ABOARD AIR FORCE II (AP) – Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday vigorously defended the Bush administration’s use of secret domestic spying and efforts to expand presidential powers, saying “it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years.”

Talking to reporters aboard his government plane as he flew from Islamabad, Pakistan to Muscat, Oman on an overseas mission, Cheney said a contraction in the power of the presidency since the Vietnam and Watergate era must be reversed.

“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it. And to some extent, that we have an obligation as the administration to pass on the offices we hold to our successors in as good of shape as we found them,” he said.

Cheney spoke from his plane’s private cabin as he was making a trip aimed at boosting the United States’ image abroad and its relationships with its war-on-terror partners. But after visiting Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was cutting his travels short, skipping planned stops in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to return to Washington to be on hand for session-ending Senate activity that could require his tie-breaking votes.

Cheney said he believes the American people support President Bush’s terror-fighting strategy. “If there’s a backlash pending,” because of reports of National Security Agency surveillance of calls originating within the United States, he said, “I think the backlash is going to be against those who are suggesting somehow that we shouldn’t take these steps to defend the country.”

Cheney talked about terrorism and national security amid a burgeoning controversy at home over Bush’s acknowledgment of a four-year-old administration program to eavesdrop _ without court-approved warrants _ on international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the United States with suspected ties to the terrorist network al-Qaida.

Some legal experts described the program as groundbreaking. And until the highly classified program was disclosed last week, those in Congress with concerns about the National Security Agency spying on Americans raised them only privately.

Since the program’s existence was revealed, lawmakers from both parties have objected and begun discussing a congressional investigation. Cheney said the opposition is politically unwise.

“Either we’re serious about fighting the war on terror or we’re not,” the vice president said. “The president and I believe very deeply that there is a hell of a threat.”

The vice president also told reporters that in his view, presidential authority has been eroded since the 1970s through laws such as the War Powers Act and anti-impoundment laws.

“Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both during the ’70s served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area,” Cheney said. But he also said the administration has been able to restore some of “the legitimate authority of the presidency.”

Cheney said the White House helped protect presidential power by fighting to keep secret the list of people who were a part of his 2001 energy task force. The task force’s activities attracted complaints from environmentalists, who said they were shut out of discussions on developing a national energy policy while corporate interests were present. A protracted lawsuit ensued.

“I believe that the president is entitled and needs to have unfiltered advice in formulating policy,” Cheney said. “He ought to be able to seek the opinion of anybody he wants to and that he should not have to reveal, for example, who he talked to that morning. That issue was litigated all the way up to the Supreme Court and we won.”

Cheney said that “many people believe” the War Powers Act, enhancing the power of Congress to share in executive branch decision-making on war, is unconstitutional and said “it will be tested at some point. I am one of those who believe that was an infringement on the authority of the president.”

Cheney noted he had served in the House for 10 years and said he has “enormous regard” for the legislative branch.

“But I do believe that especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats of we face _ and this is true during the Cold War as well as I think is true now _ the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy,” the vice president said.

Cheney conceded that arguments over eavesdropping won’t likely pass any time soon, saying, “It’s an important subject.”

“I would argue that the actions that we’ve taken there are totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president,” he added.

“You know, it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years,” Cheney said. “I think there’s a temptation for people to sit around and say, ‘Well, gee that was just a one-of affair, they didn’t really mean it.’ “

“The bottom line is we’ve been very active and very aggressively defending the nation and using the tools at our disposal to do that,” he said.