Bush defends spying

WASHINGTON — Accused of acting above the law, President Bush forcefully defended a domestic spying program on Monday as an effective tool in disrupting terrorists and insisted it was not an abuse of Americans' civil liberties.

Bush said it was "a shameful act" for someone to have leaked details to the media. The New York Times reported on the eavesdropping program last week.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said it was "probably the most classified program that exists in the United States government" — involving electronic intercepts of telephone calls and e-mails in the United States of people with known ties to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

Telephone calls and e-mails have been monitored in about 500 instances since October 2001, according to an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

At a news conference, Bush bristled at the suggestion he was assuming unlimited powers.

"To say 'unchecked power' basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject," he said angrily in a finger-pointing answer. "I am doing what you expect me to do and at the same time safeguarding the civil liberties of the country."

Bush said he will reauthorize the controversial program every 45 days "for so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill American citizens."

Shortly before the president's news conference, Gonzales told reporters the administration believes the spying program was allowed under the Constitution and by Congress in its resolution authorizing the war on terror shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed more than 3,000 people.

Gonzales said the U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged the president's powers in wartime, particularly when it decided last year that Congress had authorized the detention of a U.S. citizen captured on the battlefield as an "enemy combatant." The Supreme Court likely would uphold the administration's spying as well, even though Congress did not specifically authorize it, he said.

"We believe that the court would apply the same reasoning to recognize the authorization by Congress to engage in this kind of electronic surveillance," he said.

Failing that, he said, the Constitution itself gives the president, as commander-in-chief, broad wartime powers.