International Herald Tribune Editorial - In from the cold

International Herald Tribune Editorial - In from the cold
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: January 18, 2007


Of the many ways that President George W. Bush has trampled civil liberties and the balance of powers since the 9/11 attacks, one of the most egregious was his decision to order wiretaps of Americans' international calls and e-mail without court approval. It was good news, then, when the administration announced Wednesday that it would now seek a warrant from the proper court for that sort of eavesdropping.

The president's decision hardly ends this constitutional crisis. Among other things, the public needs to know why Bush broke the law for more than five years and what should be done to ensure there will be no more abuses of the wiretap statute.

But we are pleased that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed the Senate Judiciary Committee that Bush had decided to end the warrantless program. He said the administration had worked out a way to speed the process of getting a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to intercept communications to and from the United States "where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member or agent of Al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization."

He said the court issued an order on Jan. 10 governing this new process and that eavesdropping under "the terrorist surveillance program" would be subject to the court's approval. There are still some big unanswered questions. For one thing, because the new warrant process is secret, we don't know whether the court has issued a blanket approval for wiretapping, which would undermine the intent of the law, or whether the administration agreed to seek individual warrants.

It was also troubling that Gonzales repeated his insistence that the warrantless spying was legal. That suggests that the administration — which has never explained why it could not have sought warrants from the start and turned down offers to amend the law — will continue to resist legislative oversight of the wiretapping. It's also likely to argue that the lawsuits challenging the eavesdropping should be dismissed. The damage has already been done by the president's decision to ignore the law, and the lawsuits should proceed.

Gonzales' announcement clearly was politically timed: he was to appear Thursday before the Judiciary Committee, now controlled by Democrats who have vowed to investigate the eavesdropping.

We hope they will do that. Congress has a legitimate interest in the creation of this program, which has always seemed motivated more by the president's relentless campaign to expand his powers than by a real need to speed intelligence gathering.

We strongly agree with John Rockefeller IV, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that "the administration's go-it-alone approach, effectively excluding Congress and the courts and operating outside the law, was unnecessary" and that the White House should turn over documents on the creation of the wiretapping program. If the 1978 law needs to be updated, that should happen in public, not in a secret court.

This administration long ago forfeited the public trust on these issues.