Return of the 'I-Word'

James Risen and Eric Lichtblau write in the New York Times: "A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say."

Douglas Jehl writes in the New York Times: "The limited oral briefings provided by the White House to a handful of lawmakers about the domestic eavesdropping program may not have fulfilled a legal requirement under the National Security Act that calls for such reports to be in written form, Congressional officials from both parties said on Tuesday."

Cheney Speaks

Richard W. Stevenson and Adam Liptak write in the New York Times: "In his first discussion of the underpinnings of the Bush administration's decision to eavesdrop without warrants on communications from the United States to other countries, Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday cast the action as part of a broader effort to reassert powers of the presidency that he said had been dangerously eroded in the years after Vietnam and Watergate.

"Talking with reporters on Air Force Two as he flew from Pakistan to Oman, Mr. Cheney spoke in far broader terms about the effort to expand the powers of the executive than President Bush did on Monday during an hourlong news conference. . . .

"Mr. Cheney directly linked the effort to bolster the president's wartime authority to the nation's safety since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

" 'You know,' he said, 'it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years.' "

Maura Reynolds writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Cheney dismissed the idea that Americans were concerned about a potential abuse of power by the administration, saying that any backlash would probably punish the president's critics, not Bush."

Here's the must-read full text of Cheney's remarks to the pool.

In his typically unsubtle way, Cheney suggested that anyone opposed to the secret NSA order is being oblivious to the threat of terror, and that there is no middle ground.

"Now we've gotten to the point where four years beyond the attack, people are saying, well, gee, maybe there's not a threat here after all, and so we've got people suggesting we shouldn't be doing what we're doing with respect to the NSA program," he said. "Either we're serious about fighting the war on terror or we're not."

Cheney also held a short interview with CNN's Dana Bash : "It is good solid sound policy. It is, I'm convinced, one of the reasons we have not been attacked for the last four years. It's absolutely the right thing to do," he said. "It has saved thousands of lives."

Executive Power

Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei write in The Washington Post: "The clash over the secret domestic spying program is one slice of a broader struggle over the power of the presidency that has animated the Bush administration. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney came to office convinced that the authority of the presidency had eroded and have spent the past five years trying to reclaim it.