The Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) has issued 51 questions to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on President Bush's warrantless wiretap program.
The letter, issued to Gonzales today and acquired by RAW STORY, demands answers to myriad legal questions on the program, which involved eavesdropping on Americans' calls overseas. Sensenbrenner has given Gonzales a Mar. 2 deadline to respond.
Combined with a move by the chairman of a House subcommittee on intelligence, and hearings in the Senate, the move is likely to signal that Republicans are not going to swallow the President's justification for the surveillance, and may be a precursor to hearings in the House. Still, Sensenbrenner seems to leave room for accepting the taps, at one point referring to them as "terrorist surveillance," the Administration phrase for the program.
Strikingly, the letter to Gonzales quotes Harvard University professor Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional scholar who testified at unofficial hearings held by ranking Judiciary Democrat John Conyers (D-MI). In a letter to Conyers, Tribe wrote that the taps "far from being authorized by Congress,
in the face of an explicit congressional prohibition and therefore unconstitutional."
MORE: http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Senior_House_Republican_wants_answers_on_0208.html
PDF of Sensenbrenner letter: http://judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/DOJNSA.pdf
(EDIT: added cautionary sentence, "Still, Sensenbrenner seems to leave room for accepting the taps, at one point referring to them as "terrorist surveillance," the Administration phrase for the program." which was revised in article)
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