Can Bush Negotiate?

"'Sometimes . . . [Prime Minister] Tony [Blair{rcub} had made his point with the president, and I'd made my point with Don [Rumsfeld] and [foreign secretary] Jack [Straw] had made his point with Colin [Powell] and the decision actually came out of a completely different place. And you think: what did we miss? I think we missed Cheney.' . . .

"Describing the task of dealing with the US administration as a 'multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle,' Mr Hoon accepted that Britain had greatly underestimated the influence of the neo-con vice-president Mr Cheney."

Surveillance Watch

Walter Pincus writes in The Washington Post: "Court orders in January that brought President Bush's warrantless terrorist surveillance program under existing law have limited the intelligence that agencies can collect, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate committee yesterday.

"'We are actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting,' McConnell said during an unusual public session of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the administration's proposal to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).

"The intelligence collection program was secretly instituted under presidential authority shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was disclosed by the news media in December 2005. It permitted warrantless intercepts of telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and locations overseas if one participant was believed to be a member of al-Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.

"In January, the administration agreed to bring the program under the oversight of the secret FISA court, which approves warrants in terrorism and espionage investigations. That reversed Bush's position that he had the authority to order the program on his own. . . .

"Democrats on the committee made clear that they want a revised surveillance law that would prohibit future presidents from initiating another warrantless intercept program based on the constitutional authority to protect the nation, as Bush did."

James Risen writes in the New York Times: "Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday that they could not pledge that the administration would continue to seek warrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as it agreed to do in January.

"Rather, they argued that the president had the constitutional authority to decide for himself whether to conduct surveillance without warrants.

"As a result of the January agreement, the administration said that the National Security Agency's domestic spying program has been brought under the legal structure laid out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for the wiretapping of American citizens and others inside the United States.

"But on Tuesday, the senior officials, including Michael McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said they believed that the president still had the authority under Article II of the Constitution to once again order the N.S.A. to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants. . . .

"Mr. McConnell emphasized that all domestic electronic surveillance was now being conducted with court-approved warrants, and said that there were no plans 'that we are formulating or thinking about currently' to resume domestic wiretapping without warrants."