd find a job anywhere."

But it was no joke, of course. One of the tools they used to torment Begg was photos of Umamah herself, which they had somehow obtained – stolen from his family home perhaps? – shortly after his capture. When that didn't work, the beatings and bindings described above began.

As I wrote two years ago, describing the plight of three other innocent British Muslims who'd been ensnared in Bush's global net: "The treatment of these three innocent men, chained and beaten for two years, is not just a crime, but also – like that other crime, the invasion of Iraq – an enormous waste of time and resources in the "war on terrorism." We saw the grim fruit of this waste in Madrid on March 11.

"But of course, the Pentagon Archipelago wasn't designed to fight terrorism; it's designed to advance terrorism – state terrorism. Its purpose is to establish the principle of arbitrary rule – in the name of "military necessity" – above the rule of law, in America and around the world. It's part of an overarching system of terror – aggressive war, assassination, indefinite detention, torture – employed to achieve the Regime's openly-stated ideological goal: "full spectrum dominance" of global politics and resources, particularly energy resources. Al Qaeda has the same goal, and uses the same methods, albeit on a smaller, "asymmetrical" scale.

"Now we are all at the mercy of these entwined terrorist factions – both led by fundamentalist sons of two financially linked elitist clans. We will see more Guantanamos, more Madrids, before this long, dark night is over."

Moazzam Begg was released from captivity in January 2005, with all the false charges against him dropped.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and other supporters of the compromise warned that there is no better deal to be struck and that the U.S. strategy could undermine their efforts to create an improved, though imperfect, human rights body. "I think we should not let the better be the enemy of the good," Annan told reporters Monday in Geneva.

The United States and the United Nations have been pressing for nearly a year to create a strengthened human rights council to replace the 53-member Human Rights Commission. The reputation of the Geneva-based panel, which helped draft the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has recently been tainted by the frequent election of members with dismal human rights records, such as Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Senior U.S. and U.N. officials had sought to prevent countries with poor rights records from joining the new organization by raising the membership standards and requiring a two-thirds vote of the 191-member General Assembly for any nation's admittance. But the proposal met stiff resistance, and the current draft resolution would require members to be elected by an absolute majority -- at least 96 countries.

"I say this really more in sorrow than in anger, but we're very disappointed with the draft that was produced last Thursday. We don't think it's acceptable," Bolton told reporters. "My understanding is that the president of the General Assembly intends to bring this matter to the General Assembly within a day or two for a vote. If he continues on that course, we will call for a vote and vote no."

Annan, U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour and two leading human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) say the compromise proposal is still worth supporting. They have been joined by former president Jimmy Carter and several other Nobel Prize winners, who issued a joint letter calling on the United States and other governments to back the deal.

Annan, who discussed the human rights council Sunday with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, appealed Monday for the United States to "join the vast majority of governments who seem ready to accept" Eliasson's proposal. He and other supporters said the proposal constituted a serious improvement on the existing Human Rights Commission.

They noted that provisions to subject all council members to scrutiny of their human rights record would discourage countries with poor records from joining. They also said that council members suspected of abusive behavior can be suspended by a vote of two-thirds of the U.N. membership present.

"We are a country that puts high value on human rights. We wouldn't vote in favor if we weren't sure it was going to be an improvement," said Chile's U.N. ambassador, Heraldo Muñoz, a former dissident who was jailed under former Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet.

The new council would consist of 47 members selected by secret ballot on the basis of "geographical distribution" and committed to "uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights." Members would be elected for as many as two three-year terms at a time and would meet for at least 10 weeks throughout the year.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

It comes less than three weeks before Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko seeks a new term. The United States and
European Union accuse Lukashenko of cracking down on opponents, muzzling the media and systematically falsifying ballots -- including his re-election in 2001.

The two women -- Irina Krasovskaya and Svyatlana Zavadskaya -- are co-founders of an organization called "We Remember," which seeks justice for the disappeared.

Krasovskaya's husband, a prominent pro-democracy businessman, disappeared in 1999. Zavadskaya's husband was a well-known television journalist who disappeared in 2000 following his reports that Belarussian authorities may have aided Chechen separatists.

Several international investigations have concluded that the women's husbands were murdered.

"We continue to stand with the people of Belarus in their effort to determine their own future," McClellan said.

Lukashenko, the favorite, faces three rivals in the election on March 19, including two representing Belarus's small opposition.

The Times in December broke the story that the NSA had begun intercepting domestic communications believed linked to al Qaeda following the September 11 attacks. That provoked renewed criticism of the way U.S. President George W. Bush is handling his declared war on terrorism.

Bush called the disclosure of the program to the Times a "shameful act" and the U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation into who leaked it.

The Times had requested the documents in December under the Freedom of Information Act but sued upon being unsatisfied with the Pentagon's response that the request was "being processed as quickly as possible," according to the six-page suit filed at federal court in New York.

David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, acknowledged that the list of documents sought was lengthy but that the Pentagon failed to assert there were "unusual circumstances," a provision of the law that would grant the Pentagon extra time to respond.

The Defense Department, which was sued as the parent agency of the NSA, did not immediately respond to the suit.

McCraw said there was "no connection" between the Justice Department probe and the Times' lawsuit.

"This is an important story that our reporters are continuing to pursue and of the ways to do that is through the Freedom of Information Act," McCraw said.

The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the federal government to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for surveillance operations inside the United States.

But the Bush administration says the president as commander in chief of the armed forces has the authority to carry out the intercepts and that Congress also gave him the authority upon approving the use of force in response to the September 11 attacks.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he formed the "informal working group" to craft legislation that will strengthen its legal basis. More than a half dozen senators left an hourlong meeting offering few details about progress.

The negotiations put Republicans in a politically tricky spot. The White House has argued for more than two months that President Bush had all the authority he needed to order the surveillance of international communications of U.S. residents without first seeking a court's approval. The administration has said one party to the call had suspected ties to al-Qaida.

One possible proposal, advanced by Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, would allow the government to monitor any electronic communication _ such as a telephone call or e-mail _ that involves a member of a terrorist organization designated by the president.

DeWine said the National Security Agency could listen for a period of time _ perhaps 45 or 90 days _ before having to go to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get a warrant. It's that court that critics of Bush's program have said he should have been using all along.

But Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., wants the intelligence court to evaluate whether the program is constitutional in regular 45-day reviews. The court also would have to certify the government is collecting information only when there is probable cause.

"We are making progress," DeWine said. But "we've got a ways to go."

It's unclear if the House will act. Jamal Ware, spokesman for House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said the congressman is not working to pass similar legislation in the House and "has been very consistent that the president has the necessary legal authority."

The Senate meeting came hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its second hearing on the president's wartime powers and the NSA program.

Taking a middle ground, former CIA Director James Woolsey said the warrantless eavesdropping is appropriate when U.S. intelligence officials are trying to identify terrorists based on their phone calls or other communications. But he said once suspects are identified, then court-approved surveillance is appropriate.

Doug Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law professor, said claims by lawmakers that Bush acted illegally by authorizing the warrantless surveillance were "partisan, unnecessary, unfortunate and unwise."

"There is a genuine argument on both sides," Kmiec said, adding that he generally supports Specter's legislation imposing modest limits on such surveillance.

Bruce Fein, a constitutional expert, was far more critical of Bush's executive order. He said the legal theory justifying the eavesdropping "would equally justify mail-openings, burglaries, torture or internment camps _ all in the name of gathering foreign intelligence."

"Unless rebuked, it will lie around like a loaded weapon, ready to be used by an incumbent who claims an urgent need," Fein said.

Fein urged Congress to wield its power to set budgets to prevent such eavesdropping by the NSA, and said the president should more broadly explain why existing powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were inadequate.

As people are absorbing this, one of the men challenges a patron about a Web site he is visiting and asks the man to step outside. At this point, a librarian intervenes and calls the uniformed men aside. A police officer is summoned. The men leave. It turns out they are employees of the county's department of Homeland Security and were operating way outside their authority.

We are indebted to reporter Cameron W. Barr of the Washington Post for the account of this incident, which, I feel constrained to repeat, did not happen in China, Cuba or North Korea. Rather, it happened a few days ago in this country. Right here in freedom's land.

There are those of us who'd say the country has become less deserving of that sobriquet in recent years. They would point as evidence to the detention of U.S. citizens without charges, counsel or recourse, to laws empowering the government to check up on what you've been reading, to revelations of illegal eavesdropping.

And there are others who'd say, "So what?" They're in the 51 percent, according to a recent Los Angles Times/Bloomberg poll, who say we should be ready to give up our freedoms in exchange for security. Apparently, they are ignorant of what Benjamin Franklin said: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Apparently, they're also unversed in something candidate Bush said in 1999: "There ought to be limits to freedom." This nugget of wisdom wasn't dropped in a discussion of national security. Rather, it was the future president's reaction to a Web site that made fun of him.

Seven years later, he's clearly getting his wish. It chills me to know that doesn't chill more of us. Indeed, of all the many things I cannot fathom about certain of my countrymen and women, their ability to be sanguine at the threatened abrogation of their rights is very near the top.

The only way I can explain it is that freedom - the right to do, say, think, go, "live" as you please - is so ingrained in our psyche, has been such a part of us for so long, that some people are literally unable to imagine life without it. They seem fundamentally unable to visualize how drastically things would change without these freedoms they treat so cavalierly, what it would be like to need government approval to use the Internet, buy a firearm, watch a movie or read these very words.

If that sounds alarmist, consider again the experience at Little Falls, where an agent of the government literally read over a man's shoulder, Big Brother like, and tried to prevent him from seeing what he had chosen to see. The fact that we are at war doesn't make that OK. The fact that we are panicked doesn't make it OK. The allegation that the material is unsavory doesn't make it OK.

Freedom is a messy business. It is also a risky business. But it means nothing if we surrender it at any hint of messiness and risk. That's cowardly and un-American.

You'd think we'd have learned that lesson after the Sedition Act of 1918, the excesses of Joseph McCarthy, the surveillance of Martin Luther King. But apparently the lesson requires constant relearning. And vigilance.

So thank you to the Little Falls library for having the guts to say, hell no.

Some things should never happen in freedom's land.

"The issue is not concluded," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa. He said he plans more legislation and hearings on restoring House-rejected curbs on government power.

The Senate voted 69-30 Tuesday _ 60 votes were needed _ to limit debate and bring the bill to a final vote that could occur as early as Wednesday. The House then would vote and send the legislation to the White House. Sixteen major provisions would expire March 10 if President Bush doesn't sign the bill by then.

Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, did not vote.

First passed in the weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the law has been extended twice for lack of congressional accord over the balance between civil liberties protections and law enforcement tools in terrorism investigations.

Several Democrats voted "no" on the test vote Tuesday to protest the GOP majority's refusal to allow amendments, but said they would vote for the bill on final passage. These lawmakers included Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Judiciary Committee's senior Democrat.

Others still plan to vote against the bill as a whole, but they stand little chance of blocking it. Led by Sens. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., they contend that the months of haggling produced few meaningful curbs on government power.

Specter agreed on that point. Even as he urged his colleagues to vote this week for the bill, he introduced a separate bill to make the government satisfy a higher threshold for warrantless wiretaps and to set a four-year expiration date for the use of National Security Letters in terrorism investigations.

However appetizing to Specter's colleagues in the Senate, the new bill represents items House Republicans flatly rejected during talks last year.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., has insisted that once the House approves the renewal and sends it to Bush, his chamber is done with the issue for the year.

That will be none too soon for some lawmakers. The standoff pushed renewing the law into this midterm election year. Senate leaders were forced to find a procedural way of getting the bill to a vote without losing the support of Sensenbrenner, the Bush administration and libertarian-leaning lawmakers _ all before March 10.

The solution is a convoluted procedural dance that illustrates the razor-thin zone of agreement when it comes to Bush's terror-fighting law.

Congress will extend the Patriot Act by passing two pieces of legislation. The first is the same accord passed last year by the House and filibustered in the Senate by members who said it contained too few privacy protections. The second is, in effect, an amendment to the first that adds enough privacy protections to win over those same libertarian-leaning Republicans.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is permitting no other amendments, allowing the measure to slide through both houses without extended debate.

Feingold, who has opposed the act since his lone "no" vote against the 2001 law, complained that the lack of amendments had turned the Senate into an arm of the Bush administration.

"No one has the right to turn this body into a rubber stamp," he said just before Tuesday's vote. "The White House played hardball and the decision was made by some to capitulate."

Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., countered that the war on terrorism couldn't wait for more debate.

"Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead," Bunning told the Senate.

"The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world," says a longtime field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. "He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us Al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington."

Within hours of the President's speech Thursday claiming his administration had prevented a major attack, sources who said they were current and retired intelligence pros from the CIA, NSA, FBI and military contacted Capitol Hill Blue with angry comments disputing the President's remarks.

"He's full of shit," said one sharply-worded email.

Although none were willing to allow use of their names, saying doing so would place them in legal jeopardy, we were able to confirm that at least four of the 23 who contacted us currently work, or had worked, within the U.S. intelligence community.

But Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is willing to go on the record, claiming Bush blind-sided his city with the claims.

"I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the mayor says. "I don't expect a call from the president but somebody." Villaraigosa also said he has twice requested meetings with Bush to discuss security issues for Los Angeles and was turned down both times.

Intelligence pros say much of the information used by Bush in an attempt to justify his increased spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, trampling of civil rights under the USA Patriot Act, and massive buildup of the Department of Homeland Security, now the nation's largest federal bureaucracy, was "worthless intel that was discarded long ago."

"A lot of buzz circulated in the months following the September 11, 2001, attacks," says an NSA operative. "Snippets here and there were true but most was just random information that could never be confirmed. One thing we do know about al Qaeda is that they seldom use the same technique twice. They tried a car bomb to bring down the World Trade Center and it failed. Then they went to planes. The next time will be something different because we've geared up to prevent hijacking planes and using them as flying bombs."

In August 2004, just as the Presidential campaign was about to heat up, the Bush White House raised the terror alert, claiming attacks were imminent on major financial institutions. The alert, apparently timed to steal thunder from Democrat John Kerry's nomination for President, was withdrawn after administration officials admitted it was based on old information from a discredited informant.

The discredited information dated back to the same period when intelligence agencies began receiving reports of a planned attack against Los Angeles.

Former DHS secretary Tom Ridge admits the U.S. raised terror alerts for the wrong reasons and now says he often disagreed with the timing of such alerts but was overruled by the White House.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge says. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on alert, There were times when the White House was really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' We often lost the argument."

Ridge left DHS in February 2005 and replaced him with Michael Chertoff who agrees with the "cry wolf" strategy of the White House.

"Chertoff is a lackey," says Kevin Riley, a retired New York City Detective who knew Chertoff during his days as a U.S. Attorney in New York. "He'll do whatever Bush tells him to do."

Intelligence pros at established Washington agencies laugh at DHS operatives, calling them "Keystone Kops" and "overpaid rent-a-cops," saying they lack any real expertise in dealing with terrorism.

"DHS is a political police force," says a retired CIA agent. "They exist to enforce the political propaganda program of George W. Bush. That's all they're good for and they're not very good at that."

Now the Florida delegation's third-strongest Bush supporter is on the front lines of the Republican revolt against the president on the deal to turn over key operations at six U.S. ports to a United Arab Emirates company. Republicans who once marched in lock step behind their president on national security are increasingly willing to challenge him in an area considered his political strength.

The signs of GOP discontent have been building in the past few months. Dissident Republicans in Congress forced Bush to sign a measure banning torture of detainees despite his initial veto threat, blocked renewal of the USA Patriot Act until their civil liberties concerns were addressed and pressured the White House into accepting legislation on its secret eavesdropping program. By the time the port deal came to light, the uprising was no longer limited to dissidents.

"We simply want to participate and aren't going to be PR flacks when they need us," Foley said. "We all have roles. We have oversight. When you can't answer your constituents when they have legitimate questions . . . we can't simply do it on trust."

The breakdown of the Republican consensus on national security both reflects and exacerbates Bush's political weakness heading toward the midterm elections, according to party strategists. Even as Republicans abandoned him last year on domestic issues such as Social Security, Hurricane Katrina relief and Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination, they had largely stuck by him on terrorism and other security issues.

Karl Rove, the president's political guru and deputy chief of staff, has already signaled that he intends to use national security as the defining issue for the fall congressional campaigns, just as he did to great effect in 2002 and 2004. But with Bush's numbers still falling, the Republicans who will be on the ballot have decided to define the security issue in their own way rather than defer to the president's interpretation.

The release of a new CBS News poll showing Bush's approval rating dropping to 34 percent, a low for him in that survey, sent tremors through Republican circles in Washington. Scott Reed, who managed Robert J. Dole's presidential campaign in 1996, called the results "pretty shattering." Most distressing to GOP strategists was that Bush's support among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent.

"The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women and it's spreading. It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."

Bush shrugged off the poll numbers in an interview with ABC News yesterday. "If I worried about polls, I would be -- I wouldn't be doing my job," he said before leaving Washington for a trip to India and Pakistan. "And, look, I fully understand that when you do hard things, it creates consternation at times. And, you know, I've been up in the polls and I've been down in the polls. You know, it's just part of life in the modern era."

Yet at the White House, aides were decidedly downbeat, making dark jokes about the latest political trajectory and the Murphy's Law quality of life in the West Wing these days -- what can go wrong will go wrong. At least, some consoled themselves, Bush beat out Vice President Cheney, who was viewed favorably by just 18 percent in the CBS survey.

Others held on to the hope that this, too, shall pass.

"We've got a period of time when the news that's dominating the headlines is not good and some Republicans are going to feel free to distance themselves from the president," said a senior White House official who was not authorized to speak on the record. "But at the end of the day, I don't think the breach is deep or lasting because this is the president's strong suit. I think it's about this moment in time. I don't think it's fundamental."

That is what a bipartisan group of US lawmakers believe, in any case, as they struggle to respond to the White House's assertions of broad powers in the surveillance case.

Unless Congress asserts authority over the program via some form of legislation, some legislators and legal scholars assert, it risks becoming less relevant on important questions of war and national security than it is today.

"This is a defining issue in the constitutional history of the United States," constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein testified Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Since late last year, when news reports revealed the existence of the NSA program, the Bush administration has staunchly defended it as legal. Congress implicitly authorized the program when it voted in 2001 to authorize use of force in the war on terror, claims the White House.

In addition, officials say, the president's inherent authority as commander in chief allows him to take any steps he deems necessary in the defense of the United States.

Some key Republican lawmakers, such as Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Warner of Virginia, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, have joined Democrats in voicing worry about the extent of power claimed by the executive branch in the eavesdropping issue.

Senator Specter's solution

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary panel, Sen. Arlen Specter (R) of Pennsylvania, is leading one of the main efforts to draw up legislation on the issue.

Under a draft version of Senator Specter's bill, the surveillance program would come under the authority of the secret court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The legislation would require the administration to get approval from the court every 45 days for the controversial surveillance program to continue.

Specter is also calling for the FISA court to determine whether the program is constitutional - although a number of legal experts question whether any such ruling would be an inappropriate advisory opinion, or determination of a case without a plaintiff.

Senator DeWine's alternative

While insisting that the program is legal, the White House has indicated that it would work with Congress to codify the law in this area, if necessary. It prefers a proposal from Sen. Mike DeWine (R) of Ohio, which would exempt the program from the FISA law and set up a special congressional committee to provide oversight and review of eavesdropping cases.

The importance of this debate, say experts, lies in the fact that it bears directly on questions of power between the branches that have been debated since members of Congress wore breeches and wigs.

Its outcome will have far-reaching effects, since any shift in this balance tends to persist, say legal scholars. In addition, the White House is in essence asserting privilege in an area that Congress has specifically addressed, via the 1978 FISA statute.

"The president is asserting an inherent constitutional authority in 'wartime' that allows him to ignore the plain meaning of the FISA law," says Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "How it is ultimately resolved will help define the limits of presidential power."

At Tuesday's Senate Judiciary hearing, some experts said it is important to remember the context of the debate. The "war on terror" is not just an empty phrase, they said, but an accurate description of a struggle between the US and enemies that would do it grievous harm.

The US is the battlefield, as much as Afghanistan, former CIA Director James Woolsey told the panel. The NSA must be able to move quickly to eavesdrop on conversations that have a domestic component. "The country has been invaded, albeit not occupied," said Mr. Woolsey.

While expanded congressional oversight of the program may be appropriate, the FISA law was not designed to deal with a fast-moving, internal enemy, he said.

But Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale Law School, called the program "blatantly illegal." "Fighting terrorism outside the law is deeply counterproductive," he said.

A political vs. judicial solution

Any solution will likely be a political agreement, as opposed to judicial-branch rulings, say experts. For one thing, a legal result would take years. The US Supreme Court probably would not rule on these questions until long after the Bush team leaves office.

And the very nature of the executive branch's claims to power in this area means that the White House might ignore legislation with which it does not agree.

"Reasonable minds have been differing on these questions since Madison and Hamilton," Doug Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University, told the Judiciary panel. "It's important not to have recriminations, but to pursue the issue of what is the appropriate course as we go forward."

Some Democrats said President Bush had willfully broken the 1978 law banning warrantless domestic surveillance by ordering eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Moveon.org, the grass-roots Democratic advocacy group, demanded the appointment of special prosecutor to go after the alleged lawbreakers in the Bush administration.
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But now, two months later, another furor - over a Dubai-based firm's acquiring of leases on terminal facilities at several U.S. ports - has blown the NSA story right off the front pages.

Spying apparently continues
Yet the NSA apparently continues to eavesdrop on Americans, and Congress seems increasingly likely to open the way to after-the-fact approval of the surveillance in legislation that may reach the Senate floor in the next several weeks.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Specter and other senators would confer in his office late Tuesday to decide on how to move ahead with an NSA spying bill.

On Tuesday, Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., gathered a group of legal scholars and former government officials, including James Woolsey, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency under President Clinton, to get their views on legislation he's proposing that would require a special federal court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to give its OK to the NSA surveillance.

Former Reagan administration Justice Department official Bruce Fein, an outspoken foe of the surveillance, told the committee that Congress ought to use its power to cut off the NSA program's funding.

"The power of the purse is perhaps the greatest power the Founding Fathers entrusted to the legislative branch" and it "should be used now" to end the program, Fein said, unless Bush explains why he could not stay within the confines of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which bans warrantless eavesdropping in the United States.

But only one of the Judiciary Committee's Democratic critics of the Bush administration, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., seemed inclined Tuesday to take up Fein's proposal.

Indeed Judiciary Committee member Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., while critical of the administration for not revealing more about the NSA program, was specific after the hearing in saying, "I do not want to have it ended; I've never wanted to have it ended, I just want to make sure that somebody is overseeing it."

Program is 'blatantly illegal'
Former Clinton administration State Department official Harold Hongju Koh, who is now Dean of Yale Law School, told Specter's committee that the NSA spying was "as blatantly illegal a program as I've seen."

If Congress went along with Bush's rationale for the NSA spying, it "would turn this body into a pointless rubber stamp whose limited role in the war on terror would be enacting laws the president could ignore at will."

And Koh told Specter his bill wouldn't remedy the problem. One reason: Specter's bill would allow the FISA court to authorize the entire NSA spying program, not particular searches of particular people. Therefore it would allow a general warrant, which is what the Framers of the Constitution tried to ban by writing the Fourth Amendment, Koh said.

But Woolsey gave his strong endorsement to the NSA spying.

"We live on the battlefield," he said. "The inherent authority of the president under Article 2 (of the Constitution) under these circumstance permits the types of intercepts that are being undertaken."

The United States has been invaded, he said, "and defending against invasion is at the heart of the president's article 2 authority."

Connecting ports to NSA spying
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D- Vt., did connect the hot issue of the Dubai Ports World acquisition of leases to operate terminal facilities with the now lukewarm or cold issue of NSA spying. In both cases, Leahy said, "this obsessively secretive administration proceeded with actions it must have known would face strong bipartisan opposition."

He assailed the NSA program as "secret wiretapping of ordinary Americans" and accused the Bush administration of "running roughshod over the Constitution."

He raised the question of whether Bush could grant immunity from prosecution to administration officials who conducted the surveillance.

Another Democrat on the committee, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said that administration officials, as well as telecommunications companies, might face lawsuits for what they have done under the NSA program.

The Democrats' reference to criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits echoed what ACLU official Caroline Frederickson said three weeks ago: one deterrent to Bush administration officials carrying out NSA surveillance is their prosecution.

A future administration, perhaps a Democratic one elected in November 2008, might do the prosecuting.

But despite the references to criminal prosecution and civil liability, Leahy said after the hearing he wanted to co-sponsor Specter's legislation to send the issue to the FISA court for its decision.

Asked where the NSA controversy was headed, Feingold said, "It's up to Congress, whether Congress has the courage to stand up to an extreme assertion of executive power."

Feingold said cutting off funding is one option that he is looking at. "There's a time and a place to do that which is coming up soon," he said.

He added, "We have to address the fact that the president has broken the law."

Feingold also said he opposed Specter's proposed bill because "it hands over congressional power to the executive a way that I think is very disturbing in terms of the protections in the Bill of Rights."