Senate Panel Split Over Questioning Phone Company Executives

Members of a Senate committee are divided over proposals to question executives of four telephone companies about whether they gave the government records of millions of calls in the United States to aid anti-terrorist surveillance.

After objections from both Republicans and Democrats, Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) yesterday postponed a vote on issuing subpoenas for the chief executives of Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc., BellSouth Corp. and Qwest Communications International Inc. He scheduled more debate for June 6 after Congress returns from a one-week recess.

Specter wants to question the executives about a May 11 article in USA Today that said AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth gave the National Security Agency records of tens of millions of phone calls. NSA created a database of numbers dialed from particular phones to help detect and wiretap the calls of suspected terrorists, the newspaper said. The records did not include the contents of calls, the paper said, citing anonymous sources.

"It's not clear to me we need to have the executives of the telephone companies before the Judiciary Committee," said Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). Subpoenas would "put them on the hot seat" and create "a no-win situation for them," he said.

Kyl and Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the executives should be questioned in a closed session to protect the effectiveness of the NSA surveillance ordered by President Bush to detect terrorist plots after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) questioned the value of a closed session if members could not publicly discuss what the executives told the committee. "What's the point?" he asked.

Atlanta-based BellSouth and New York-based Verizon have denied they gave customer records to NSA. AT&T, based in San Antonio, has declined to comment on whether it gave records to the spy agency. All three companies have been named in privacy suits filed by customers.

Joseph Nacchio, former chief executive of Qwest, has said through his attorney that he refused the government's request for such records after concluding it would violate federal privacy law.

AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp said today in an e-mail that the company "is happy to appear before the committee as the members desire." Verizon spokesman Bob Varettoni declined to comment.

F. Duane Ackerman, BellSouth's chairman and chief executive, "has nothing to hide" and is willing to say under oath that the company has "never provided any information at all to the NSA," said spokesman Jeff Battcher. "We can't find anybody in this company who has ever been approached by the NSA," Battcher said.

Specter said questioning the telephone executives is also necessary to determine the constitutionality of an earlier-disclosed NSA program to monitor phone calls between the United States and al-Qaeda operatives without court warrants.

"We need to know a great deal more than we know," Specter said. "We have been denied information about the electronic surveillance program" by the Bush administration, "which I think is wrong," he said.