Wiretap Probe? Senate "No", House "Yes"

SENATE REJECTS WIRETAPPING PROBE
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Charles Babington and Carol D. Leonnig]
The Bush administration helped derail a Senate bid to investigate a warrantless eavesdropping program Thursday after signaling it would reject Congress's request to have former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and other officials testify about the program's legality. The actions underscored a dramatic and possibly permanent drop in momentum for a congressional inquiry, which had seemed likely two months ago. Senate Democrats said the Republican-led Congress was abdicating its obligations to oversee a controversial program in which the National Security Agency has monitored perhaps thousands of phone calls and e-mails involving U.S. residents and foreign parties without obtaining warrants from a secret court that handles such matters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021602155.html
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ACCORD IN HOUSE TO HOLD INQUIRY INTO SURVEILLANCE
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Eric Lichtblau & Sheryl Gay Stolberg]
Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said Thursday that they had agreed to open a Congressional inquiry prompted by the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. But a dispute immediately broke out among committee Republicans over the scope of the inquiry. Representative Heather A. Wilson, the New Mexico Republican and committee member who called last week for the investigation, said the review "will have multiple avenues, because we want to completely understand the program and move forward." But an aide to Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who leads the committee, said the inquiry would be much more limited in scope, focusing on whether federal surveillance laws needed to be changed and not on the eavesdropping program itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/politics/17nsa.html
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