Senate Panel Backs Off Telcos in Spying Probe
    Reuters

    Tuesday 06 June 2006

    Washington - A U.S. Senate panel examining the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program backed away on Tuesday from plans to order top telephone companies to answer whether they gave call records to a U.S. spy agency.

    A frustrated Senate Judiciary Committee Arlen Specter said he agreed to defer his earlier plans to subpoena telephone executives after Vice President Dick Cheney said they would be precluded on national security grounds from answering questions about the reported disclosure of call records.

    "If I thought I could have done better today by pushing the telephone companies, I would have," Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, told reporters after a divisive committee meeting.

    Less than a month ago Specter said lawmakers had to call on the telephone companies to provide details about their role. He was rebuked on Tuesday by some Democrats for pulling back.

    But Specter said Cheney told committee member Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican who acted as intermediary with the Bush administration, that he would look favorably on a bill Specter introduced to have the surveillance program reviewed by a court set up under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

    "Sen. Hatch said that if I would defer action on the telephone companies, which look to me vacuous, then he would get the administration to accept my bill," Specter said. "Now I don't regard that as a guarantee or a warranty, but that's what he said."

    Verizon Communications and BellSouth Corp. have denied a report in USA Today that they gave the National Security Agency, or NSA, tens of millions of telephone call records for a database to help it detect terrorist activity.

    AT&T Inc., which was also named in the USA Today story as providing records, has not directly addressed the matter. The Bush administration has refused to confirm or deny whether its eavesdropping program included culling phone records.

    Qwest Communications International Inc. had refused a government request to give the domestic spying agency access to its customer records, according to a lawyer for the company's chief executive officer at the time Joseph Nacchio.

    Executive vs. Legislative Branch

    Democrats on the committee accused Specter of backing down under pressure from the administration, although Sen. Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat, said she would not have voted to subpoena the telephone companies.

    Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the panel's top Democrat, said the issue of subpoenaing telephone companies "should be decided by us, not by the executive branch of the government."

    Specter said that while U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would appear before the panel within the next two weeks to answer questions, "from what he's said in the past, I doubt he's going to say very much more in the future. But we're going to try."

    News of the eavesdropping program's existence last December raised an outcry among lawmakers, including some Republicans, who believe Bush may have overstepped his executive powers by authorizing the initiative after the September 11 attacks.

    The administration said last year the program allows the NSA to monitor the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens without warrants, while in pursuit of al Qaeda.

    The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday demanded the Federal Communications Commission investigate the USA Today report as it considered whether to approve AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth. The FCC has said it cannot investigate the matter because it cannot obtain classified material.