WASHINGTON – Senators are preparing to grill President Bush’s nominee for CIA chief about government surveillance – as a new poll shows a majority think the government is invading people’s privacy.
“The American people need to be assured that their government is in fact following the law,” said maverick Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.
Hagel met last week with former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, Bush’s choice to head the troubled CIA – a choice which must be confirmed by the Senate.
Hagel says he supports Hayden, but told ABC’s “This Week,” “There’s no question that his confirmation is going to depend upon the answers he gives about activities of NSA.”
In a new Newsweek poll, 53 percent of respondents think the NSA’s surveillance program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy.”
A report last week that the NSA has been collecting trillions of bits of data by getting phone-call records from private phone companies created a firestorm on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), a Judiciary Committee Member, accused the administration of a “pattern of excess.”
First Lady Laura Bush defended the NSA’s activities in talk-show appearances yesterday.
She said the intelligence activities were lawful, and if there were a terrorist attack, “the question would be the opposite – why haven’t you been trying to track al Qaeda or links to al Qaeda in the United States?”
She said leaking of information about intelligence activities “hamstrings us in the war on terror.”