Chris Dodd is standing up for you

[mountain bed]

The man got up for 2-plus hours tonight and barely stopped to draw breath. The subject - his opposition to retroactive immunity for the telecommunications industry in the latest revamped Foriegn Intelligence Surveillance bill. It was not a paranoid screed but rather a cogent, well intentioned warning imo.

 

We (AT&T and I) welcome your opinions.

[cryptique]

Dodd is a great man. Sadly, his fellow Democrats will probably cave on this and give Bush and the GOP what they want.

 

Here's Glenn Greenwald from this morning on Salon.com:

 

_{TUESDAY FEBRUARY 12, 2008 07:01 EST}

 

Amnesty Day for Bush and lawbreaking telecoms

 

The Senate today -- led by Jay Rockefeller, enabled by Harry Reid, and with the active support of at least 12 (and probably more) Democrats, in conjunction with an as-always lockstep GOP caucus -- will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans, and will also provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, thus forever putting an end to any efforts to investigate and obtain a judicial ruling regarding the Bush administration's years-long illegal spying programs aimed at Americans. The long, hard efforts by AT&T, Verizon and their all-star, bipartisan cast of lobbyists to grease the wheels of the Senate -- led by former Bush 41 Attorney General William Barr and former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick -- are about to pay huge dividends, as such noble efforts invariably do with our political establishment.

 

It's worth taking a step back and recalling that all of this is the result of the December, 2005 story by the New York Times which first reported that the Bush administration was illegally spying on Americans for many years without warrants of any kind. All sorts of "controversy" erupted from that story. Democrats everywhere expressed dramatic, unbridled outrage, vowing that this would not stand. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for exposing this serious lawbreaking. All sorts of Committees were formed, papers written, speeches given, conferences convened, and editorials published to denounce this extreme abuse of presidential power. This was illegality and corruption at the highest level of government, on the grandest scale, and of the most transparent strain.

 

What was the outcome of all of that sturm und drang? What were the consequences for the President for having broken the law so deliberately and transparently? Absolutely nothing. To the contrary, the Senate is about to enact a bill which has two simple purposes: (1) to render retroactively legal the President's illegal spying program by legalizing its crux: warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and (2) to stifle forever the sole remaining avenue for finding out what the Government did and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its legality: namely, the lawsuits brought against the co-conspiring telecoms. In other words, the only steps taken by our political class upon exposure by the NYT of this profound lawbreaking is to endorse it all and then suppress any and all efforts to investigate it and subject it to the rule of law.

 

To be sure, achieving this took some time. When Bill Frist was running the Senate and Pat Roberts was in charge of the Intelligence Committee, Bush and Cheney couldn't get this done (the same FISA and amnesty bill that the Senate will pass today stalled in the 2006 Senate). They had to wait until the Senate belonged (nominally) to Harry Reid and, more importantly, Jay Rockefeller was installed as Committee Chairman, and then -- and only then -- were they able to push the Senate to bequeath to them and their lawbreaking allies full-scale protection from investigation and immunity from the consequences of their lawbreaking.

 

That's really the most extraordinary aspect of all of this, if one really thinks about it -- it isn't merely that the Democratic Senate failed to investigate or bring about accountability for the clearest and more brazen acts of lawbreaking in the Bush administration, although that is true. Far beyond that, once in power, they are eagerly and aggressively taking affirmative steps -- extraordinary steps -- to protect Bush officials. While still knowing virtually nothing about what they did, they are acting to legalize Bush's illegal spying programs and put an end to all pending investigations and efforts to uncover what happened.

 

How far we've come -- really: disgracefully tumbled -- from the days of the Church Committee, which aggressively uncovered surveillance abuses and then drafted legislation to outlaw them and prevent them from ever occurring again. It is, of course, precisely those post-Watergate laws which the Bush administration and their telecom conspirators purposely violated, and for which they are about to receive permanent, lawless protection.

 

What Harry Reid's Senate is about to do today would be tantamount to the Church Committee -- after discovering the decades of abuses of eavesdropping powers by various administrations -- proceeding in response to write legislation to legalize unchecked surveillance, bar any subjects of the illegal eavesdropping from obtaining remedies in court, and then pass a bill with no purpose other than to provide retroactive immunity for the surveillance lawbreakers. That would be an absurd and incomparably corrupt nonsequitur, but that is precisely what Harry Reid's Senate -- in response to the NYT's 2005 revelations of clear surveillance lawbreaking by the administration -- is going to do today.

 

Analogously, in 1973, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for its work in uncovering the Watergate abuses, and that led to what would have been the imminent bipartisan impeachment of the President until he was forced to resign in disgrace. By stark and depressing contrast, in 2006, Jim Risen, Eric Lichtblau and the NYT won Pulitzer Prizes for their work in uncovering illegal spying on Americans at the highest levels of the Government, and that led to bipartisan legislation to legalize the illegal spying programs and provide full-scale retroactive amnesty for the lawbreakers. That's the difference between a country operating under the rule of law and one that is governed by lawlessness and lawbreaking license for the politically powerful and well-connected.

 

Chris Dodd went to the Senate floor last night and gave another eloquent and impassioned speech, warning of the consequences for our country from telecom amnesty. He specifically focused on the permanently and comprehensively suppressive effect it will have on efforts to investigate what the Bush administration did in illegally spying on Americans.

 

At around 2:25, Sen. Dodd quoted from this blog (from this post specifically regarding last week's testimony of Michael Mukasey) concerning the consequences for our country from ensuring, as the Senate is about to do, that such blatant and deliberate governmental lawbreaking is protected and goes forever unpunished (h/t selise):

 

 

From Frank Church and the bipartisan oversight protections of the post-Watergate abuses in the mid-1970s to Jay Rockefeller, Dick Cheney, legalized warrantless eavesdropping and retroactive telecom amnesty in 2008 -- that vivid collapse into the sewer illustrates as potently as anything could what has happened to this country over the last eight years.

 

-- Glenn Greenwald

[MrRain422]

This was the reason that I was going to vote for Dodd before he dropped out. It's nice that someone in the government stands for something.

[IRememberDBoon]

I dont mind the retroavtive immunity so much if there are guarantees it wont happen again.

 

will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans

 

this doesnt seem right to me

[MrRain422]

But immunity would more than likely guarantee that it will happen again. Why shouldn't it, if there's a precedent for getting away with it?

[IRememberDBoon]

But immunity would more than likely guarantee that it will happen again. Why shouldn't it, if there's a precedent for getting away with it?

 

I dont think the phone companies should be sued for handing over something the govt was asking them to.

 

I am so against warantless wiretapping you have no idea. I think its the worst thing ever along with gitmo and abu gharib.

 

With warantless wiretapping the white house could say "we think terrorists have infiltrated DNC headquarters were going to tap the line" and noone would ever know.

[cryptique]

I dont think the phone companies should be sued for handing over something the govt was asking them to.

I'll let Glenn Greenwald explain why you're wrong:

 

Section 222 of the Communications Act of 1934 provides that "[e]very telecommunications carrier has a duty to protect the confidentiality of proprietary information of . . . customers." 18 U.S.C. 2511 makes warrantless eavesdropping a felony; 18 U.S.C. 2702 requires that any "entity providing an electronic communication service to the public shall not knowingly divulge to any person or entity the contents of a communication" without a court order; 47 U.S.C. 605 states that "no person receiving, assisting in receiving, transmitting, or assisting in transmitting, any interstate or foreign communication by wire or radio shall divulge or publish the existence, contents, substance, purport, effect, or meaning thereof, except through authorized channels of transmission or reception"; and 18 U.S.C. 2520 provides for civil damages for any violations.

 

Like all statutes, those are all laws democratically enacted by the American people through their Congress and signed into law by the President. They were enacted precisely in order to make it illegal for telecoms to allow government spying on our calls and written communications without court orders -- precisely because Americans discovered that telecoms had previously allowed unfettered government spying on our communications and wanted to make it illegal for them to do so ever again. Those are exactly the laws the telecoms broke, in exactly the way that the American people wanted to prohibit.

[MrRain422]

Except that the government didn't just ask them to, they also promised them huge government contracts if they did it. And you know what? Some companies turned them down! Because they knew it was illegal! Just because the government asks you to do something, that doesn't mean it isn't illegal. Why should we let them off the hook just because the criminals that they aided happened to be in the government? And how are we going to discourage this from happening again if we don't punish large crimes?

 

Edit: Yeah, what he said.

[John Smith]

I can't remember where I read it, it may have been here. But the main character in the story was either Lincoln or Mark Twain. And he is discussing a dog. He asks if we call a dogs tail a leg how many legs does a dog have. His audience of course answers five. Wrong he say's, calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg, it is still a tail.

 

This makes me think of so many things the current administration has done and proclaimed legal, be it torture, ending Habeus Corpus, or circumventing the FISA laws. Saying it is legal or saying it is this or that does not make it so. But, when you have the power of the pulpit and the force of the media repeating the message you get popular support, which still does not make it right.

[Gobias Industries]

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four; calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

-Abraham Lincoln

[mountain bed]

Let's not forget that the telephone companies' "patriotism" evidently comes with a price: when the Govt quit paying their bills to the companies, they immediately cut them off from the information the Govt wanted.

 

To suggest (as some have) that immunity is needed because the lawsuits could financially cripple the companies is a very sick thought. If they're innocent, the courts will bear this out. If not...well if a companies' bottom line trumps our Constitutional rights then this country really has went into the sewer.

 

This is a VERY dangerous precedent being set here imo.

[MrRain422]

The whole idea is truly insane in a nation with a constitutional government. There's no way a discussion like this would even be possible before the Bush years. Doesn't matter what pre-Bush era you're talking about, the idea of major corporations getting retroactive immunity for violating major federal laws would have been laughed off the congressional floor.

[MrRain422]

Greenwald also pointed out yesterday that AT&T was involved in the writing of the FISA law in question (which requires the government to present the telecom with certification from the Attorney General that the spying they are asking for is legal) so its not like they can pretend like they were unaware.

[IRememberDBoon]

The whole idea is truly insane in a nation with a constitutional government. There's no way a discussion like this would even be possible before the Bush years. Doesn't matter what pre-Bush era you're talking about, the idea of major corporations getting retroactive immunity for violating major federal laws would have been laughed off the congressional floor.

 

well yeah but they were asked by the federal govt to do this. its not like retroactive immunity for something they were trying to hide from the govt. at least the administration, justice and so forth.

[cryptique]

well yeah but they were asked by the federal govt to do this. its not like retroactive immunity for something they were trying to hide from the govt. at least the administration, justice and so forth.

You obviously missed the part where that's still TOTALLY FUCKING ILLEGAL.

[John Smith]

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four; calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."

-Abraham Lincoln

 

 

Thanks I thought it was Lincoln.

[IRememberDBoon]

You obviously missed the part where that's still TOTALLY FUCKING ILLEGAL.

 

 

Not according to The Attorney General and DOJ

[cryptique]

Not according to The Attorney General and DOJ

Fuck the Attorney General. DOJ or not, they broke the law.

[IRememberDBoon]

Fuck the Attorney General. DOJ or not, they broke the law.

 

 

I agree but who are the phone companies supposed to ask?

[MattZ]

I agree but who are the phone companies supposed to ask?

 

Their own lawyers.

[cryptique]

I agree but who are the phone companies supposed to ask?

No one. They're supposed to refuse to be a party to criminal acts.

 

Some telecoms did refuse -- they knew, and respected, the law. The others ignored the law, or were ignorant of it (ignorance of the law is no excuse).

 

The idea of amnesty is preposterous. If amnesty is granted, not only will similar lawbreaking occur in the future, but no one -- not the telecoms, not the Bush administration -- will be held accountable for serious lawbreaking that's already occurred. This whole push for amnesty is just one more exercise in covering Bush's ass.

[MrRain422]

I agree but who are the phone companies supposed to ask?

 

The law requires a certain process by which warrants are issued, and the Department of Justice officially certifies for the telecoms that the act is legal. This process was not followed -- they went ahead and did it without the warrants and without the official certification. So it was completely illegal, end of story.

[John Smith]

The law requires a certain process by which warrants are issued, and the Department of Justice officially certifies for the telecoms that the act is legal. This process was not followed -- they went ahead and did it without the warrants and without the official certification. So it was completely illegal, end of story.

 

Exactly the law was not changed, all the telecoms knew what the law was. I'll bet all they got was the word of the adminsitration that it was OK. The reality is that when they were first approached it was probably sold to them with the notion that it would never be made public. Sort of a "if you break a law and nobody knows you broke a law did you really break it" situation. Now despite assurances from the administration for years that no laws were broken, they intend to give retroactive immunity??? IIf no laws were broken, why do they need immunity?

 

On a side note there has been an international incident with the USS Nimitz over in the far east today. NNothing has hit the news yet, but it is supposed to have happened in international waters and fighters were put in the air because of this.

[MrRain422]

If no laws were broken, why do they need immunity?

 

 

This is the key question that even defenders of this travesty have not been able to answer. I'd also like to see someone on that side of it explain how the telecoms that chose not to participate knew it was illegal while the other ones couldn't figure it out.

[a.miller]

This borders on being as bad as Watergate, IMO. I'm not sure what the country has come to when our government breaks the laws that it developed and then says it is OK. That's not what America is or should be all about; quite the opposite.