As the Senate takes up “debate” today over granting the President new warrantless eavesdropping powers and granting immunity to lawbreaking telecoms, the individual who joined forces with Dick Cheney to get this ball rolling, AT&T’s personal Senator Jay Rockefeller, made some comments yesterday to The Politico that illustrate just how twisted and dishonest is the thinking of telecom immunity advocates. First, there is this:
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is predicting the Senate will grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies as Congress takes up reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). . . “I think we will prevail,” Rockefeller said on Wednesday, adding that he hoped the Senate will finish the bill by next week. The FISA legislation expires in February, and both President Bush and GOP congressional leaders have demanded new legislation be in place by that time.
“It’s a pretty bad idea to appear cocky,” Rockefeller noted. “I am not pessimistic.”
For an entire year, Congressional Democrats have won absolutely nothing. They’ve given in to the White House on every one of its demands. Yet here is Jay Rockefeller strutting around declaring Victory and having to battle against feelings of cockiness because, finally, he is about to win something. But ponder the “win” that is giving him these feelings of immense self-satisfaction. Is he finally accomplishing what Democrats were given control of Congress to do: namely, impose some checks and limits on the administration? No. The opposite is true. Rockefeller is doing the bidding of Dick Cheney. The bill that he is working for is the bill the White House demanded. Rockefeller is supported by the entire Bush administration, urged on and funded by the nation’s most powerful telecoms, and is backed by the entire GOP caucus in the Senate.
When Rockefeller smugly announces that he “thinks we will prevail,” the “we” on whose behalf he is so proudly speaking is Bush and Cheney, lawbreaking telecoms, and all Republican Senators. The only parties whom Rockefeller is so happily “defeating” are civil liberties groups and members of his own party. That is what is making him feel pulsating sensations of excitement and “smugness.”
He is being allowed to win only because he is advancing the Bush agenda and those of his largest corporate donors, and waging war against members of his own party, acting to destroy the allegedly defining values of that party. Yet he’s so desperate to feel like he’s won something that this is enough to cause him to strut around giddily battling feelings of cockiness over his impending “win.” At least he’s being honest here about whom he represents.
Next we have this:
Rockefeller also rejected a potential compromise being floated by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that would let a secret FISA court decide whether the telecom companies, who are being sued for going along with official requests from the Bush administration to cooperate with warrantless surveillance programs, acted properly.
Telecoms already have immunity under existing FISA law where they acted pursuant to written government certification or where they prove they acted in good faith (see 18 USC 2520 (d)). There is no reason that the federal courts presiding over these cases can’t simply make that determiniation, as they do in countless other cases involving classified information. Even Feinstein’s “compromise” is a completely unnecessary gift to telecoms: to transfer the cases away from the federal judges who have ruled against them to the secret FISA court. But even that pro-telecom proposal is unacceptable to Rockefeller (and the administration), because that would still leave telecoms subject to the rule of law. Rockefeller’s only goal is to bestow on his telecom supporters full and unconditional protection from having their conduct — and, by effect, the administration’s conduct — subject to a court of law. Manifestly, that’s the real agenda. That’s why he’s feeling “cocky.”
It gets worse:
Rockefeller defended the actions of the telecom companies, arguing that the companies received explicit orders from the National Security Agency to cooperate with the super-secret surveillance effort. The West Virginia Democrat said the telecom companies were being “pushed by the government, compelled by the government, required by the government to do this. And I think in the end, we’ll prevail.”
Can someone please tell Jay Rockefeller that we don’t actually live in a country where the President has the definitively dictatorial power to “compel” and “require” private actors to break the law by “ordering” them to do so? Like all other lawbreakers, telecoms broke the law because they chose to, and profited greatly as a result. That telecoms had an option is too obvious to require proof, but conclusive proof can be found in the fact that some telecoms did refuse to comply on the grounds that doing so was against the law. There is a branch of Government that does have the power to compel and require behavior by private actors. It’s called “the American people,” acting through their Congress, who democratically enact laws regulating that behavior. And the American people enacted multiple laws making it illegal (.pdf) for telecoms, in the absence of a warrant, to enable Government spying on their customers and to turn over private data. Rockefeller’s claimed belief that we live in a country where private companies are “compelled” to obey orders to break the law is either indescribably authoritarian or disgustingly dishonest — probably both. Continued>>
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/23/6594/I just love getting screwed by my own side!!!!!!!
:grr:
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