Civil liberties groups fired double-barrelled lawsuits at President George W. Bush, challenging the legality of his domestic eavesdropping programme and demanding its immediate suspension.

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday that he will testify in a Senate hearing on the National Security Agency's recently revealed domestic eavesdropping program.

Pakistani intelligence officials have said the target of the attack was al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, who they said was invited to a dinner celebrating an Islamic holiday in the village but sent aides instead.

U.S. counterterrorism officials, however, have not ruled out that Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant was killed.

In the first official confirmation by Pakistani authorities that militants were killed, the administration of Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal regions bordering Afghanistan said in a statement that the four or five bodies of "foreign terrorists" were taken away "by their companions."

The NSA's system of monitoring e-mails and phone calls to check for search terms has been used for decades overseas, where the Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable searches does not apply, declassified records have shown.

But since Bush's order in 2001, Bamford and other specialists said, the same process has probably been used to sort through international messages to and from the United States, though humans have never seen the vast majority of the data.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, on the eve of a trip to Washington, said that despite the importance of ties with the United States, attacks inside Pakistan "cannot be condoned."

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | December 23, 2005

''They have a capacity to listen to every overseas phone call," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has obtained documents about the NSA using Freedom of Information Act requests.