[Dialogue] Lawbreaking Telecoms Still Conniving to Obtain Immunity from Congress

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Thursday, January 17, 2008 by Salon.com
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/>  

Lawbreaking Telecoms Still Conniving to Obtain Immunity from Congress

by Glenn Greenwald

Over the past several months, Democratic Senators Jay Rockefeller and Harry
Reid have been the two most valuable instruments in the Bush
administration's efforts to obtain vastly expanded warrantless eavesdropping
powers and immunity for lawbreaking telecoms. As the Senate returns to
Washington next week, Reid is apparently now more determined than ever
before to ensure that the Bush administration's FISA demands are complied
with in full.

Contrary to the completely erroneous claims by the
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120001233310682537.html?mod=todays_us_opini
on> Wall St. Journal Editorial Page that Senate Democrats intend to enact an
18-month extension of the Protect America Act without telecom immunity
(false claims that produced some premature
<http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3192>  blogospheric
declarations of victory last week), Reid has spent the last two weeks making
abundantly clear that his intention is to bring to the Senate floor as early
as next week the Bush-compliant Senate Intelligence Committee bill, and has
further made clear that it's his expectation that that bill - complete with
warrantless eavesdropping powers and telecom immunity - will pass. Because
the Protect America Act is scheduled to expire in early February, it will be
necessary to extend it by 30 to 60 days, but that is seen by the Senate
Democratic leadership only as a tool to enable them to work out a deal with
the House to ensure that a bill acceptable to the President is sent to the
White House promptly.

>From all appearances, Sen. Dodd is as committed as ever to doing what he can
to stop telecom immunity (thus giving the lie to the jaded
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/21/dodd_reid/>  claims from
Reid and others
<http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2007/10/18/post_137.html>  that he
was doing this only to help his presidential bid) - including full-scale
filibusters and other forms of procedural obstructionism. But thanks to
Reid's decision to bring to the floor the immunity-providing SIC bill
(rather than the immunity-denying SJC bill), it will be exceedingly
difficult for Dodd and his allies to strip immunity out of the bill by
amendment (60 votes would be required to overcome a certain filibuster of
any such amendment). Thus, Bush and Cheney - with the subservient loyalty of
their key allies, Rockefeller and Reid - appear, at least as of right now,
highly likely to prevail in their twin goals of warrantless eavesdropping
and telecom immunity.

None of this is particularly surprising. As The Washington Post's Dan
Frookmin aptly put it yesterday
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/01/13/DI200801
1302800.html>  in his online chat:

West Union, Iowa: What's your take on how the upcoming FISA renewal will
play out?
Dan Froomkin: I'm betting on Bush beating the Democrats into submission
again. So far, that's been a safe bet.

Indeed, as a general matter, betting on Democratic Congressional submission
to Bush's demands is one of the surest bets there is. And with Reid and most
of the Senate Democratic leadership specifically committed to delivering yet
another victory for Bush and their telecom owners on the FISA bill, "uphill
battle" is an understatement for describing the challenge which proponents
of the rule of law face. As Froomkin put it
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/12/13/BL200712130113
4_pf.html>  on a separate, recent occasion in his column: "Historians
looking back on the Bush presidency may well wonder if Congress actually
existed."

* * * * *

Despite all of this, there will be, in the next couple of weeks, several
points of focus. Initially, the leading presidential candidates have been
all but silent with regard to all of this. That's particularly striking
because this is a real, live issue that implicates their ostensible
commitment to "changing how Washington works" - it's nothing more than
telecoms using their power, influence and bipartisan lobbyists in Washington
to write extraordinary legislation for themselves that bequeaths them with
immunity for having broken the law.

Manifestly, retroactive immunity is something available only to the largest,
lobbyist-using corporations, and is not something that ordinary Americans
would ever even get a hearing on. It's as illustrative a case of core
Beltway corruption as it gets. Yet as Clinton, Obama and Edwards parade
around rhetorically proclaiming their "leadership abilities" and their
willingness to fight vested interests in Washington and to defend the rule
of law, they abdicate one opportunity after the next to demonstrate their
authenticity. Taking a real stance against such a corrupt gift to the
telecom industry - through real leadership rather than the obligatory,
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/24/dodd/>  forced issuance
of meaningless statements - seems like a rather compelling way for at least
one of those candidates to distinguish their campaign.

As Matt Stoller recently <http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3220>
documented, telecoms have become increasingly brazen about the fact that
they essentially own multiple members of Congress. They began pouring money
and other favors
<http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/dem-pushing-spy.html>  into the
coffers of Jay Rockefeller at exactly the same time that they began cajoling
him (successfully) to become the leading advocate for telecom immunity.
Telecoms have on their payroll hordes of bipartisan
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/22/telecom_immunity/>
lobbyists and advisors working for immunity, including former Clinton
officials such as Jamie Gorerlick.

Beyond that, immunity would be a complete
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/14/rule_of_law/>
evisceration of the rule of law, bizarrely protecting telecoms from the
consequences of their lawbreaking and putting an end to any real hope for
investigating and obtaining accountability for years of illegal spying on
Americans by the Bush administration. When you put all of that together,
telecom immunity embodies every form of lawlessness and corruption which are
destroying our political culture - everything that the Democratic
presidential candidates endlessly claim in pretty speeches they are
committed to fighting.

* * * * *

There are other important points to note here as well. Chris Dodd is already
being pressured <http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3244>  (and
vaguely threatened) by cowardly, anonymous Democratic Senate aides, who are
leaking smarmy and thuggish nuggets suggesting that Dodd can get back into
the good graces of his caucus only if he gives up his whole flighty,
annoying fixation on the Constitution and the Rule of Law. He's going to
need ongoing support and reinforcement.

The House actually passed a relatively
<http://thinkprogress.org/restore-act-summary/>  decent FISA bill that has
real protections on eavesdropping and denies immunity to telecoms, and it's
possible that they will be a leverage point as well (though it's more likely
that the Bush-supporting "Blue Dogs" will ultimately throw their support to
the Senate version). Additionally, certain Senators who have supported
telecom immunity - such as Dianne Feinstein and Sheldon Whitehouse - have
been toying with the idea of some kind of "compromise" whereby the Federal
Government stands in as defendants for the telecoms, though a far superior
compromise would simply be to amend FISA to clarify (even though it's
already clear) that telecoms are free to submit any exculpatory evidence in
secret to the federal court presiding over lawsuits against them (more on
that later).

In his stump speech
<http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/11/sweet_blog_extra_text_of_obama.html
> , Barack Obama pledges to end what he calls "Lewis Libby justice."
Immunity for lawbreaking telecoms is the extreme expression of that. In
fact, the ability of the rich and well-connected to obtain immunity from
lawbreaking is one the hallmarks of corrupt oligarchy, one of the surest
signs of the breakdown of basic justice. From
<http://www.amazon.com/History-Rome-Down-Reign-Constantine/dp/0312383959/ref
=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200572021&sr=8-3> The History of Rome, Cary &
Scullard, 3rd edition, 1975. p. 494:

.this change of procedure was accompanied by the increasing use of different
scales of punishments according to the person of the delinquent. For
purposes of criminal jurisdiction the citizen body fell into a class of
honestiores (including members of the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders,
municipal magistrates and senators, and soldiers of all ranks), and another
of humiliores. For the same crime a privileged offender might suffer simple
banishment, an unprivileged one would be sentenced to penal servitude in the
mines; in capital cases the honestior would be put to death quickly and
cleanly, the humilior might be thrown to the beasts. A person of higher
status still enjoyed the right of appeal to the emperor, and he remained
exempt from torture, except in trials of treason . but these privileges were
withdrawn from those of the lower order. From the time of Severus [early 2nd
Century] the principle that the law was a respecter of persons pervaded the
whole of the Roman criminal jurisdiction, a rule which constituted one of
Rome's most harmful legacies to the Middle Ages.

The Senate Democratic leadership, working hand-in-hand with the Bush
administration, is working feverishly to ensure that telecoms benefit from
exactly this corrupt and lawless framework. There are still some
opportunities to try to prevent those efforts, or at least make them much
more public, difficult and costly.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights
litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling
book "How Would a Patriot Act?
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/097794400X?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=097794400X&adid=0DDYV6E3FJN3EJW5RMWC&> ," a
critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in
May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307354199?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0307354199&adid=0JN08D8RST19DSGHZY6K&> ", examines
the Bush legacy.

C Salon.com

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/17/6425/

 

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