by David Nitkin and Siobhan Gorman

With lawmakers preparing for another rewrite of a contentious wire-tapping law, the White House is launching an offensive to keep its favored provisions in a measure that it pushed through Congress earlier this year.

The latest effort includes a visit by President Bush to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland tomorrow.

Congress approved the Protect America Act last month, under intense pressure from the Bush administration, which insisted that lawmakers needed to update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before going on their summer recess.

Congress felt the heat, and gave the president pretty much what he said he needed to combat the threat of terrorism, although with an escape clause. The new measure would expire in six months, giving Democratic leaders a chance to evaluate claims of critics who said that civil liberties were being eroded.

"I am concerned that as drafted the administration's bill just went too far," said Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat and head of the House Select Committee on Intelligence today, opening the committee's first FISA hearing since returning from its break. "It allows warrantless physical searches of Americans' homes, offices and computers. It converts the FISA Court into a rubberstamp. And it contains insufficient protections for Americans who will have their phone calls listed to and e-mails read under this broad new authority."

Reyes accused the Bush administration of "moving the goalpost even after striking an agreement with congressional leaders" earlier this year, and promised that a new measure would be crafted next month.

He also called on the administration to turn over documents he said it was withholding regarding its surveillance program.

"Today I would like to say publicly to President Bush's nominee for attorney general, Judge Mukasey: One of your first tasks as attorney general will be to repair DOJ's relationship with Congress," Reyes said. "You can start by turning over the documents that all members of this have long sought relating to the NSA surveillance program."

Pushing back, the White House issued a seven-point fact sheet that it said debunked "key myths" about the Protect America Act.

The White House insists that the latest law protects civil liberties and does not authorize a practice known as "reverse targeting," or allowing spies to eavesdrop on Americans under the guise of keeping tabs on a person overseas. The law does not allow physical searches of U.S. citizens, the administration said.

Tomorrow, Bush plans to visit the nation's premier spy agency, the NSA, for the first time since January 2006. Judging from the preparations of Secret Service agents, the president could tour the agency's National Security Operations Center, the around-the-clock nerve center of the nation's intelligence gathering operations. As CNN wrote on its Web site, the center is "often the first place that word of a crisis reaches the United States," such as the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

After a tour of the facility, Bush is scheduled to deliver a speech in support of the Protect America Act.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the White House wanted to see the law renewed. "As we all know, our enemies do not operate on a six month deadline," she said.