Our Democrats Support Bush with FISA Bill

   I think that it is time that all of these bums in Washington,DC  be kicked to the curb, especially after pretty much granting amnesty to the telecoms for illegally spying for the Bush administration.

  Cross-posted from AlterNet

Democrats Have Legalized Bush's Crimes

By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted June 21, 2008.

The Democratic leadership cleared the way for the president and his collaborators to evade punishment for defying the law.

Editor's note: You can read more about Obama backing a FISA "compromise" here.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claims that a key positive feature of the new wiretap "compromise" is that the bill reaffirms that the President must follow the law, even though the same bill virtually assures that no one will be held accountable for George W. Bush's violation of the earlier spying law. Share this article

In other words, in the guise of rejecting Bush's theories of an all-powerful presidency that is above the law, the Democratic leadership cleared the way for the President and his collaborators to evade punishment for defying the law.

So, why should anyone assume that the new legislative edict demanding that the President obey the law will get any more respect than the old one, which established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 as the "exclusive" means for authorizing electronic spying?

It wasn't that Bush and his team didn't understand the old law's language; they simply believed they could violate the law without consequence, under the radical theory that at a time of war -- even one as vaguely defined as the "war on terror" -- the President's powers trump all laws as well as the constitutional rights of citizens.

Essentially, Bush was betting that even if his warrantless wiretap program was disclosed -- as it was in December 2005 -- that he could trust his Republican congressional allies to protect him and could count on most Democrats not to have the guts to challenge him.

His bet proved to be a smart one. After the New York Times revealed the warrantless wiretaps two and a half years ago, Congress took no steps to hold Bush accountable. Before the 2006 elections, Pelosi declared that Bush's impeachment was "off the table."

Then, on the eve of the August 2007 recess, the Democratic-controlled Congress was stampeded into passing the "Protect America Act," which effectively legalized what Bush had already done and expanded his spying powers even more.

After that law was passed, U.S. news reports mostly parroted the White House claim that it "modernized" FISA and "narrowly" targeted overseas terror suspects who might call or e-mail their contacts in the United States.

However, it soon became clear that the law applied not just to terror suspects abroad who might communicate with Americans, but to anyone who is "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" and who might possess "foreign intelligence information," defined as anything that could be useful to U.S. foreign policy.

That meant that almost any American engaged in international commerce or dealing with foreign issues -- say, a businessman in touch with a foreign subsidiary or a U.S. reporter sending an overseas story back to his newspaper -- was vulnerable to warrantless intercepts approved on the say-so of two Bush subordinates, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence.

Beyond the breathtaking scope of this new authority, the Bush administration also snuck in a clause that granted forward-looking immunity from lawsuits to communications service providers that assisted the spying.

That removed one of the few safeguards against Bush's warrantless wiretaps: the concern among service providers that they might be sued by customers for handing over constitutionally protected information without a warrant.

In short, the "Protect America Act" made warrantless surveillance legally cost free for a collaborating service provider, tilting the scales even further in favor of the government's spying powers.  

Catching on

A week after the "Protect America Act" was passed, the New York Times and the Washington Post published front-page stories explaining how the Bush administration had ambushed the Democrats.

Pressed up against the start of the August recess and the prospect of Republican taunts that Democrats were "soft on terror," the Democratic leaders abandoned earlier compromise proposals and accepted the more expansive law. Their one point of resistance was putting a February 2008 sunset provision into the law.

Still, the Democratic cave-in in August 2007 provoked an uproar among rank-and-file Democrats. Pelosi's office reported receiving more than 200,000 angry e-mails.

Stung by the reaction, House Democratic leaders balked at White House pressure to make even more concessions, including retroactive immunity for telecommunication companies that had collaborated with Bush's warrantless wiretaps in the years after the 9/11 attacks.

In February 2008, to the surprise of many observers, the Democratic leadership allowed the "Protect America Act" to lapse. Though Republicans attacked the Democrats as expected, the accusations seemed to have little political resonance.

Nevertheless, the Democratic leadership -- behind Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, and Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland -- continued working on a compromise.

While the new version drops some of the more intrusive features of the "Protect America Act," such as allowing warrantless wiretaps of Americans outside the United States, the bill adds retroactive telecom immunity (only requiring the companies show they got a written order from the President).

The bill also would grant the administration emergency power to wiretap a target for up to one week before getting a warrant from the secret FISA court. But the bill bars the government from targeting a foreigner as a "back-door" way to spy on an American without a court warrant.

'Capitulation'

Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisconsin, a strong constitutionalist, termed the new bill "not a compromise; it is a capitulation."

One of the bill's illusions would seem to be that the precedent of a President ignoring the FISA law and escaping any accountability can somehow be negated by restating what the original, violated law had declared.

In her June 20 floor statement, Pelosi said in her view this was a crucial feature of the bill, the statement that the President cannot ignore the FISA law again. However, Pelosi's position sounded like the words of an indulgent parent of a spoiled child: "This time I really mean it!"

The more powerful message from the latest Democratic compromise is that a President -- at least a Republican one -- can break the wiretap law under the cover of national security and expect to ride out the consequences.

Rather than reaffirming the rule of law and the Constitution's checks and balances, as Pelosi claimed, the new FISA "compromise" may have done the opposite, signaling that the President is above the law.

After Pelosi's speech, the House passed the bill by a 293-129 margin with 105 Democrats -- including most of the leadership -- voting in favor and 128 Democrats against. The bill then went to the Senate, which was expected to approve it.

Technorati Tags: FISA,Protect America Act,Congress,Senate,telecom amnesty,Nancy Pelosi,George Bush,illegal wiretaps,Russ Feingold

FISA: Why Care So Much?

   A lot of the MSM and many ordinary people in the United States can't seem to understand why people like myself and many others, along with various activist groups, are so up in arms over the FISA Bill and it's retroactive immunity for the telecoms and the Bush administration. Let's face it. By giving the phone companies retroactive immunity for illegally spying on us for George Bush and his partners in crime, our New Congress has basically given George Bush and his partners in crime a free pass from any accountability to the congress or to " We, The People " for Bush's illegal, criminal activities since moving into the White House. Our Congress has given Bush and ATT and Verizon the okay to go ahead and intercept our emails, IM's, faxes, and our phone calls without having any legal basis for doing so.

   Congress, on Thursday, gave the Bush administration an early Christmas present by giving him and his crime partners the rights to your privacy. Privacy isn't yours anymore in any form. Our Democratic Congress helped George Bush, the telecoms, and the rest of the Republicans steal your right to privacy, plain and simple! Nothing else needs to be said as there was/is no reason that this bill should have passed in its present form. The Democrats sold you and I out for a few dollars from the telecoms, towards their re-election. There is no other reason that makes any sense what so ever! We have been robbed and I am one mad motherfucker and I am not going to take this one laying down!

Hunter@ DailyKos

Why do so many people care so much about a mere technical issue such as whether such-and-such is legal or illegal?

I can count three reasons.

1. It goes to the heart of illegal actions by this administration. The Bush administration has broken law after law, and been enmeshed in scandal after scandal, and been met with no substantive actions. There are investigations that never end; there are stern letters that are never answered; there are subpoenas that are simply ignored. So to respond to a clearly illegal act by, of all possible things, writing legislation that offers retroactive immunity for those acts, maintains the secrecy of those acts, and declares that the Bush administration itself will be responsible for the future integrity of those acts -- it is patently asinine. It is an insult. It demonstrates a complete lack of regard for the law, and for the very responsibilities of each branch of government. In this, it is symbolic of the entire current Congress, which has proved itself all but nonfunctional when it comes to checking abuses by the executive branch -- or even by their own branch.

2.It is a Constitutional question, and of a sort that the administration has fought long and hard to cripple. Among the more basic premises of the Bill of Rights is the notion of probable cause; your government may not conduct searches or seizures without a warrant, and the judicial branch shall judge the merit of those warrants. But the Bush administration wishes simply nullify that entire concept, if those searches are electronic in nature. It takes no imagination at all to observe that once one type of widespread, warrantless, causeless electronic search is deemed to be outside of 4th Amendment protections, an entire series of other electronic searches will follow. That is, after all, the entire reason the Bush administration pursued these searches illegally, rather than attempting to change FISA law in advance; they have every intention of creating a precedent for future searches, and they now have been given exactly that.

3. It was easy. I mean, Jesus H. Christmas, it has been the easiest thing in the world -- all they had to do was not do it. It's not freakin' rocket science -- but thanks to the efforts of a number of Democrats, not just Rockefeller and Hoyer but people like Reid and Pelosi, they just couldn't not put immunity in. We were never told why it was so all-fired important -- they would never grace us with any non-childish, non-condescending, non-flagrantly-insulting explanation. But instead of just not passing bills granting immunity, we had Reid treating Dodd more shabbily than he ever treated any Republican, and Hoyer apparently going around Pelosi, and all manner of prodding and dealing by Democrats to get immunity for these acts. It is baffling, and the only rationale available seems to be the most cynical one -- it is merely doing the bidding of companies that provide substantive campaign contributions. No other explanation would seem to suffice.

So those are the reasons. Because of all the issues we've faced, in the last few years, this one was an absolute no-brainer, the one thing that the Democrats, no matter how stunningly incompetent, humiliatingly ineffective or bafflingly capitulating they may be, could manage to win simply by sitting on their damn hands. But no; it took serious work to lose on this one. Serious, burning-the-midnight-oil work to manage to quite so cravenly negate their own oversight duties.

And that is why this will not be forgotten anytime soon. A caucus willing to go to these lengths to satisfy the illegalities of the Bush administration is not one that can easily be defended. It is understandable that it would take a great deal of courage to enforce Congressional subpoenas. We can understand that voting against funding for the war could be risky, if we were to presume that Bush would simply keep the troops in the Iraqi desert to rot regardless of funding.

But this one? This petty, stinking issue of granting retroactive immunity to companies that violated the law, such that they need not even say how they violated the law, or when they violated the law, or how often, or against who, and the whole thing started before 9/11 so it is clear that terrorism wasn't even a prime factor for doing it -- that whole mess is now absolved, no lawsuits, no discovery, no evidence allowed to be presented?

No, that one is indefensible. It is indefensible because it requires not just passive acceptance of a corrupt administration performing illegal acts, but legislators actively condoning those acts with the stroke of a pen. The Democrats are determined to set themselves as partners in committing crimes, then absolving them; there should be nothing but contempt for such acts.

Technorati Tags: FISA,Protect America Act,telecom amnesty,George Bush,Democrats,warrantless wiretaps