The ink is still wet on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, adopted by Congress in the final hours before its August recess, and already this six-month-long compromise legislation has drawn strident criticisms from civil libertarians, who believe that it has given the president too much power.
Last Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing — at which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was insulted by senators and ridiculed by spectators — was Washington political theater at its lowest. But some significant information did manage to get through the senatorial venom directed at Mr. Gonzales. It now appears certain that the terrorist surveillance program (TSP) authorized by President Bush after 9/11 was even broader than the TSP that the New York Times first revealed in December 2005.
