"It can be interpreted as giving them a hand, getting rid of evil spirits".
But pieced together the laws have been interpreted as giving them wide-ranging authority to undertake mass surveillance of emails, texts, phone conversations and internet searches.
The raging debate comes with Chapter 4, Verse 34 in the Koran, long interpreted as giving husbands the right to strike their wives as the final step in an escalating series of punishments for being rebellious.
Prominent black supporters of Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, have been criticizing Mrs. Clinton over her remarks last week that some have interpreted as giving President Lyndon B. Johnson more credit than Dr. King for civil rights law.
Unless Congress has explicitly banned White House interference, she said, laws granting authority to an official — like giving the Environmental Protection Agency administrator the responsibility to set allowable pollution levels — should be interpreted as giving the president an unwritten power to override those decisions.
Mr. Clinton's fairy tale line and a comment by Mrs. Clinton that some interpreted as giving President Lyndon B. Johnson more credit than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights laws have disturbed African-Americans, who saw them as unfair and diminishing the role of civil rights activists.
On the international scene, the Obama administration's "no" to trying to rally its friends to oil-related sanctions just might be interpreted as giving tacit support to the very questionable idea that if the West waits long enough, a new regime will nullify the mullahs' nuclear threat.
The Bush administration, in the space policy it released in August 2006, said it "rejects any limitations on the fundamental right of the United States to operate in and acquire data from space," a phrase that was interpreted as giving a green light to the development and use of antisatellite weapons.
