Cheney defends Bush. Bush defends spying

Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday vigorously defended the Bush administration’s use of secret domestic spying and the expansion of presidential powers, saying “it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years.”

Talking to reporters aboard his government plane as he flew from Islamabad, Pakistan to Muscat, Oman on an overseas mission, Cheney said he believes the power of the presidency has indeed contracted since the Vietnam and Watergate era.

He said he believes the American people support President Bush’s terror-fighting strategy. “If there’s a backlash pending,” because of reports of National Security Agency surveillance of calls originating within the United States, he said, “I think the backlash is going to be against those who are suggesting somehow that we shouldn’t take these steps to defend the country.”

Cheney talked about terrorism and national security amid a burgeoning controversy at home over President Bush’s acknowledgment of a four-year-old administration program to eavesdrop — without court-approved warrants — on international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the United States with suspected ties to the terrorist network al-Qaida.

In the meantime some legal experts described the program as groundbreaking. And until the highly classified program was disclosed last week, those in Congress with concerns about the National Security Agency spying on Americans raised them only privately, the AP reports.

V.Y.