U.S. Senate wants answers about domestic spying

The U.S. Senate's judiciary committee grilled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday over the Bush administration's domestic spying program.

In December it was revealed the U.S. National Security Agency had been listening in to domestic phone conversations without court orders. Angry Democrats, who call the action illegal, spent most of the day in a heated debate with the attorney general over presidential powers.

"Mr. Attorney General," said Vermont's Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, "in America, our America, nobody is above the law. Not even the President of the United States." Leahy said President Bush's decision to bypass a secret court and order domestic surveillance without warrants was a federal crime.

"Congress makes law" he said, "not the president and those around him.

"They do not write the laws, they do not pass the laws, they do not have unchecked powers to decide what laws to follow, and they certainly do not have the power to decide what laws to ignore."

Gonzales defended Bush's actions.

"To end the program now," he said, "would be to afford our enemy dangerous and potentially deadly new room for operation within our own borders."

And he brushed aside the questions of legality.

"The terrorist surveillance program is necessary. It is lawful, and it respects the civil liberties we all cherish."

Most Republican Senators backed Gonzales, but there was one notable skeptic, the chair of the committee, Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who pointed to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, "a forceful and blanket prohibition against electronic surveillance without a court order."

It's hard to decipher who is winning the battle. Public opinion polls show the U.S. is divided, unsure if the spying at home makes the country safer from terrorists, or more vulnerable under the secret surveillance of its own leaders.