WASHINGTON, 11 June 2006 — President Bush was celebrating “a good week for the cause of freedom,” with the killing of terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and the completion of Baghdad’s government, as he huddled with advisers.
“We will determine how to best deploy America’s resources in Iraq and achieve our shared goal of an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself,” Bush said yesterday in his weekly radio address. “There’s still difficult work ahead in Iraq. Yet this week, the ideology of terror has suffered a severe blow.”
The president was spending the weekend at Camp David, Md., preparing for extended meetings there next week on Iraq after he conferred Friday at the presidential retreat with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a staunch ally.
On Monday, Bush is gathering his top national security advisers, including military commanders reporting from the field in Iraq, and members of his Cabinet. They will hold two long sessions, broken up by a lunch featuring outside experts with a range of views and capped off by dinner. On Tuesday, the president and his team are holding a joint Cabinet meeting of sorts, talking via video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and a dozen or so of his government ministers.
The White House discouraged speculation the Camp David meetings would produce a troop-cutback formula. “This is not a meeting about drawdowns,” White House counselor Dan Bartlett said. “It’s a meeting about how can we best help the Iraqis help secure their country.”
The meetings were scheduled before the events of this week — Al-Zarqawi’s death from a US airstrike on Wednesday and the Iraqi parliament’s approval Thursday of three key security ministers in Al-Maliki’s government.
But with the war dragging down his approval rating and clouding Republican election hopes for November, the developments were welcome at the White House.
Al-Zarqawi’s death was not expected to end the unrelenting violence in Iraq, or bring a speedy withdrawal of American troops. In fact, Bush predicted attacks may increase. “The terrorists and insurgents will seek to prove that they can carry on without Zarqawi,” he said. Democrats also celebrated the week’s events, but said Bush should use the opportunity to present the country a concrete plan for making it “a year of significant transition.”
A federal appeals court sided with the Bush administration Friday on an electronic surveillance issue, making it easier to tap into Internet phone calls and broadband transmissions.
The court ruled 2-1 in favor of the Federal Communications Commission, which says equipment using the new technologies must be able to accommodate police wiretaps under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, known as CALEA.
Judge David Sentelle called the agency’s reading of the law a reasonable interpretation. In dissent, Judge Harry Edwards said the FCC gutted an exemption for information services that he said covered the Internet and broadband. The FCC “apparently forgot to read the words of the statute,” Edwards wrote.
FCC chairman Kevin Martin said the decision ensures that law enforcement’s ability to conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance will keep pace with new technology.
Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, primary sponsor of CALEA, called the court’s decision contrary to congressional intent, saying it stretches a law written for “the telephone system of 1994 to cover the Internet of 2006.”
The American Council on Education said it was encouraged by part of the court’s ruling that the law does not apply to private networks, which include many research institutions and corporations.
Challengers to the FCC rule focused on a Supreme Court case upholding the FCC’s classification of broadband as an integrated information service under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Therefore, the education groups said, broadband providers must fall within the exemption for information services in CALEA.
But the appeals court said CALEA and the Telecom act are different laws and that the Supreme Court did not find that broadband Internet access was exclusively an information service.
The two laws reflect different objectives and the commission made a reasonable policy choice, wrote Sentelle, an appointee of President Reagan.
