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Gonzales to face grilling on spy programAttorney general ready to defend operation before Senate panel
 U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says the surveillance program is necessary and legal. YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSWASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is poised to defend President Bush's controversial domestic spying program Monday when he testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the program. "Congress and the American people are interested in two fundamental questions: Is this program necessary and is it lawful? The answer to both questions is yes," Gonzales will say Monday, according to prepared opening remarks obtained by CNN. Gonzales plans to say the program "provides the United States with the early warning system we so desperately needed on September 10 [2001]." The program, authorized by the president shortly after 9/11, authorizes the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of communications between the United States and other countries, bypassing a secret court set up to provide warrants for such surveillance. The spying program, Gonzales will say, is "firmly grounded in the president's constitutional authorities." Some critics have argued the program is illegal because Congress required a court warrant for wiretaps when it passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Why the administration chose not to use the FISA court process is the most important question to be answered in Monday's hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." A post-9/11 congressional authorization approving use of force against al Qaeda "doesn't say anything about electronic surveillance," Specter said. "The issue was never raised with the Congress. And there is a specific statute on the books ... which says flatly that you can't undertake that kind of surveillance without a court order." The ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, told CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday the issue is not preventing another attack, because those on both sides of the aisle want to do that. "But what I worry about is, if we keep on trying all these things that might not be legal, we're distracted from catching [terrorists]," he said. "If we're spying on Americans, tapping their phones, their e-mails, whatever, I think Americans want to know that at least there's a check and balance, at least it's being done within the law." Congressional consternationIn his remarks, Gonzales will say that the congressional leadership, including the leaders of the intelligence committees of both houses, have been briefed on the program more than a dozen times since 2001. Ranking minority Intelligence Committee member Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, has argued that briefings given to the only top two members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees were inadequate. Specter noted Sunday that law requires that the committees be informed, not just their leaders. "And if the administration thinks that's too broad because Congress leaks -- and, regrettably, that's a fact of life -- we ought to change the law," he said. "They have never asked us to do that." Meanwhile, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Gen. Michael Hayden defended the program. "What [the president's] authorization does is make it far more likely that NSA will be able to detect, grab, intercept al Qaeda communications that are most important, al Qaeda communications entering or leaving the homeland," he told ABC's "This Week." Asked about whether the program creates a dragnet that will snare Americans with no ties to al Qaeda, Hayden said, "We really don't have the time or the resources, the linguists to linger, to go after things that aren't going to protect the homeland." "When NSA goes after the content of a communication under this authorization from the president, the NSA has already established its reasons for being interested in that specific communication," Hayden told "Fox News Sunday." "I've said in other places this isn't a drift net over Lackawanna or Freemont or Dearborn, grabbing all communications and then sifting them out." NSA lawyers have raised no concerns regarding the legality of the program, he said. Under the law, if the NSA seeks a warrant from the FISA court, it can begin monitoring communications and has 72 hours to seek that warrant. But, Hayden said, it would actually take longer to begin surveillance because the NSA must still wait for the attorney general's review. "The AG has to feel as if he's got the evidence in front of him, that if he handed it to the court at that moment, he would get a yes ... and it does take time. The emergency FISA process isn't that the folks at NSA can just go do what they want and have a 72-hour hall pass. It's not that way at all." The FISA process, he told Fox, "doesn't give us the speed and agility to do what this program is designed to do." Media accounts on the program, Gonzales plans to say, have been, "in almost every case, in one way or another, misinformed, confused or wrong." 
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