August 2, 2007 (LPAC)--Over the past week, the White House has been putting heavy pressure on Congress to immediately pass new legislation to give the Administration more leeway to monitor phone calls and e-mails of "suspected terrorists." Fearful of being labeled as "soft on terrorism," many Democrats are backsliding on their earlier insistence that Congress should not pass any new legislation modifying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) until the Administration had fully disclosed the scope of the domestic surveillance program put in effect after September 2001.

This program, it is well-established, was run by Vice President Dick Cheney; it was Cheney who provided all the classified briefings -- such as they were -- to Congressional leaders, and it has now been reported that it was Cheney who ordered then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to go to Attorney General Ashcroft's hospital room in 2004 to try to get the heavily-sedated Ashcroft to override the determination by the top Justice Department officials that the program as it then existed was illegal. 

According to Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, the reason for the Administration's desperation is that a judge of the FISA Court recently imposed new restrictions on the NSA's ability to intercept, without a specific warrant, overseas phone calls and e-mails which are routed through U.S. facilities.

Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, according to McClatchy Newspapers, has rejected one White House proposal which would by-pass the FISA Court. "The Administration has offered a proposal that would ... permanently grant the Attorney General excessive surveillance powers, by giving him sole authority to direct surveillance, while completely removing the FISA court from the process," Rockefeller said. "That is simply unacceptable."