WASHINGTON – Warning that terrorists “are coming again,” President Bush said Friday that he’d shut down a secret CIA interrogation program if lawmakers refused to give interrogators wide latitude in dealing with detainees.

“It’s a dangerous world,” Bush said as he prodded Congress to follow his lead in dealing with suspected terrorists. “I wish I could tell the American people, “Don’t worry about it, they’re not coming again.’ But they are coming again.”

The president’s use of fear to pressure lawmakers came a day after a Republican-led Senate committee defied the White House and approved legislation that would prohibit abusive treatment of detainees. The bill, which the Senate Armed Services Committee endorsed 15-9, also would revise Bush’s rules of evidence for trials of suspected terrorists.

The House of Representatives appears headed toward approving the president’s approach, but the Senate is likely to oppose him. That may leave the issue unresolved before November’s congressional elections.

Bush cast the dispute as a choice between protecting the nation or leaving it vulnerable to another terrorist attack. His critics, including many retired military officers and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, say his approach violates American values, undermines the moral foundation of the war on terrorism and increases the risk that U.S. prisoners of war will be abused.

Both sides say they want to clarify the CIA’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions, a series of international agreements that govern the treatment of wartime prisoners. Bush’s critics say his approach essentially would jettison the agreement. “What is being billed as “clarifying’ our treaty obligations will be seen as withdrawing from the treaty obligations,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Armed Services Committee. “It will set precedent which could come back to haunt us.”

The president bristled when he was asked about Powell’s comment Thursday that “the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

“That’s flawed – flawed logic,” he said. “It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”

The Pentagon has banned abusive interrogations in military detention centers, but the CIA, until recently, had more latitude in its efforts to pry information from terrorist suspects. The techniques the agency used are classified, but they reportedly include simulated drowning, temperature extremes and sleep deprivation.

Bush suspended the CIA interrogation program and emptied the agency’s secret prisons after the Supreme Court ruled in June that the detainees are covered by the basic protections that the Geneva Conventions provide. The protections, spelled out in a provision known as Common Article 3, prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity” as well as “humiliating and degrading treatment.”

The president said he would shut down the CIA interrogation program permanently if Congress didn’t pass legislation that gave the agency latitude in dealing with suspects and protected its interrogators from possible prosecution for war crimes.

“This program has saved innocent lives,”‘ he said. “The intelligence community must be able to tell me that the bill Congress sends to my desk will allow this vital program to continue.”

When he was asked how he’d react if captive Americans were subjected to the same treatment as the CIA’s prisoners, Bush replied that “the world would be better” if other countries observed his treatment standards.

Turning to Iraq, the president acknowledged that deploying more Iraqi security forces hasn’t led to reducing the number of U.S. troops in the country, the stated goal of his Iraq strategy. In fact, the number of American troops in Iraq has increased in recent months, from 135,000 to 147,000.

“The enemy is changing tactics, and we’re adapting,” Bush said.

Looking ahead to his trip to the United Nations General Assembly next week, the president criticized the U.N. and said he wouldn’t meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad there. He chided the U.N. for failing to respond to violence in Sudan’s Darfur region.

On another topic, Bush said he was “just speculating” when he told a group of conservative journalists earlier this week that America might be in the midst of a “Third Awakening” of religious devotion.

Religious historians refer to a wave of Christian fervor in the American colonies in the mid-1700s as the First Great Awakening. The Second Great Awakening refers to a similar wave in the early 1800s.

The president said his musings about a third religious wave were inspired by his experience and a book on Abraham Lincoln that he read recently.

“It seems like to me that something is happening in the religious life of America,” he said. “I’m able to see a lot of people, and from my perspective, people are coming to say, “I’m praying for you.”‘