WASHINGTON — The nation's top intelligence officials resisted pressure to provide more details about a controversial domestic eavesdropping program during congressional testimony Thursday, but said without elaborating that the operation had enabled authorities to disrupt potential terrorist plots.
National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte and other senior officials declined to respond to questions about the surveillance program, refusing to say in a public session how many Americans had been targeted or how many e-mails and phone calls had been intercepted.
The issue dominated a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that was otherwise devoted to a survey of international threats to U.S. interests. Negroponte described Al Qaeda as the U.S. intelligence community's "top concern" and said that the nuclear weapons programs of Iran and North Korea represented threats.
But he spent much of the four-hour session defending the eavesdropping program, in which the National Security Agency has intercepted communications of U.S. residents without obtaining court warrants ordinarily required by law. Bush administration officials have said the program is limited to eavesdropping on people in the U.S. who are in contact with individuals abroad suspected of having links to Al Qaeda.
"This was not about domestic surveillance," Negroponte said. "It was about dealing with the international terrorist threat in the most agile and effective way possible."
Thursday's hearing marked the first time that senior intelligence officials had testified before Congress about the NSA program.
The session exposed deep fault lines between lawmakers over the issue, with Republicans and Democrats engaging in unusually harsh exchanges over whether the Bush administration had the authority to order the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans, and whether it had provided adequate notice to Congress.
At the close of the hearing, committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) angered Democrats by suggesting they were more focused on threats to civil liberties by intelligence agencies than threats from terrorist networks.
"I would only point out that you really don't have any civil liberties if you're dead," Roberts said.
The leading Democrat on the panel, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, responded testily that he was "strongly for the goals" of disrupting domestic terrorist plots.
