Former US secretary of state Colin Powell said on Sunday that it would not have been "that hard" for President George W. Bush to have obtained warrants for eavesdropping on domestic telephone and Internet activity, but that he saw "nothing wrong" with the decision not to do so.
"My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants," Powell said. "And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it. The law provides for that."
But Powell added that "for reasons that the president has discussed and the attorney general has spoken to, they chose not to do it that way."
"I see absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions," he said.
Asked if such eavesdropping should continue, Powell said, "Yes, of course it should continue."
Powell said he had not been told about the eavesdropping activity when he served as secretary of state.
He spoke on the ABC News program This Week about the disclosure, first reported in the New York Times, that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to intercept communications by Americans without approval from a special foreign intelligence court.
Parting company
Though Powell stopped short of criticizing Bush, his suggestion that there was "another way to handle it" was another example of his parting company on a critical issue with the president he served for four years.
This fall, Powell broke with the administration on the issue of torture, endorsing a move by Republican Senator John McCain to pass a measure in Congress banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees by all US authorities, including intelligence personnel.
The White House at first opposed the measure but later accepted it.
Since leaving office at the end of Bush's first term, Powell has been involved in several business and public service ventures, including the establishment of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at City College of New York, his alma mater.
Iraq differences
On Iraq, Powell repeated earlier statements that differed somewhat from those of Bush, saying he did not know whether he would have advocated going to war with Iraq if he had known that the country had no stockpiles of illicit weapons.
Referring to the case for going to war if there were no such weapons, Powell said he would have told the president, "You have a far more difficult case, and I'm not sure you can make the case in the absence of those stockpiles."
Powell said he expected US troop levels to continue to go down in the coming year out of necessity, because it will become difficult to sustain the current high levels and because the effort to train Iraqis should be successful.
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