A Surrender or a Feint?

President Bush used to suggest that trying to bring judicial oversight to his warrantless wiretapping program was tantamount to supporting the terrorists. So the announcement yesterday that the program will now operate under court jurisdiction was undeniably a reversal.

But how much of one? Is the White House running up the white flag in its longstanding battle to expand executive power? Or is this just a tactical retreat?

We really don't know, because even while apparently giving ground, the White House is leaving many important issues terribly unclear.

Among today's questions: Are specific wiretapping warrants now being issued by the court -- as federal law would appear to require -- or did the administration somehow persuade one of the judges on the secret panel to grant some sort of blanket approval?

The Coverage

Dan Eggen writes in The Washington Post: "The Bush administration said yesterday that it has agreed to disband a controversial warrantless surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, replacing it with a new effort that will be overseen by the secret court that governs clandestine spying in the United States.

"The change -- revealed by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- marks an abrupt reversal by the administration, which for more than a year has aggressively defended the legality of the NSA surveillance program and disputed court authority to oversee it. . . .

"But many details of the new approach remained unclear yesterday, because administration officials declined to describe specifically how the program will work.

"Officials would not say, for example, whether the administration will be required to seek a warrant for each person it wants to monitor or whether the FISA court has issued a broader set of orders to cover multiple cases. Authorities also would not say how many court orders are involved or which judge on the surveillance court had issued them.

"One official familiar with the discussions characterized the change as 'programmatic,' rather than based on warrants targeting specific cases. This official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the judge who issued the Jan. 10 order was not U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the FISA panel's chief judge, but rather one of that court's rotating members who was assigned to hear cases that week. . . .

"White House and Justice officials said the president was not retreating from his stance that he has the constitutional and legislative authority to order warrantless surveillance on international calls but said the new rules promulgated by the surveillance court have satisfied concerns about whether the FISA process can move quickly enough to authorize surveillance."

Eric Lichtblau and David Johnston write in the New York Times: "The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had obtained multiple orders, or warrants, a week ago from the FISA court allowing it to monitor international communications in cases where there was probable cause to believe one of the participants was linked to Al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist group. . . .

"Justice Department officials said that the FISA court orders, which were not made public, were not a broad approval of the surveillance program as a whole, an idea that was proposed last year in Congressional debate over the program. They strongly suggested that the orders secured from the court were for individual targets, but they refused to provide details of the process used to identify targets -- or how court approval had been expedited -- because they said it remained classified. The senior Justice Department official said that discussing 'the mechanics of the orders' could compromise intelligence activities."