The federal probe centers on identifying who within
President George W. Bush's administration leaked to the media the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, in what critics have alleged was an act of retribution against her husband, Joseph Wilson.

Wilson fell out of favor with the administration after publicly challenging in July 2003 administration assertions that Iraq had been attempting to procure radioactive material from Niger to build a nuclear weapon.

Another senior White House aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, faces charges in the inquiry.

Libby, who was indicted on five counts of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI, is scheduled to go on trial next January.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to answer any questions related to Rove and the grand jury on Wednesday.

A spokesman for Fitzgerald did the same. "I cannot comment on any witnesses who may or may not be appearing before a grand jury or any activity before a grand jury," Randall Sanborn said.

Bush last week reassigned Rove as part of a shake-up of his top advisers, freeing up his political guru from duties overseeing domestic policy to allow him to work on crafting a winning Republican strategy for November's mid-term elections.

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, in a statement, said that the reports of Rove's reappearance before the panel were "ominous".

"While obviously no one knows what goes on in the grand jury, the fact that Karl Rove has been called back once again, is ominous.

"This additional Rove visit clearly shows that the Plame investigation is far from over, and that Patrick Fitzgerald is living up to his reputation as an impartial, dedicated prosecutor determined to turn over every stone," Schumer said.

"There was no wholesale abdication of the attorney general's duty to direct and supervise litigation," he wrote.

Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had recused himself from the investigation because of his White House contacts. James Comey, who was deputy attorney general at the time, appointed Fitzgerald, giving him wide berth to conduct the investigation into who leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters in 2003.

"This case provides the clearest example of why such broad discretion is necessary," Walton wrote. "Here, the attorney general believed there was a conflict of interest ... It was, therefore, entirely appropriate for the attorney general to remove himself completely from the investigation."

Walton said there must be a way to appoint special prosecutors to ensure that "the perception of fairness withstands the scrutiny of the American public" when high-level government officials are investigated for alleged wrongdoing.

Libby, 55, is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, accused of lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury about how he learned about Plame and what he subsequently told reporters about her.

Conservative columnist Robert Novak named her in a column July 14, 2003, eight days after Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the Bush administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.

The CIA sent Wilson to Niger in early 2002 to determine whether there was any truth to reports that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports. But the allegation nevertheless wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

Walton said Comey made the legal analysis more difficult by failing to appoint Fitzgerald under Justice Department rules for special prosecutors. As a result, the judge said he had to rely on a series of letters Comey wrote to Fitzgerald outlining the CIA leak investigation.

The judge concluded that Fitzgerald's powers are limited because he can be removed by the Justice Department. Walton also said Fitzgerald's authority will expire when the CIA leak investigation and resulting prosecutions are concluded.

"The integrity of the rule of law ... is challenged to the greatest degree when high-level government officials come under suspicion for violating the law," Walton wrote. "And a criminal investigation of any individuals, prominent or not ... must be above reproach to preserve respect for the fairness of our system of justice."

Without a pledge from Bush to provide more information on the surveillance program, Specter filed an amendment to a spending bill Thursday that amounted to a warning to the White House.

The amendment would enact a "prohibition on use of funds for domestic electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes unless Congress is kept fully and currently informed."

Specter also said he would turn the amendment into a bill and hold hearings.

"Institutionally, the presidency is walking all over Congress at the moment," Specter said. "If we are to maintain our institutional prerogative, that may be the only way we can do it."

Specter made clear that, for now, the threat was just that.

"I'm not prepared to call for the withholding of funds," he told reporters later.

"But I think that it is important to elevate the public consciousness as to what is going on," Specter said. "The four hearings we have had and the way the matter is drifting, in my view, is insufficient to safeguard civil liberties."

The move got the White House's attention, but not its immediate cooperation. Bush has insisted that the program falls within his authority and has refused to allow Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other officials to answer many of Specter's questions.

"The appropriate members of Congress have been and continue to be informed with respect to the Terrorist Surveillance Program," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

"The administration remains confident that a majority of members of Congress continue to recognize the importance of protecting Americans through lawful intelligence activities directed at terrorists," Perino said.

Specter said he hoped to jolt the public's awareness and "an inert Congress ... which has not stood up to the executive branch."

"You have a Congress which candidly is more concerned about re-election and fundraising and who controls the House and the Senate than about asserting constitutional prerogatives," Specter said. "That's not the way it ought to be. These are matters which require some active congressional action and that's what I'm looking toward."

For now, Specter said he will not bother having Gonzales return to the committee "because he won't tell us anything."

Threatening to withhold money from the wiretapping program is not unprecedented.

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee tried to attach an amendment to the 2007 intelligence authorization bill to withhold money from the National Security Agency if the White House did not disclose information about the cost of the warrantless surveillance program.

The figure was given to a select group of members who have been briefed more fully on the NSA program, and is classified.

First, a key Republican senator said Thursday that he was contemplating pulling the plug on the NSA spying program by cutting funding--unless, that is, the Bush administration comes clean on how the program works and whether it complies with privacy rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

"When you're withholding funds, here you're talking about real authority," Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol. Specter said he met with Bush on Wednesday but was unable to find common ground.

Second, on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in the northern district of California set two hearing dates over the next two months for a lawsuit that seeks to prove that AT&T illegally cooperated with the NSA and violated federal wiretapping laws in doing so. One date is May 17 and the other is June 21.

At issue in the AT&T lawsuit, filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is not only the company's actions (it has repeatedly declined to answer questions from CNET News.com). It's also over whether EFF will be able to unseal allegedly confidential documents it obtained, including a sworn statement by a retired AT&T telecommunications technician describing a "dragnet surveillance" scheme.

AT&T has asked the judge not only to keep the documents sealed and away from the public's eyes, but also to force the digital-rights group to return them. "We're waiting to see what happens," Lee Tien, an EFF senior staff attorney, said Thursday.

In Washington, the political situation is becoming even more complicated than the legal one. The Senate Judiciary Committee has convened four hearings this year related to the terrorist surveillance program that could be spying on an untold number of Americans' phone conversations and e-mails.

But the committee has still not obtained enough information to do its job, which is to judge the constitutionality of the program, and neither has the intelligence committee, which the administration is legally obligated to brief on such matters, Specter said.

"Is the president doing anything wrong?" Specter asked. "We don't know, because we don't know what the program is."

There's no doubt that the program is going on in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, a 1978 law that requires a secret court to approve investigative wiretapping before it occurs, Specter said. What remains murky, he added, is whether the president's constitutional powers as commander-in-chief would justify the program's existence without a court order.

"Here you have a lot of taps going on in America, in violation of a statute," Specter said. "They may be necessary, they may be vital, but there needs to be a determination of that...to ensure they're not a violation of privacy without probable cause."

Specter introduced a bill in March that would explicitly require the FISA court to sign off on all future and existing surveillance programs. That measure, along with two other bills regulating electronic surveillance, remains under debate in committee.

Specter emphasized that he doesn't want the issue to fade into the background, saying that he'd like to see "public concern and public indignation build up." He said it's possible he would also propose a separate bill to withhold the funds and plans to study how such a tactic has or has not been used in other times of controversy, such as during the Vietnam War.

The tactic may be largely symbolic, though, unless other Republicans join him or Democrats manage to retake the House of Representatives in the fall 2006 elections.

Prosecutors said repeatedly since Tuesday's verdict that they don't believe there was any improper influence on jurors, and that any pressure on Lopez was part of the normal jury deliberation process.

Though emotional, Lopez confirmed her guilty vote in open court Tuesday when all 12 jurors were questioned by presiding U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr.

"I deeply regret my decision," Lopez said in the affidavit obtained by defense investigator and former
FBI agent James Wedick.

Lopez said she went to a medical clinic Saturday with a migraine headache and believed "my health and physical well-being were being affected by the pressure from the other jurors to change my vote."

Prosecutors say Hayat, 23, should face a minimum 30 years in prison at his July 14 sentencing based on his convictions on charges he provided material support by attending the terror camp in 2003 and lying about it to FBI agents when he was questioned after he returned to the United States in May.

Hayat told agents in an hours-long videotaped statement that he was awaiting orders to carry out a religious war against targets such as banks, groceries and hospitals. Mojaddidi disputes the confession and says there is no direct proof Hayat attended the camp.

Hours before the guilty verdict against Hamid Hayat, a separate jury said it was hopelessly deadlocked on whether his father, Umer Hayat, 48, also of Lodi, was guilty of lying to FBI agents about his son's alleged terrorist training.

Prosecutors are expected to tell Burrell on Friday if they will retry the older man's case. Burrell has set a hearing on whether Umer Hayat should be released on bail.

Both men were detained along with two Muslim religious leaders in what authorities suggested was part of a terrorist movement in Lodi, located in a grape-growing region 35 miles south of the state capital. The two imams and one man's son were deported for immigration violations, however, and the Hayats were the only people criminally charged in the probe.

"The suffering that continued in the days and weeks after the storm passed did not happen in a vacuum; instead, it continued longer that it should have because of - and was in some cases exacerbated by - the failure of government at all levels to plan, prepare for and respond aggressively to the storm," concluded the report.

It was titled "Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared," sober words for the future.

The Senate inquiry is the third major federal report on the government failures exposed by the Aug. 29 storm, which killed more than 1,300 people and which the Senate Budget Committee says has so far cost the federal government $103 billion.

The report follows similar inquiries by the House and White House and comes in an election year in which Democrats have pointed critically to the administration's Katrina response.

The senators concluded that only by abolishing the Federal Emergency Management Agency - which Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called a "bumbling bureaucracy" - and replacing it with a stronger authority could the government best respond to future catastrophes.

But the two lawmakers who led the inquiry, Collins and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said such an overhaul could not be completed by the June 1 start of the hurricane season.

"As a practical matter, that's just five weeks away, and it's not going to happen," Collins told reporters. "But that doesn't mean that we should continue in the long term to operate with a system that's failed, that is so clearly flawed."

Looking ahead to approaching hurricane season, Collins added: "We're clearly better prepared than last year, but are we prepared enough? No, we're not."

Underscoring the hurdles the proposals face, eliminating FEMA got a cool reception from the White House as Bush traveled to the still-ravaged Gulf Coast to view rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and Mississippi.

"My thoughts are is that we've got to make sure it functions well. We're coming into a hurricane season," he said in an interview with "NBC Nightly News."

Earlier, White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, said, "Now is not the time to look at moving organizational boxes around."

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said: "FEMA is injured. It's going to take more than surgery and a cast to mend it. To restore the nation's confidence in times of crisis, the call for help must be answered and it must be answered quickly."

Besides dumping FEMA, the report makes 85 other recommendations, from clarifying who's responsible for maintaining New Orleans levees to demanding better plans for protecting or evacuating elderly and poor victims.

The report calls for more funding for disaster planning and response, but does not specify how much or where the money would come from.

The Bush administration says it has been working to prepare for what the National Hurricane Center has predicted will be an active decade for hurricanes. It is rebuilding New Orleans levees, prodding local governments to update evacuation plans and hire emergency workers, and creating databases to order and track food and other supplies needed during disasters.

Though the new report singles out officials from New Orleans to Washington for blame - and lambastes Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in particular - it gives Bush a mixed review for his performance. It credits the president for declaring an emergency before the hurricane's landfall, but faults him for waiting until two days after it hit to return to Washington and convene top officials to coordinate the federal response.

Lieberman, in an addendum, took sharper aim at Bush, who he said appeared distracted from the disaster as it unfolded. "The president is, after all, the commander in chief - not only in terms of international crises, but in terms of catastrophes here at home," he said.

Not all the senators who participated in the seven-month inquiry agreed with its central recommendation - to create a National Preparedness and Response Authority but keep it within the oversight of Homeland Security Department to draw on the larger department's resources.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said FEMA needs to be stripped out of the larger department and restored as an independent Cabinet-level agency. "That's how it was done in the past and it worked as we hoped," said Lautenberg, a member of the Senate panel.

But Robert Latham, director of Mississippi's emergency response efforts, said lingering funding and manpower problems should be addressed before such a drastic step is taken.

"Changing the name of something doesn't fix a problem, other than maybe fixes a perception," Latham said. "Maybe FEMA has taken such a bashing that the name recognition itself will be hard to overcome."

For one thing, many mainstream journalists consider Snow a Bush partisan and doubt he can provide much new thinking to the White House. Many reporters also doubt that he will work aggressively on their behalf to provide more access to the president and to senior administration officials and to give out more information about what the government is doing.

There's also a question about whether Snow is an adept inside player. Some who remember him from his days as a speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush say that Snow was often blindsided by policy decisions no one told him about and that his advice was often ignored. He also was unable to make his way into the White House inner circle and was never a confidant of Bush the elder.

These are the same kinds of problems endured by outgoing Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who is leaving the West Wing early next month.

"The press secretary's job is not that difficult as long as you have a president who's willing to work with you," says a former adviser to Bush's father. "That hasn't been the case for Scott."

MySpace.com said there is no way to determine whether Meyer wrote the message himself.

"Jesus, I don't know if any of you have heard what has happened to me yet, but I just want to remind you not to be sad," said the note, posted Monday. "Laugh, that's what lifes about ... When it is all said and done, ... it is the ones you love who you will remember."

Meyer's father referred questions Thursday to Army public affairs. Joe Walker, a spokesman for Meyer's unit, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, said the investigation is still going on.

MySpace.com - a social networking hub with more 72 million members - allows users to post searchable profiles that can include photos of themselves and such details as what music they like.

Dustin Triplett, a friend of Meyer's from high school, told the St. Petersburg Times that many of Meyer's friends were surprised by his decision to join the Army early last year. Triplett said Meyer told him how much he hated the military and that he was never comfortable.

On his MySpace page, a passage addressed to other soldiers read: "Have fun you simple minded creatures. The army needs drones like you, you are what they call life long enlisted."

A film and drama fan, Meyer made a movie on April 21 that was added to his MySpace site, a short film about Army life called "Bored As Hell: A Weekend at Ft. Gordon."

MySpace.com said in a statement Thursday that a third of its staff is devoted to monitoring content, mostly for violations of its terms-of-use agreement, including posting of inappropriate photos and hate speech.

The company added that it could not comment or specific cases or ongoing investigations. But when situations arise "that put the safety and security of our more than 74 million members at risk, we work with the appropriate authorities" to quickly resolve them, the company said.