US:The White House has scored a victory over critics in Congress with the approval of domestic spying legislation by a key Senate committee, but faces fresh trouble over the nomination of Michael Mukasey as attorney general.
The Senate intelligence committee approved legislation on Thursday allowing the surveillance without a warrant of international phone calls that may involve US citizens, while granting a special court authority to review several aspects of such spying.
The Bill, which would give retroactive legal immunity to private telecommunications companies alleged to have participated in the National Security Agency's surveillance programme, had the backing of the White House.
Earlier this week, Republicans forced Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives to withdraw a version of the Bill that the Bush administration said placed too many restrictions on the spying programme.
The Bill must still win approval from the judiciary committee before going to the Senate floor, where Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd has threatened to block it. "I said that I would do everything I could to stop this Bill from passing, and I have," Mr Dodd said.
Many Democrats believe US president George Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when he secretly approved the domestic spying programme after the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks.
During his confirmation hearing before the Senate judiciary committee on Thursday, Mr Mukasey defended Mr Bush's action, arguing that federal laws could not trump the president's constitutional authority to protect the US from an attack.
"The president is not putting somebody above the law; the president is putting somebody within the law. The president doesn't stand above the law. But the law emphatically includes the constitution," he said.
Mr Mukasey impressed Democrats at the start of his hearing on Wednesday when he said the president could not authorise the torture of suspected terrorists abroad and repudiated a 2002 justice department memo that appeared to give the green light to the harshest interrogation methods.
On Thursday, however, Mr Mukasey refused to say if he regarded waterboarding - a form of simulated drowning - as torture, prompting some senators to accuse him of hedging and of bowing to White House pressure to tone down his earlier remarks.
"I don't want to go down the road on interrogation techniques - that's obvious. Did the things that were presented to me seem over the line to me as I sit here? Of course they did. They were intended to, and they did and they do," Mr Mukasey said.
The White House yesterday defended Mr Mukasey's response, saying it was difficult to discuss individual interrogation techniques in public.
"These are complicated questions. Judge Mukasey, I think, did the best he could to be responsible in not talking about interrogation techniques which, as you all know, we decline to do," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.
Mr Fratto said Mr Mukasey, a retired federal judge, had not been briefed on any of the government's secret programmes that had been created since 9/11.
"There are certain issues that are very difficult to speak about in a public setting - particularly difficult for an attorney general nominee who has not been read into classified programmes and wouldn't be until he has been sworn in as an attorney general," he said.