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WASHINGTON - The Bush Administration may soon face a courtroom showdown over its secret eavesdropping programme after subpoenas were issued to the White House, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and the Justice Department.
A storm is gathering over Cheney in particular, with increasingly vocal demands for his impeachment for "political crimes against the nation".
The United States Senate Judiciary Committee wants to know the legal basis, if any, for the placing of wiretaps on American citizens without court warrants, as part of the war on terror.
These taps were placed by the National Security Agency, which runs a vast international electronic eavesdropping and codebreaking web with Britain's GCHQ.
The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy gave the Bush Administration until July 18 to hand over documents which the White House described last week as highly classified and off limits.
Leahy wrote: "Over the past 18 months, this committee has made no fewer than nine formal requests to the Department of Justice and to the White House, seeking information and documents about the authorisation of and legal justification for this programme."
The eavesdropping programme began after the September 11 attacks.
It allowed monitoring of terror suspects' phone calls, emails and financial transactions in and out of the US.
It is not known how many intercepts were made, nor how widely the net was cast or whether it included opponents of the US invasion of Iraq.
Yesterday's move follows extraordinary testimony to the Senate last month in which a justice official described a confrontation with the former Attorney-General John Ashcroft when he refused to give legal cover to the secret surveillance activities.
The whistleblower, James Comey, described a furious row between top White House emissaries and Justice Department officials over the wiretaps.
- INDEPENDENT
