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Administration hikes efforts to defend its domestic spying Students protest Gonzales event at Georgetown

Eric Lichtblau New York Times Jan. 25, 2006 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Ramping up the administration's defense of its domestic eavesdropping program, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday invoked the lessons of George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt in justifying President Bush's broad power to wage war against terrorism.

Gonzales, a key architect of the surveillance program, said that the operation was "both necessary and lawful" and that he believed any president would have taken the steps Bush did.

"I think it would be irresponsible to do otherwise," he said in a speech at Georgetown University Law Center.

Gonzales' address, along with seven television appearances Monday night and Tuesday morning, was part of an orchestrated effort by the Bush administration to recast the debate on the National Security Agency program as one of national security rather than civil liberties.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nation's second-ranking intelligence official, made an unusual public speech about the program on Monday, while Bush discussed it on a trip to Kansas.

The president is also scheduled to visit the security agency in Fort Meade, Md., today to reassure employees whose normally secret activities have come under scrutiny.

With polls showing the public evenly split about the eavesdropping program, Gonzales, like Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney before him, said in his speech that he welcomed a "worthy debate" over the limits of presidential power.

More than two dozen students in the audience responded by turning their backs on Gonzales and standing stone-faced before live television cameras for the duration of his half-hour speech.

Five protesters in the group donned black hoods and unfurled a banner paraphrasing a quotation from Benjamin Franklin as "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."

Former counsel

Gonzales, who had been White House counsel when the eavesdropping program was approved after the Sept. 11 attacks, appeared unbothered by the protest.

Aides said he planned more events before his testimony at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the program, scheduled Feb. 6.

Critics of the NSA program, who accused Bush of violating the Constitution and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by authorizing wiretaps without warrants on international communications linked to al-Qaida, said they were unimpressed by the administration's public push.

'Clearly' illegal

David Cole, a Georgetown law professor who took part in a panel discussion by liberal critics and conservative supporters after Gonzales' speech, said the program was "clearly" illegal.

He attacked what he saw as a "blatantly political" effort by the White House to establish a legal footing for it.

Administration officials "can say over and over and over again that it's lawful - as if the American people will believe it if you say it often enough," Cole said.

Gonzales offered a more detailed explanation of why the administration felt the need to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The court was created in the aftermath of Watergate with the "exclusive" charge to administer wiretaps in foreign intelligence investigations.

Gonzales said that even under an emergency wiretap application, which allows the government to go to the court retroactively 72 hours after beginning a wiretap, the system might not work quickly enough in all cases.