Secret surveillance.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The Bush administration's fierce defense of government eavesdropping inside the United States without court approval underscores the urgent need for the swift, thorough oversight hearings promised by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

On Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney insisted, without a whiff of evidence, that this unwarranted snooping has helped prevent terrorist attacks in the last four years - and that a similar program might even have prevented the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In the absence of evidence, these assertions are no more credible than Cheney's claims that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction and played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks - claims he continued to make long after they were proven invalid.

Moreover, they fit the Bush administration's pattern of defending encroachments on civil liberties as being essential to national security, while arguing that the president has the authority to override constitutional checks and balances in its prosecution of the "war on terror."

A day earlier, Bush defended the use of the National Security Agency for domestic eavesdropping as "a limited initiative." Yet recent reports indicate that the scope of the government's monitoring of phone calls and e-mails was much broader than initially reported.

Meanwhile, newly released documents reveal that the NSA acted without presidential authorization to expand domestic surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet Bush continues to defend the program as a constitutional use of executive au- thority.

Now, Congress must assert its underused oversight authority and thoroughly examine the administration's actions and the domestic surveillance program. It must demand to know why the NSA acted on its own authority to expand surveillance and why the administration has said it was done by executive order.

Lawmakers should also demand an explanation of why such a program is necessary, when Congress already has established a secret court to approve wiretaps of suspected terrorists - a court that has a record of promptly complying with government requests. If the administration believes that the law establishing the court was too restrictive, it should explain why it didn't ask Congress to revise the law instead of arbitrarily deciding to ignore it.

Finally, lawmakers should demand to know why the Bush administration continues to act as if the checks and balances prescribed by the Constitution became dispensable after Sept. 11 and are no longer, as this nation's founders so adamantly believed, essential to preserving both our freedom and our security.