Bush made his nationally televised address from the Oval Office, after a day spent honouring the nearly 3,000 dead at all three sites of the attacks - New York City, Shanksville, Pa., and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

"America did not ask for this war, and every American wishes it were over, and so do I," Bush said. "But the war is not over - and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious."

Bush said that most of those behind the 9/11 attacks have been killed or captured, and promised that the search for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda members would continue.

"Our message to them is clear: No matter how long it takes, America will find you, and we will bring you to justice," he said.

Bush characterized the Middle East as the key to the world's peace, highlighting a vision where its citizens would be free from the "deserts of despotism."

"If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons," Bush said.

No attacks since 9/11

While mentioning the fact there have been no further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the president pointed to bombings around the world and charges brought in apparent foiled plots as as evidence that extremism remained a threat.

Bush praised the efforts of law enforcement and the intelligence community, and promised to continue to supply them with "every response and legal authority to do their jobs."

Last week, Bush publicly acknowledged for the first time that suspects accused of terrorism have been detained abroad in secret CIA prisons, indicating that all of them were now at at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the military tribunals ordered by the Bush administration at Guantanamo were illegal.

Global threat

After addressing the global threat, Bush attempted to make the case for the war in Iraq, though he admitted that Saddam Hussein's regime was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Three days ago, the U.S. Senate intelligence committee concluded that there was no evidence of a link between the former Iraqi president and al-Qaeda, based on an analysis of CIA intelligence.

While Bush said the world was safer without Hussein in power, he did not go into the type of specific reasoning that Vice President Dick Cheney did while appearing on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday.

Cheney asserted that Hussein would have prospered from the global spike in oil prices, would have ignored United Nations sanctions and would have resumed his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

Bush said the notion that a pullout in Iraq would lead to an end to terrorist attacks was mistaken, adding he "cherishes the memory" of the nearly 3,000 Americans who have been killed in the Iraqi war.

At the same time, Bush asked Congress to amend the War Crimes Act in order to retroactively protect him and other U.S. officials from prosecution for these crimes, and from civil lawsuits arising from them. He justified this on the basis that "our military and intelligence personnel involved in capturing and questioning terrorists could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act . . . ," and insisted that "passing this legislation ought to be the top priority" for Congress between now and the election in November.

His profession of concern for military and intelligence personnel was utterly misleading. Military personnel charged with war crimes have always been, and continue to be, prosecuted under the Universal Code of Military Justice rather than the War Crimes Act; and the likelihood of CIA interrogators being identified and prosecuted under the act is remote -- they are protected by the secrecy that surrounds all CIA operations.

The only real beneficiaries of such amendments to the War Crimes Act would be Bush himself and other civilian officials who have assisted him in these crimes -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, Gonzales, Rice, Cambone, Tenet, Goss, Negroponte and an unfortunately long list of their deputies and advisors.

Bush asked Congress to do three things in these amendments. "First, I am asking Congress to list the specific recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes under the War Crimes Act so our personnel can know clearly what is prohibited in the handling of terrorist enemies."

One prong of the U.S. government's attack on the Geneva Conventions has been the assertion that they do not provide a laundry list of what techniques of treatment and interrogation are permitted or prohibited. This is, of course, because the Geneva Conventions instead contain blanket prohibitions on torture, cruelty and humiliation. It has only been the efforts of U.S. officials to encroach on these prohibitions that may have raised doubt among U.S. personnel as to what is and is not permitted.

Captain Ian Fishback, the military interrogator who blew the whistle on Camp Nama (Nasty Assed Military Area) in Iraq, has contrasted his orders in Iraq with the rules he had been taught, "My feelings were that it clearly violated what I had learned as the appropriate way to treat detainees at West Point. . . . You don't force them to give you any information other than name, rank, and serial number. That's the gist of the Geneva Conventions." Captain Fishback's account of the war crimes he was involved in at Camp Nama is in the latest edition of Esquire magazine.

Bush continued, "Second, I'm asking that Congress make explicit that by following the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act, our personnel are fulfilling America's obligations under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions."

This is the crucial change that Bush wants in the law. The War Crimes Act currently criminalizes murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, humiliating and degrading treatment, and arbitrary punishment of prisoners, based on the prohibitions in Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions. Bush is asking Congress to replace the straightforward prohibitions in Common Article 3 with the provisions of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, which includes extraordinary protections for U.S. officials.

These protections are clearly designed to undermine the Geneva Conventions, the War Crimes Act and even the Nuremberg Principles. Section 1004(a) of the Detainee Treatment Act states that, in the case of "operational practices . . . that were officially authorized and determined to be lawful at the time they were conducted, it shall be a defense that such officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces or other agent did not know that the practices were unlawful and a person of ordinary good sense and understanding would not know the practices were unlawful."

This would shift the legal standard from the clear one defined by the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act as it is presently written to one of who knew what when, requiring courts to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that the perpetrator knew his actions were unlawful. Even if opinions written by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jack Goldsmith and David Addington were found to have no legal basis at all, they could suffice to cast doubt on Bush and his colleagues' knowledge of their crimes, which would be crucial under the amended law.

"Third," Bush said, "I'm asking that Congress make it clear that captured terrorists cannot use the Geneva Conventions as a basis to sue our personnel in courts, in U.S. courts. The men and the women who protect us should not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists because they're doing their jobs."

This would protect U.S. officials from civil liability for human rights violations. Prisoners released from Guantanamo have already filed such lawsuits against the U.S. government, Bush, Rumsfeld and other officials, which might help to explain why these amendments are Bush's "top priority."

The central myth of the War on Terror is that the world faces an unprecedented threat from terrorism that renders obsolete the existing laws of war and international behavior.

Bush framed his justification of torture in a classic use of this mistaken logic: "And in this new war, the most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves. Captured terrorists have unique knowledge about how terrorist networks operate. They have knowledge of where their operatives are deployed and knowledge about what plots are under way. This is intelligence that cannot be found any other place. And our security depends on getting this kind of information. To win the war on terror, we must be able to detain, question and, when appropriate, prosecute terrorists captured here in America and on the battlefields around the world."

The context Bush did not provide is that this applies equally to all prisoners of war. Captured soldiers usually do possess information that would be valuable to their captors, and the Geneva Conventions do constrain the ability to extract this information from them, but this is by design. Based on bitter experience, the people and governments of the world have decided that torture is so abhorrent that it must be completely outlawed, even though this results in the loss of information that might save lives or even alert captors to an existential threat to their country.

The purpose of the Hague and Geneva Conventions is to provide all people with certain protections in times of war, to place some limits on the otherwise limitless human suffering that war inflicts. Arguably, governments have agreed to rules of war precisely so that they can continue to wage limited war without plunging their societies into the total chaos that would result from unrestricted use of increasingly destructive modern weapons against entire populations. The Geneva Conventions afford different status to different classes of people, giving rise to different protections for combatants, prisoners of war and civilians. However the notion that certain classes of people fall entirely beyond the protection of these Conventions is not a serious interpretation, unless one is talking of something other than human beings.

For five years, U.S. government officials have justified unlawful actions with political arguments that have no legal merit. Now that the political tide is turning, Bush and his associates are behaving like other war criminals throughout history, marshalling what power they have left to shield themselves from the legitimate consequences of their actions.

American prohibitions on abuse of prisoners go back to the Lieber Code promulgated by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The first international Geneva Convention dates from the following year.

After World War II, international law protecting prisoners of war and all noncombatants was codified in the Geneva Conventions. They were ratified by the US Senate and, under Article II of the Constitution, they thereby became the law of the land.

Wishing to rebuke the unpunished war crimes of dictators like Saddam Hussein, in 1996 a Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Crimes Act without a dissenting vote. It defined a "war crime" as any "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. It thereby advanced a global trend of mutual reinforcement between national and international law.

The War Crimes Act was little noticed until the disclosure of Alberto Gonzales's infamous 2002 "torture memo." Gonzales, then serving as presidential counsel, advised President Bush to declare that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to people the United States captured in Afghanistan. That, Gonzales wrote, "substantially reduced the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act."

Noting that the statute "prohibits the commission of a 'war crime' by or against a US person, including US officials," he warned that "it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges." The President's determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply "would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."

Unfortunately for top Bush officials, that "solid defense" was demolished this summer when the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruled that the Geneva Conventions were indeed the law of the land.

The Court singled out Geneva's Common Article 3, which provides a minimum standard for the treatment of all noncombatants under all circumstances. They must be "treated humanely" and must not be subjected to "cruel treatment," "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment," or "the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

As David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center pointed out in the August 10 issue of The New York Review of Books, the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rusmfeld "suggests that President Bush has already committed a war crime, simply by establishing the [Guantánamo] military tribunals and subjecting detainees to them" because "the Court found that the tribunals violate Common Article 3--and under the War Crimes Act, any violation of Common Article 3 is a war crime." A similar argument would indicate that top US officials have also committed war crimes by justifying interrogation methods that, according to the testimony of US military lawyers, also violate Common Article 3.

Lo and behold, the legislation the Administration has circulated on Capitol Hill would decriminalize such acts retroactively. Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told the Associated Press on August 10, "I think what this bill can do is in effect immunize past crimes. That's why it's so dangerous." Human rights attorney Scott Horton told Democracy Now! on August 16 that one of the purposes of the proposed legislation is "to grant immunity or impunity to certain individuals. And these are mostly decision-makers within the government."

The Coming Debate

Bush officials have not acknowledged that one of their real motives for gutting the War Crimes Act is to protect themselves from being prosecuted for their own crimes. But so far they have apparently offered only one other reason for tampering with the law: The existing law, especially the Geneva language prohibiting "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment," is too vague to enforce. (Perhaps the Bush Administration should declare the US Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" as too vague to enforce as well.)

Fidell noted in an August 9 Washington Post article that military law includes many terms like "dereliction of duty," "maltreatment" and "conduct unbecoming an officer" that may appear vague but that are nonetheless enforceable. The Army Field Manual bars cruel and degrading treatment. When Attorney General Gonzales recently testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that "outrages upon personal dignity" was too ambiguous, Senator John McCain stated that top military lawyers see no problem in complying with Common Article 3.

The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act and rejecting the Bush amendments, in contrast, are multiple and overwhelming:

1. Commitment to the Geneva Conventions protects US service people from future retaliation.

As former Secretary of State Colin Powell has argued, abandoning the Geneva Conventions would put US soldiers at greater risk, would "reverse over a century of US policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions" and would "undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops, both in this specific conflict [Afghanistan] and in general."

2. The War Crimes Act will prohibit "torture-lite" in the future.

According to Scott Horton, the proposed legislation is "designed to provide an OK to certain techniques which fall just short of torture that are being used by the CIA," including "waterboarding, longtime standing and hypothermia," techniques that have been "linked to severe injuries and fatalities."

3. The War Crimes Act will prohibit future Abu Ghraib-type outrages.

The Bush Administration's legislation would remove the prohibition on "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Repealing the War Crimes Act, the Washington Post's R. Jeffrey Smith reported, is decriminalizing the forced nakedness, use of dog leashes and wearing of women's underwear that shocked the world at Abu Ghraib prison.

Derek P. Jinks an assistant law professor at the University of Texas, author of a forthcoming book on the Geneva Conventions, said in an August 9 Washington Post article that the "entire family of techniques" used to degrade, humiliate and coerce prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo "is not addressed in any way, shape or form" in the Bush Administration's proposal. Retired Army Lieut. Col. Geoffrey Corn, until recently chief of the war law branch of the Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General, said in the same article, "This removal of [any] reference to humiliating and degrading treatment will be perceived by experts and probably allies as 'rewriting'" the Geneva Conventions.

This "rewriting" could have very concrete ramifications in practice. The international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia deemed acts like placing prisoners in "inappropriate conditions of confinement," forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and threatening them with "physical, mental, or sexual violence" to be humiliations, degrading treatment and outrages. The proposed changes to the War Crimes Act would indicate that it is not a crime for Americans to conduct such acts.

4. Gutting the War Crimes Act will promote the perception of the United States as an outlaw country.

As a letter signed by sixteen members of Congress recently said, such legislation "would harm the reputation of the United States as a leader promoting and protecting human rights." What would be more deserving of scorn than a country that lets potential war-crime defendants repeal the very law under which they might be prosecuted?

5. The Bush legislation unfairly exempts high government officials from the very war crimes charges they are leveling against lowly "grunts."

Since the start of the Iraq War there have been more than thirty prosecutions under the military law that prohibits war crimes, with many more pending. But they have all prosecuted low-level military personnel. Gutting the War Crimes Act would leave the military "bad apples" at the bottom subject to prosecution but would let the civilian "bad apples" at the top evade all responsibility.

As Horton points out, the Uniform Code of Military Justice already incorporates the Geneva Convention rules, but it does not apply "to Donald Rumsfeld or Stephen Cambone or to people in the White House." The point of the War Crimes Act is that it "spreads the application of the Geneva Conventions the next level up to civilians, and particularly to civilian policymakers." From the beginning, the "prosecutorial focus" of the War Crimes Act "was intended to provide deterrence at that level." Repealing it undermines the fundamental principle of equal justice under law.

6. Preserving the War Crimes Act is part of reasserting the rule of law in America.

The War Crimes Act has been a central focus of the Bush Administration's scorn for all Constitutional limits on the power of the President and the executive branch. It was the idea that the President could by fiat declare US and international law null and void that animated the Gonzales torture memo. It was this denial of constitutional limits that the Supreme Court resoundingly rebuked in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. A rebuff to the Bush Administration's attack on the War Crimes Act is a reassertion of those constitutional limits.

The War Crimes Act can be a bridge to a more just and peaceful world. The incorporation of the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions on war crimes into national law affirms America's commitment to international law. It embodies an implementation of the global heritage of the Nuremberg trials, the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. It embeds that tradition within our own national law.

In the wake of World War II, Justice Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, observed that "the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law." Making statesmen responsible to law is what the War Crimes Act is all about.

Defending the Law

The arguments for preserving the War Crimes Act are conclusive (except perhaps to those who might face criminal prosecution under them). Indeed, the Administration's decision to gut the War Crimes Act is a gift to those who want to see American statesmen held accountable to national and international law. It suggests that the Bush Administration itself recognizes the criminality of many of its actions. And it shows in the sharpest relief why the War Crimes Act is needed.

But, at least for the moment, Bush's Republican allies still control both houses of Congress; they are in a position to slip a repeal of the War Crimes Act into any piece of legislation they choose. Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, senior member of the House Committee for Homeland Security, told The Nation, "The Bush Administration and the GOP leadership in Congress is trying to quietly excuse and even codify cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners in US custody, at secret CIA prisons abroad and even the abhorrent practice of extraordinary rendition [the outsourcing of torture and other cruel treatment to other countries]."

While the Administration has been lining up its ducks, the campaign to save the War Crimes Act has just begun. The advocacy group Just Foreign Policy has started an online campaign to save the War Crimes Act. "This is not an obscure point in the law. What's at stake here is whether, for example, the abuses of prisoners by sexual humiliation that shocked us at Abu Ghraib are clearly illegal under US law," national coordinator Robert Naiman observes. "If we found these actions outrageous, we are obligated to tell our members of Congress to protect the law that bans them."

Markey adds, "Every American citizen should call the White House and their members of Congress because these changes being made in the dead of night could be the green light for other countries that capture American troops to treat them cruelly or torture them."

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They worry that they will not have Justice Department representation in court or congressional inquiries, the report said.

The Post said the anxieties stem partly from public controversy about a system of secret CIA prisons, in which detainees were subjected to harsh interrogation methods, including temperature extremes and simulated drowning.

The White House contends the methods were legal, but some CIA officers have worried privately that they may have violated international law or domestic criminal statutes, the paper said.

President George W. Bush announced last week that he had transferred the last 14 detainees from secret CIA prisons abroad to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and expressed his determination to try them.

But defence attorneys for the suspects are expected to argue that admissions made by their clients were illegally coerced as the result of policies set in Washington, The Post said.

Eventually, the computer would be programmed to understand a variety of languages.

"Passengers are not being snooped on by humans, but by machines which will process the data, which would not be stored after the flight unless there is an incident," she said.

"There are likely to be cameras and microphones in the toilet, because that is where terrorists go to assemble bombs." The camera could also be trained to detect seemingly harmless items being left in aircraft lavatories that could later be assembled to make a lethal device.

"If people know they will be safer, they will be happy to accept the sensors, but we are considering the legal implications of this."

Bae Systems is co-operating with Reading University on the project designed to make the aircraft as secure as possible. "We are concentrating on onboard threat protection," said James Ferryman, a lecturer in computer science.

"We would be looking at ways in which people behave which would give rise to suspicion. It is a challenge to distinguish between situations - such as two children play fighting or someone being attacked."

The aviation industry is monitoring the project closely. ''We are always looking at new initiatives that would enhance security," a British Airways spokesman said. "BA already has CCTV which monitors activity outside the reinforced cockpit door. But we believe it is robust ground security which is the key to safety in the air."

Even before the aircraft takes off, passengers could be swept with an "electric nose" a hand-held device which could tell if they had had any contact with explosives.

Other initiatives include sophisticated biometric cameras at the check-in desk and departure gate. By comparing the iris, it could check that the passenger presenting him or herself at the airport was the one boarding the aircraft.

Work is already in hand to examine putting electronic chips on luggage that would match ones embedded in the boarding pass. They would make it easier to link passengers to their bags or, more importantly, find them when they are separated.

Within minutes of the strikes, U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering authorities mobilized to find the culprits and prevent another attack. They ramped up the tapping of Americans' phone calls and voicemails. They watched Internet traffic and e-mails as never before. They tailed greater numbers of people and into places previously deemed off-limits, such as mosques.

They clandestinely accessed bank and credit card transactions and school records. They monitored travel. And they broke into homes without notice, looking for signs of terrorist activity and copying entire file cabinets and computer hard drives.

Authorities even tried to get inside peoples' heads, using supercomputers and "predictive" software to analyze enormous amounts of personal data about them and their friends and associates in an effort to foretell who might become a terrorist, and when.

In the five years since the attacks, the scope and breadth of domestic surveillance has steadily increased, according to interviews with dozens of current and former U.S. officials and privacy experts.

Some of these programs have been debated and approved by the courts and Congress - the traditional checks against unjustified intrusions on Americans' right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment.

But others have not, and some of them are operating without the knowledge or approval of judicial and legislative overseers, officials and experts say.

Two such classified programs have been disclosed by the media, over the objections of the Bush administration. One involves the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of suspicious phone calls and e-mails into and out of the United States. The other is an effort by the Treasury Department and the CIA to monitor international bank transfers.

Beyond top secret

Privacy experts believe that some of the activity is so secret that none but a small circle of top Bush administration officials and operational support personnel know about it - even though Congressional leaders are legally required to be notified.

"The White House simply refuses to be straight with us about what they're up to," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who says he has pressed unsuccessfully for answers as a member of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, which entitles him to classified briefings on the subject.

In response, administration officials say that they have the authority to conduct whatever surveillance is under way, in part due to the special war powers granted to President Bush by the Congress a week after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In a speech Thursday, Bush lobbied Congress for updated and expanded surveillance powers, saying they are needed to keep pace with a stealthy and technologically savvy enemy.

Meanwhile, the domestic surveillance effort continues within virtually every U.S. counter-terrorism, law-enforcement and intelligence agency.

The programs comprise actual surveillance of Americans' activities and communications, and "dataveillance," the practice of mining the vast amounts of personal data compiled on Americans.

On both fronts, the NSA is leading the effort from its headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., just outside Washington, D.C.

Robert Deitz, general counsel for the NSA, told Congress last week that the NSA's primary mission since Sept. 11 has been to develop ways of eavesdropping on al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that have used cutting-edge technologies to stay one step ahead of their pursuers.

The NSA has improved its ability to monitor the entire spectrum of communications, including fiber-optic and wireless transmissions, instant messages, BlackBerry e-mails and voice conversations sent over the Internet, say officials and experts.

They add that the intelligence community may not be breaking any laws because these kinds of communication might not be covered under loosely worded federal laws that don't account for advances in technology.

Several congressional officials and privacy experts said they believe the NSA also tracks the movement of "persons of interest" by the electronic signals emitted by their cell phones and the global positioning navigation system in the vehicles they drive.

Letter to search

On the ground, the FBI has led the way on the low-tech surveillance front, using little-known powers given to it under the USA Patriot Act and other post-Sept. 11 policies.

Before Sept. 11, virtually all FBI surveillance was authorized by court-approved warrants and subpoenas issued through federal grand juries, which have some measure of oversight by citizen jurors and judges.

Since then, however, the FBI has dramatically increased the use of "National Security Letters," which allow agents to obtain information on people they deem suspicious with little probable cause and without judicial approval. Unlike traditional search warrants, the "target" does not have to be notified.

FBI agents are also using what are known as "sneak-and-peek" warrants on a wider scale, entering hundreds of homes clandestinely to gather intelligence and copy computers and files, again without notification.

And they have conducted surveillance on antiwar, religious, civil rights and environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Treasury Department agents have directed searches of bank records and other financial information in more than 4,000 cases, usually without notifying the U.S.-based individuals, companies, charities and nonprofit organizations, interviews and documents show.

The U.S. military has a program known as "Threat and Local Observation Notice," or TALON, which compiles reports of suspicious activity in and around military installations.

Under TALON, military intelligence squads have monitored Americans at scores of events, including religious and antiwar protests, and filed suspicious action reports, according to records obtained by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

High-tech surveillance

Many government officials and privacy experts say the most alarming expansion in domestic surveillance involves the use of computers and the Internet.

Because gadget-happy consumers are snapping up the latest high-technology devices and online services to make life easier, authorities and private data brokers now have easy access to a digitized footprint of their activities and interests. Phone records, political preferences and purchasing habits are now only mouse clicks away from government agents.

After Sept. 11, government agencies began combining information collected by private companies with their own storehouses of intelligence. Authorities then used "social networking" software to map relationships among large groups of people in America and overseas. And they used "predictive" software to determine terrorism risks associated with individuals based on their activities, purchases, personal quirks and habits.

In 2004, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office found 199 U.S. government uses of data mining, 54 of which used private-sector data, including credit-card records, Internet logs and other information, some of which was of questionable accuracy.

"This has to be largest intrusion on privacy that we have ever seen in the history of this country, undoubtedly," said James Dempsey, policy director for the nonpartisan Center for Democracy and Technology and a former Congressional staffer.

One former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with even the most secret surveillance and data-mining programs defended them, saying that when combined, they form a nearly all-encompassing web that is critically important to the overall counter-terrorism effort.

He said the programs have been hugely successful in catching individual terrorists and in allowing authorities to home in on geographic "hot spots" and ways that terrorist cells communicate and operate.

"If you lose programs like these, you rip a huge hole out of the hide of protection we have put in place around the United States," the former official said. "They are tremendously important, in ways people cannot even imagine."

Angry lawmakers

But even some supporters of such programs believe the administration's failure to disclose them to Congress and the courts could lead to a Constitutional showdown, and soon.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote recently to President Bush that he had learned of "some alleged intelligence community activities about which our committee has not been briefed.

"If these allegations are true, they may represent a breach of responsibility by the administration, a violation of the law, and, just as importantly, a direct affront to me and the members of this committee who have so ardently supported efforts to collect information on our enemies," wrote Hoekstra, a staunch Bush ally.

"The U.S. Congress," Hoekstra added, "simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution."

The vice president said U.S. allies in Afghanistan and Iraq "have doubts" the United States will finish the job there. "And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we've had in the United States," he said. "Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists."

Cheney unapologetically defended the 2003 invasion that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, saying the administration would have done "exactly the same thing" even if it knew before the war what he acknowledged knowing now -- that Iraq did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Yet he also gave a bit of ground, as he was pressed repeatedly by interviewer Tim Russert about statements that turned out to be wrong or damaging to his credibility.

The vice president acknowledged he had been overly optimistic in predicting a quick demise to the Iraqi insurgency that continues to bedevil U.S. forces. More than a year ago, in May 2005, Cheney proclaimed the insurgency was in its "last throes." Since then, more than 1,000 U.S. troops have died and sectarian violence has intensified.

"I think there's no question . . . that the insurgency's gone on longer and been more difficult [than] I had anticipated," Cheney said. But he added that 2005 will be seen as a "turning point" in Iraq's history because of elections that have led to a democratic government.

He did not mention warnings from the intelligence community and others that the post-invasion Iraq could be consumed by religious violence, and that pacifying the country would require many thousands more troops than those committed by the White House.

Cheney's appearance came on the eve of the five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and as the Bush administration ratchets up efforts to convince Americans that the war in Iraq is part of a global struggle against Islamic terrorism and extremism. As it tries to keep GOP majorities in Congress, the White House is hoping to make the elections more about battling terrorism in general than about the unpopular war in Iraq.

In sending out Cheney to do a nearly hour-long interview with Russert, the administration chose one of the principal authors of its national security strategy -- but one whose stature has been eroded, in part, by assertions that Democrats and even some administration allies consider as lacking credibility.

Democrats reacted with scorn to Cheney's latest comments.

"Vice President Cheney's influence over our nation's foreign policy and defense has made America less safe," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.). "The vice president was a chief architect of the effort to manipulate intelligence to build a case for invading Iraq; he ignored the threat of insurgencies, he took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and today he made clear that he would do nothing different."

Cheney appeared unruffled as Russert asked him again and again about his past remarks or about policies that have lost popularity with Americans.

When Russert presented polling data suggesting that most Americans do not view Iraq as part of a war against terrorists, Cheney replied, "I beg to differ. . . . The fact is, the world is much better off today with Saddam Hussein out of power."

Russert pushed Cheney on his repeated assertions that Sept. 11 plotter Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, which the vice president has used to raise the possibility of a connection between Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheney said yesterday the CIA had presented a Czech intelligence report to him of the meeting but later "backed off" it; U.S. intelligence reports, however, repeatedly cast doubt on that meeting, even in the months before Cheney discussed it publicly in September 2002, according to a declassified report released Friday by the Senate intelligence committee.

Separate from the issue of Sept. 11, the vice president maintained, prewar Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism. He quoted former CIA chief George Tenet in saying there was a relationship between Hussein and al-Qaeda going "back at least a decade" before the U.S. invasion.

Cheney asserted that the slain al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had fled Afghanistan and "set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of '02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq." The Senate intelligence committee reported that, by October 2005, the CIA had debunked the idea of any prewar relationship between Zarqawi and Hussein's government.

Cheney told Russert that he had not read the Senate report.

Cheney said it is "hard to say" whether there are more terrorists now than five years ago. But the fact that al-Qaeda has launched no successful attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, shows that the administration's policies are working, he added.

"I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of, of defeating the efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans," Cheney said. "You've got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right."

Cheney said he sees "part of my job is to think about the unthinkable, to focus upon what, in fact, the terrorists may have in store for us." He said the threat that drives administration thinking is "the possibility of a cell of al-Qaeda in the midst of one of our own cities with a nuclear weapon, or a biological agent. In that case, you'd be dealing -- for example, if on 9/11 they'd had a nuke instead of an airplane, you'd have been looking at a casualty toll that would rival all the deaths in all the wars fought by Americans in 230 years."

But a Senate intelligence committee report on prewar Iraq intelligence released on Friday concluded that there was no evidence that Mr Hussein's Ba'athist regime had either harboured or turned a blind eye to Mr Zarqawi.

In an hour-long interview on NBC television, Mr Cheney argued that the invas­ion of Iraq had imp­roved the country. While recognising the increase in sectarian violence, he said Iraq was better off without Mr Hussein. "If we weren't there . . . the situation would be far worse than it is today," Mr Cheney said.

He acknowledged that the US intelligence on Iraq had been poor but he appeared to put the blame on the Central Intelligence Agency, saying George Tenet, the former director of the spy agency, had told President George W. Bush that the case that Mr Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk".

But he said the lack of weapons of mass destruction would not have changed the decision to invade Iraq.

"If we had to do [it] over again, we would do exactly the same thing," Mr Cheney said. He also defended the use of controversial methods - including the domestic spying programme and US detention policies - in the "war on terror", saying they had helped stop further attacks on the US. "There has not been another attack on the US," he said. "That is not an accident."

Congress is considering legislation to authorise the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping programme. In the wake of a June Supreme Court ruling that the military commissions created to try prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were illegal, the White House and Congress are working towards approving a revamped military tribunal.

Republicans are becoming concerned that Democrats could gain control of one, or both, houses of Congress in November elections. With decreasing support for the Iraq war, which has resulted in the deaths of 2,662 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the administration is trying to argue that success in Iraq is key to winning the "war on terror".

Mr Cheney, who said last year the insurgency was in its "last throes", acknowledged on Sunday that "we did not anticipate an insurgency that would last this long". But he said the US was "well on the way" to success, meaning viable government, a country that was not a safe haven for terrorists, and the elimination of al-Qaeda.

Four out of 10 people questioned said they felt less safe now than when the so-called war on terror began after the 9/11 attacks, while 11 percent felt safer.

In the survey, some 52 percent thought British troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan now, and half believed they should leave Iraq. And about 52 percent believed western governments should not negotiate with al-Qaida, and almost a third thought they should.

Some 55 percent people said British government is too closely aligned with U.S. foreign policy, and 19 percent thought it was about right.

According to the report, GfK NOP surveyed almost 1,000 people nationally on Sept. 8-10 for the BBC's Ten O'Clock News.