What the ...?!!! Telecom Immunity???

So, let's get this straight.

The President (via his point-man DNI Mike McConnell, who has repeatedly said things under oath that were not true) has been fighting hard to have provisions included in the latest revisions to FISA that provide immunity to telecom corporations for their past actions in assisting the administration with warrantless surveillance of the American people.

So, despite the provision in the Constitution that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" (and the clear provision of a system of warrants and courts to determine what is "unreasonable") the President's men have been intercepting the communications of Americans, without warrants, with the active assistance of the telecom companies.

So, despite the clear wording of the original FISA law that says the exclusive way the Government can intercept those communications is with a warrant or a short-term emergency certification by the Attorney General, the President's men have been intercepting the communications of Americans without warrants OR AG certification, with the active assistance of the telecom companies.

So, despite the fact that the revelations of the Church Committee led to enactment of clear legal responsiblity for telecom companies to refuse to provide such information to the government without proper legal authority, the President's men have been intercepting the communications of Americans without warrants, with the active assistance of the telecom companies.

And while arguing that the Congress should give these companies, with their arrays fo very skilled lawyers, immunity for acts which seem on their face to be completely illegal, the President has refused to provide the Congress or the public with the details of just how extensive this activity has been, what the companies would be getting immunity for having done, or how much they were paid for it.

Yet, it appears that Congress will go ahead and do what the President is asking.

As they say in the vernacular, WTF?!

Because, even with the President's stone-walling, we have accumulated some frightening bits of information about what they have been up to. A federal judge in a lawsuit against AT&T in San Francisco, ruled that there was no way a reasonable phone company could have done what AT&T was doing and thought it was legal. That ruling is currently under appeal, but it certainly suggests the issue is not as vague or unclear as the President would have us believe.

Just two days ago, we read that Verizon has admitted to Congress that it turned over data to federal officials without court orders hundreds of times since 2005. This information included not only info about the person calling, but about everyone they called and about the people those people called.

Worse, the former head of one of those telecom companies has said that this surveillance had nothing to do with 9/11, as the administration claims. Joseph Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest, has claimed that Qwest was approached with an NSA proposal in February, 2001, months before the terrorist attack, and barely a month after President Bush took office.

In an interview with Glenn Greenwald in Salon, the lead counsel in the suit against AT&T, describes part of their case:

We have evidence of an NSA-controlled room in the Folsom Street AT&T facilities in San Francisco. We have evidence that AT&T diverted copies of everyone's Internet traffic into that room. And we know that there's very sophisticated equipment in that room that is capable of doing real-time analysis of the Internet traffic that is getting routed into there.

For most of our legal claims, that's enough to win, and we're done.

GG: Let's talk about those allegations. Your lawsuit, if it proceeded, would necesarily require an investigaiton into those allegations -- namely, into whether there was a secret room built, whether AT&T was providing unfettered access to the NSA, whether they were turning over this data. You would have to prove those allegations in order to prevail, right?

CC: Yes. . . . in that regard we already have AT&T internal documents that lay out the schematics of how this is happening and AT&T has authenticated these documents. They filed a motion with Judge Walker saying that those documents are their trade secrets and to say that, they had to say they were true. . . . The evidence we already presented and the fact that AT&T authenticated them takes us, if not all the way there, pretty darn close.

What little we know about what has been going on in secret suggests that the Bush administration and the telcom companies have been engaged in many thousands of acts of law-breaking and privacy violation for years. We have reason to suspect that this started way before 9/11, and may have much more to do with governmental power than fighting terrorism. And the telecom companies have been helping, in spite of their legal responsibility to demand demonstration of legal process.

There is plenty of reason to believe that serious crimes have been committed, by people who knew what they were doing was against the law, and not just once or twice. If the concept of "rule of law" is to mean anything in this country any more, they must not be given special treatment by the Congress that frees them from the consequences retroactively, just because the President wanted them to commit the crimes, and maybe paid them to do it.

What is wrong with the people in Congress?!!!

Update: Thank you, Senator Dodd.

(I have to say Senator Dodd has recently been the main Democratic Senator showing the kind of guts and leadership in that role that suggests he might deserve to be President. Paradoxically, it also shows why we need to have him in the Senate.)