{"id":13275,"date":"2007-10-18T09:00:48","date_gmt":"2007-10-18T13:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/13275.html"},"modified":"2007-10-18T09:00:48","modified_gmt":"2007-10-18T13:00:48","slug":"white-house-lawmakers-reach-deal-on-telecom-immunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/white-house-lawmakers-reach-deal-on-telecom-immunity\/","title":{"rendered":"White House, lawmakers reach deal on telecom immunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

At yesterday’s White House press conference<\/a>, a reporter asked the president whether he could find “common ground” with the congressional majority on anything. Bush brought up FISA.<\/p>\n

A few seconds after saying it was a “good law” that shouldn’t be changed, the president said, “[T]he law needs to be changed, enhanced, by providing the phone companies that allegedly helped us with liability protection. So we found common ground there.”<\/p>\n

First, it wasn’t just “alleged”; the companies turned over phone records without warrants. Verizon has already admitted as much. Second, “we found common ground” on telecom amnesty? At least publicly, lawmakers and the White House were bitterly divided on the issue.<\/p>\n

But privately, they’d apparently struck a deal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources. […]<\/p>\n

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee’s chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush’s director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.<\/p>\n

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Senate Dems got some new requirements about deciding who is to be the subject of warrantless surveillance, but as is too often the case, they got a little and gave up a lot.
\n
\nWhen it comes to this immunity deal, I’m inclined to borrow a phrase<\/a> from Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey: “It’s worse than a sin; it’s a mistake.”<\/p>\n

Lawmakers and the White House have agreed to provide retroactive immunity to companies that cooperated in secret with the NSA to violate customers’ privacy rights, apparently in violation of the law, long before a national emergency might have provided a legitimate rationale. These companies will be shielded from responsibility, before<\/i> lawmakers even understand what exactly transpired.<\/p>\n

The NYT editorial board suggested<\/a> the other day that lawmakers might consider an immunity deal, but “the law should allow suits aimed at forcing disclosure of Mr. Bush’s actions [and it] should also require a full accounting to Congress of all surveillance conducted since 9\/11.” Yesterday’s deal includes neither.<\/p>\n

Glenn Greenwald emphasizes<\/a> the fact that this deal short-circuits, without justification, a legal process that is already underway.<\/p>\n

The question of whether the telecoms acted in “good faith” in allowing warrantless government spying on their customers is already pending before a court of law<\/b>. In fact, that is one of the central issues in the current lawsuits — one that AT&T has already lost in a federal court<\/b>.<\/p>\n

Yet that is the issue that Jay Rockefeller and Mike McConnell — operating in secret — are taking away from the courts by passing a law declaring the telecoms to have won (“Senators this week began reviewing classified documents . . . and came away from that early review convinced that the companies had ‘acted in good faith’ in cooperating with what they believed was a legal and presidentially authorized program”). They are directly interfering in these lawsuits and issuing a “ruling” in favor of AT&T and other telecoms that is exactly the opposite of the one an actual court of law has already issued.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s really painful to watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At yesterday’s White House press conference, a reporter asked the president whether he could find “common ground” with the congressional majority on anything. Bush brought up FISA. A few seconds after saying it was a “good law” that shouldn’t be changed, the president said, “[T]he law needs to be changed, enhanced, by providing the phone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}