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WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday he will turn over secret documents detailing the government's domestic spying program, ending a two-week standoff with the Senate Judiciary Committee over surveillance targeting terror suspects. "It's never been the case where we said we would never provide the access," Gonzales told reporters. "We'd obviously be concerned about (how) the public disclosure may jeopardize the national security of our country," he said. "But we're working with the Congress to provide the information that it needs." The documents held by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — including investigators' applications for permission to spy...

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department has begun an internal investigation into its handling of information gathered in the government's domestic spying program. However, Democrats criticized the review as too narrow to determine whether the program violated federal law. The inquiry by Glenn A. Fine, the department's inspector general, will focus on the role of Justice prosecutors and agents in carrying out the warrantless surveillance program run by the National Security Agency. Fine's investigation is not expected to address whether the controversial program is an unconstitutional expansion of presidential power, as its critics and a federal judge in Detroit have charged....

A federal panel of judges has consolidated 17 lawsuits throughout the United States filed against telecoms accused of assisting the Bush administration monitor Americans' communications without warrants. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation transferred the cases to U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who last month declined to dismiss a spying case against the federal government and AT&T Inc., according to an order released Thursday. The consolidated lawsuits also target Verizon Communications Inc., Bellsouth Corp. and their affiliates. The panel ruled 26 other lawsuits with similar allegations also may be moved to Walker, who took the bench in 1990 after being...

WASHINGTON - The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, breaking ranks with the president on domestic eavesdropping, says he wants a special court to oversee the program. But less than a day later, a top aide to Sen. Pat Roberts (news, bio, voting record), R-Kan., sought to clarify his position. Roberts told The New York Times that he is concerned that the secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act could not issue warrants as quickly as the monitoring program requires. But he is optimistic that the problem could be worked out. "You don't want to have a situation...

WASHINGTON - A Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday that President Bush has more explaining to do on his domestic spy program and cast doubt on the administration's assertion of broad executive power. Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record), R-Neb., said he is looking forward to congressional hearings on the legal justification for the secretive National Security Agency program. He remains unconvinced that Bush could allow the program without fully consulting with the courts or Congress. The Senate Judiciary Committee holds hearings beginning Feb. 6; the Senate Intelligence Committee will hold similar closed-door sessions on the...

Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 - A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say. The officials say the National Security Agency's interception of a small number of communications between people within the United States was apparently accidental, and was caused by technical glitches at the National Security Agency in determining whether a communication was in fact...