A tale of scumbags

So here's the word: It seems that House and Senate negotiators are near a deal on a "compromise" bill on FISA, one that Congressional "leaders" are hoping will be voted on very soon, certainly before the July 4 recess. Despite the blather and spin that it is a just oh so wonderful bill that will enable the feds "to track terror suspects overseas while protecting the civil liberties of Americans," this concoction of sewage and idiocy is no compromise at all. It is simply a surrender to the fear-mongering of the right in a (very thinly) disguised form.

The details are not yet clear, at least I'm not aware of anyone who's laid them out, but the essence of this "compro-" there's no way I can choke out that word as a description, the essence of this craven collapse is that instead of, as per the original Senate version, simply granting amnesty to the telcoms for their willing, even eager, participation in blatantly illegal domestic wiretapping and spying, it will be left to federal district court to determine if amnesty will be granted or not. (That according to The Politico, which notes the GOPpers originally wanted the FISC to do it. That change, evidently, is part of the yeah sure, "compromise.") The catch is that, as Glenn Greenwald put it, under either version, District Court or FISC,

[c]ourts are required to immunize telecoms as long as telecoms merely demonstrate that the illegal spying they enabled was requested by the President and was represented to them by the Executive branch to be lawful. Courts will be required to dismiss the lawsuits without any consideration whatsoever of whether these telecom-defendants actually broke the law.

And it is already known that the WHS* supplied the telcoms with just such a representation. The bill talks big about "let the courts decide" but the outcome is predetermined, and the "negotiators" on the bill know it. This bill is no different from playing poker with marked cards while claiming the game is legit because the cards seem okay if you don't look too closely. Which is particularly true when the main Dummycrat mover behind this, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, spent days lying about the proposal, insisting it was not amnesty.

This argument that certification will suffice is being pushed despite the fact that, as Vaughn Walker, the judge overseeing the telcom suits, said in July 2006 in rejecting a motion to dismiss,

AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal.

(Quote via Glenn Greenwald; the full ruling can be found here.)

That is, White House assurances or not, the telcoms had to know that what they were being asked to do was patently illegal. Yet the "compro-" I still can't say it, the new bill in essence says even though they knew it was illegal, the courts must say it's okay 'cause the president said so. That is, the president's word overrules the law. And the telcoms walk. Even though the suits against them are the only remaining way to expose the full extent and nature of the criminality of the Bush gang's illegal spying - the only way precisely because the Democrap-controlled Congress has utterly failed to act - still the telcoms walk. That is what this bill will do.

And there's more: Although immunity has gotten the ink, it's not the only issue. The proposal, apparently, also institutionalizes and makes permanent the sharply increased powers of unrestricted domestic spying allowed under the "Protect America Act," the one with the highly-appropriate acronym PAA, pronounced "pah." Some of those concerns were laid out in a letter sent last week to the House and Senate Democrap leadership by Senators Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd. As they noted, the "comp-" craven surrender is based on the Senate bill the House rejected last winter. The bill

authorizes widespread surveillance involving innocent Americans and does not provide adequate checks and balances to protect their rights. First, it permits the government to come up with its own procedures for deciding who is a target of surveillance, and provides no meaningful consequences if the FISA Court later determines the government’s procedures are not even reasonably designed to wiretap foreigners. Second, even if the government is wiretapping foreigners outside the U.S., those foreigners need not be terrorists, suspected of any wrongdoing, or even be of any specific intelligence interest. That means the government could legally collect all communications between Americans here at home and the rest of the world. Third, the Senate version of the bill failed to prohibit the practice of reverse targeting – namely, wiretapping a person overseas when what the government is really interested in is an American here at home with whom the foreigner is communicating. Fourth, the Senate version of the bill failed to include meaningful privacy protections for the Americans whose communications will be collected in vast new quantities.

(Link via Firedoglake.)

"Vast new quantities" indeed: "Wiretapping" does not mean just phone calls, it means all electronic communication. In fact, Pah!

permitted intelligence agencies to force Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to hand over a copy of every email passing through their systems which lists one non-US recipient. [Emphasis added.]

(Original full article is at this link.)

And again, the misleadership is hoping that this will be a done deal before the July 4 recess. How perfect: Celebrate Independence Day by undermining the Constitution and the rule of law. Terrific.

I cannot possibly even begin to express the utter contempt I feel for those disgusting, asinine, cowering, dung beetles occupying the positions of misleadership among Congressional Democraps. Having just months ago done about the only damned thing they've done right since taking over by refusing to be bullied by the usual "omigod we're all gonna die unless you do this" bullshit and allowing Pah! to expire, and despite having discovered they paid no political price for doing so, they're now preparing to roll over. In fact, they're going out of their way to figure out how they can do it:

Senate Democratic leaders said Tuesday that they would not stand in the way of a compromise overhaul of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), despite their concerns with the impacts of the sprawling measure. ...

When asked if he would whip his conference to vote against it, [Senate Majority Whip Dick] Durbin said: “I doubt if it’s going to be a caucus position.” ...

[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid said that he would not ask his members to vote against the bill and that he still had not reviewed the language, pointing out that negotiators have been saying for weeks that they had a deal on the contentious issue.

That is, "we're against it but no way in hell are we going to try to stop it." On the other side of the building,

“We want to pass a bill that will be signed by the president,” [Speaker Nancy Pelosi] said. “And that will happen before we leave for the Fourth of July. So the timing is sometime between now and then. I feel confident that that will happen.”

Why oh why are they doing this? The only reason anyone has suggested - and one I completely agree is the reason - is utter, irredeemable, political cowardice. That the Dimcrats are still so ready to piss their pants at the mere hint of being called "soft on terror" that they are desperate to take FISA off the table, particularly since the authority to spy issued under Pah! will be expiring just about the time the Dumcrats will be nominating Barack Obama. That is, their concern is not with the Constitution, not with reining in the illegal excesses of the Shrub gang, but only with winning elections, with maintaining and expanding their hold on power, on cementing their own sinecures. When civil liberties and privacy come into conflict with that, it's no contest. This isn't even Celtics-Lakers 2008 territory, it's Globetrotters-Generals.

Speaking of Obama, as Kevin Drum asked, where is he? He says he's against the warrantless wiretapping program, but is he going to actually do anything about it? True, he has issued a statement repeating his opposition to immunity and adding this:

When I am president, there will be no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens; no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime; no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war.

That's all well and good, but will he attach action to his words? Has he at least pledged to leave the campaign trail to vote against the bill? Where is his statement as the presumptive nominee insisting that all Democrats must unite against this piece of crap? Or again does what looks good in the short term in order to win trump everything, including conscience?

The only good news here is that this is, reportedly, not actually a done deal and some have even pushed back against the idea that a deal has been finalized. It still has to gain enough support among the issue's partisans and some on the side of good and light may say it goes too far (which it clearly does) while the reactionaries might prefer to kill it in order to have a club to wield against the Dums and that combined opposition may defeat it. That's an outcome to be desired not only because it will kill the bill but because that club has proved of late to be more of a foam bat and we can hope against hope that it's continued ineffectuality will finally penetrate the dark recesses of the minds of the Congressional misleadership.

Still, there is a bottom line here and that line is that this should be, and for me is, a deal-breaker and I have so informed my Congresscritters. Fail to actively oppose this bill, I have told them, and I will never again contribute to your campaign, work for your campaign, or vote for you. Never. (Not that I have done either of the first two, but they don't know that and I have done the third.) I sincerely hope you do the same. If you're of a mind, you might consider a contribution to a new fund intending to bring pressure on leading Dims on the matter. Glenn Greenwald has info and updates here.

Footnotes: The New York Times, despite having previously given credence to the FISA fear-mongering, ran a decent editorial on the bill on Wednesday. The ACLU has joined with others, including Ron Paul supporters and liberal bloggers, in the Strange Bedfellows coalition to fight this contemptible bill.

*WHS = White House Sociopaths