The White House launched a vigorous defence of the general who is President Bush's choice as the new director of CIA today after a weekend of sniping from Republicans that raises fears of a difficult confirmation process.

The widely expected nomination of General Michael Hayden was confirmed this afternoon by Mr Bush, who described the Air Force general and satellite surveillance expert as a leader with a thorough knowledge of America's clandestine world.

"Mike knows our intelligence community from the ground up," said the President. "He has been both a provider and a consumer of intelligence."

"He has demonstrated an ability to adapt our intelligence services to the new challenges of the War on Terror," said Mr Bush, referring to General Hayden's modernisation of the National Security Agency (NSA), where he served as chief general, before becoming deputy to John Negroponte, the US Director of National Intelligence.

Despite General Hayden's eminent qualifications -- he is the highest ranked US general working in the 16 intelligence-related agencies that report to Mr Negroponte -- his confirmation is expected to be a tortuous process.

Even before his nomination was formally announced, Stephen Hadley, the President's national security adviser, assured American breakfast television that General Hayden was the right man for the job.

Over the weekend, his candidacy attracted criticism from across the political spectrum because he ran the Bush Administration's warrantless eavesdropping of American citizens in the search for terrorists.

Senior Republicans have also said that a military figure should not be appointed to lead the civilian CIA, which has lost its status as America's leading spy agency since the September 11 attacks and already feels under threat from military spying programmes run by the Pentagon.

Mr Hadley sought to counter both arguments this morning, telling NBC: "The President believes he is the right person at the right time in the right job, when the Senate confirms him, and we certainly hope it will and will do so promptly."

Speaking on CBS, Mr Hadley observed that General Hayden would be the fifth military figure to lead the CIA and that he was the best placed person to answer questions about the controversial eavesdropping programme that Democrats and civil liberties groups believe violated a 1979 law against warrantless surveillance.

"The question is not military versus civilian," Mr Hadley told CBS. "The question is the best person to do the job."

Asked whether the White House was expecting a further round of scrutiny for the eavesdropping programme, Mr Hadley replied: "Any nominee to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency would be asked to answer these questions, and who better to answer these questions than Michael Hayden, who has been overseeing this process and is very conversant with it."

Mr Hadley's comments appeared aimed at the Republicans and Democrats who spoke out against General Hayden's purported nomination yesterday.

With the mid-term elections approaching, American political commentators have suggested that Republicans will be keen to distance themselves from the White House if the confirmation process becomes testy.

Peter Hoekstra, a Republican congressman who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News that General Hayden was "the wrong person, the wrong place, at the wrong time... We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time".

Arlen Specter, the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, threatened to use the General's confirmation hearings to demand further information about the legality of the eavesdropping programme.

It was a call repeated by the Democratic Senator of Oregon, Ron Wyden, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee that will conduct the hearings, which are yet to be scheduled.

"These hearings on Hayden are going to be some of the most important that have been held in a long time, because the Congress has been kept in the dark on a handful of issues," said Mr Wyden told The New York Times.

"He cannot expect to come to the witness table before our committee and repeat the empty statements the administration has made."

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