Senate and Bush Agree On Terms of Spying Bill

Stacey Bernards, a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), called the Republican maneuver "a cheap shot, totally political."

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called it a "perfect storm" of progressive Democrats who did not think the bill protected basic constitutional rights and of Republicans who took advantage of the lack of unity. "It was too precipitous a process, and it ended up in a train wreck," she said. "It was total meltdown."

The House bill contained safeguards against spying on U.S. citizens that the Bush administration said would have interfered with its national security investigations. Some liberals, on the other hand, complained that it still allowed the surveillance of Americans to occur without individual warrants.

It would have empowered the special surveillance court to issue warrants allowing the government to intercept for up to one year the phone calls and e-mails of groups of foreign targets, such as al-Qaeda or Hamas, without requiring that the surveillance of each person be approved. If the foreign target of the surveillance was calling a person in the United States significant enough also to be deemed an intelligence target, then an individual warrant would be required, as provided under past law.

The bill would have required the court to review the government's surveillance procedures to ensure that they were designed to target only people outside the country. Such reviews could be delayed up to 45 days after surveillance began in emergencies. It also would have barred warrantless physical searches in the United States, including of homes, offices, computers and medical records, and made clear that the National Security Agency and the CIA could not eavesdrop on targeted Americans, even those abroad, without a traditional court warrant.

It was unclear late yesterday whether similar provisions are included in the Senate version of the bill that attracted bipartisan support from lawmakers and key intelligence officials.

The Senate deal was reached after the White House made available to the intelligence committee some of the documents underlying the administration's post-Sept. 11 warrantless surveillance program, to encourage the panel to include the telecommunications immunity provision.

Democrats warned yesterday that the Senate intelligence panel's consensus bill must gain the approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman and ranking Republican have said, like their House counterparts, that they are wary of granting immunity to telecommunications companies.

In June, the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the documents underlying the warrantless surveillance program, and Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking Republican Arlen Specter (Pa.) said they wanted to see those documents before endorsing any immunity clause. "I'm not going to buy a pig in a poke and commit to retroactive immunity when I don't know what went on" in the past, Specter said Tuesday on CNN's "Situation Room." "I agree with Arlen," Leahy said on the program.