Ironically, had the story broken in the months after the mega-terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killed 2,800 people, the president might have been able to shrug it off easily.

The New York Times reported Friday that in 2002 the president personally authorized the National Security Agency to monitor the international phone calls and international e-mails of at least hundreds and probably thousands of people in the United States without warrants in an effort to track-called "dirty numbers" linked to al-Qaida.

In another controversial development, the New York Times said it had the story a year ago but had held off from publishing it then after appeals from administration officials who said its disclosure would harm national security. The White House initially had no comment on the story.

The controversy could hardly have occurred for the president and his administration at a more sensitive time. Over the past two weeks, Bush has made a series of forceful, meticulously prepared speeches trying to avert, acknowledge and defuse some of the many criticism he has received for his conduct of the Iraq war. In them, he tried to make the case to the American public to hang tough in Iraq and stay the course there until a stable, democratic -- and pro-American -- government is securely established in Baghdad. The president also timed his speeches to take place in the build-up period to Iraq's parliamentary elections Thursday.

However, even before the electronic surveillance story appeared, the president's credibility, far from being decisively restored as his political strategists hoped, was still teetering in the balance.

For on Wednesday, the same day he gave the most recent of his Iraq policy speeches at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center, Bush received a stunning humiliation -- in some respects, the worst of his five years in the presidency so far -- from the House of Representatives.

The House overwhelmingly passed a non-binding resolution supporting Sen. John McCain's Senate measure to outlaw torture by 308 votes to 122. No less than 107 members of the GOP majority in the House -- a majority that has been exceptionally disciplined in general and especially uncritical of anything the White House wanted on any national security issues -- voted for it.

Combined with the 90-to-nine approval the anti-torture measure had already received in the Senate, this gave it potential veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress. And so, on Thursday, Bush finally bowed to the inevitable and endorsed it.

But now, the very day after the president was forced to make a humiliating U-turn on a major national security issue, the New York Times revelation supported by a similar story in Friday's Washington Post, emerged. And both stories immediately played big around the country and -- even worse from the administration's point of view -- they over-shadowed the set-piece story about the Iraqi general election that the White House had counted on to rally the public behind it again.

Over the past two and half years, as the Sunni Muslim insurgency in Iraq has slowly but relentlessly expanded in scale and intensity, the administration has repeatedly been able to play for time and, at least in the short term, redeem its credibility with the American pubic by making high-profile, hyped and publicized media happenings of every set-piece election and constitutional development in Iraq, even though none of them so far have done anything at all to reduce insurgent support or levels of activity. But this new storm over the secret spying procedures looks certain this time to trump that so-often-played card.

Even worse, coming right after the president was finally forced to publicly acknowledge in his Iraq speeches that much of the intelligence on the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction there was false, he is now for the first time being put in the same kind of hot seat that eventually grilled President Richard Nixon's political career to a crisp: authorizing secret spying and surveillance operations without legal or constitutional approval.

The two cases in many ways are very different: Bush ordered the NSA surveillance in 2002 not for narrow, partisan political gain or to carry out dirty tricks against his political opponents as Nixon did 30 years earlier but in the interests of national security after the most bloody and devastating terrorist attack on the American homeland in national history.

Nevertheless, if there is one issue on national security where libertarian conservatives tend to join hands with liberal Democrats, it is personal rights, especially privacy. It was also striking that the story broke the same day the Senate voted to end further debate on how much to renew or amend the hotly-contested Patriot Act.

As a result, Bush now risks facing widespread criticism that he irresponsibly grabbed and potentially abused powers that were his for the taking had he only asked for them openly. And his defense that he did so in the national interest at a time of severe national crisis would have played well before he authorized the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and even in the year that followed.

But instead, it has come out when even half of the president's own congressional party has openly defied and repudiated him on the torture issue, after he was forced to acknowledge the falsity of much of his pre-war intelligence on Iraq, and right after he had for the first time acknowledged a death toll of at least 30,000 Iraqis killed also far as a result of the war.

The president has repeatedly shown his perseverance and resilience in the face of political adversity before, especially during the June-July months of last year's presidential election, when he fell to neck and neck with Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts before his campaign hammered Kerry to a pulp on the Vietnam swift boats issue.

Bush still has three years of his second presidential term ahead of him and a sweeping purge and restructuring of the exhausted or intellectually burned out top national security and White House echelons of his administration is widely expected early in the New Year.

But he had no cause to expect this latest political storm over secret and unauthorized domestic surveillance and it has the potential to hurt him very badly in the very key areas where he most desperately needs to reaffirm his credibility with the American people -- that they can trust him not to abuse or bungle the vast power they have entrusted to him for their own protection.

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