Looks like a big win for Chris Dodd and his allies in the blogosphere as Harry Reid looks to be backing down on FISA stuff.
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No Immunity
12 Jan 2008 03:04 pm
Comments (15)
Will be interesting to see if Bush vetos the proposed extension. I suspect he will.
"There was a time when this blog didn't cast every single conflict as a personality-based horse race, and I have hope that it may yet not again."
Oh come on, Matt's been pretty clear about his opinion on the underlying policy. And for better or worse this does boil down to a personality-based horse race, since the outcome can be completely altered by even one well-placed senator.
"There was a time when this blog didn't cast every single conflict as a personality-based horse race, and I have hope that it may yet not again."
Oh come on, Matt's been pretty clear about his opinion on the underlying policy. And for better or worse this does boil down to a personality-based horse race, since the outcome can be completely altered by even one well-placed senator.
Will be interesting to see if Bush vetos the proposed extension. I suspect he will.
Since Bush can't credibly wring any political advantage out of holding out for a "better deal" from Congress, he doesn't really have the option of vetoing the legislation. The entire case for the FISA legislation that he wants is that not having it puts America's security at risk. Vetoing the extension that he signed before doesn't make that argument credible.
His only path towards getting the legislation he wants is to sign the extension now and do some arm twisting to get the immunity bill passed over the next 12 months. Bush doesn't really have the option of vetoing in order to get what he wants.
The news that the Bush administration and telecoms let wiretaps lapse for failure to pay bills on time pretty much killed telecom immunity. RIP.
Isn't this a little premature? A blog quoting the WSJ which in its turn merely repeats a rumor? I didn't even know the Majority Leader had the power to simply ignore legislative drafts for years on end. Sounds rather unreal.
for better or worse this does boil down to a personality-based horse race, since the outcome can be completely altered by even one well-placed senator.
Maybe. To be sure, Reid & Co.'s poltroon-ish behavior since winning the majority in 2006 is incomprehensible to me. Perhaps framing the conflict as a battle between two personalities is more valid that I'd initially care to admit.
Trial lawyer efforts to make any private firm that cooperates with the elected US Government in any matter where national security is involved and US lives are at stake and the companies cooperating are assured by gov't it is legal - is a very dangerous position to put the nation in.
Imagine if the FBI HAD acted on their "racial prejudice and profiling of presumed innocent Arabs" and investigated the large number of Arabs attending flight schools and only learning how to steer planes, not take off and land. If other companies had been sued in the past for billions for other "privacy rights violations of radical foreign Muslims and sympathetic US citizens". Every Flight School would have refused to disclose names, addresses, school records, or allow it's employees to be interviewed about their interactions with the wannabe Arab pilots.
And told the US to pack sand even with fears that the Arabs might be planning to slam planes into something and they wanted to alert the FAA and Justice about a menace. Get the sacred warrant!
And on trying to get a warrant, half the judges in the country would refuse on grounds there was no probable cause Arab pilots planned on any criminal activity and condemned the FBI agents to their Lawyer-Superiors at FBI HQ as being on a "liberty-violating fishing expedition". Which in the pre-9/11 years, would have landed those agents in serious trouble with the lawyers running the FBI as pissing off court judges we may have to get on our side if we seek criminal convictions later for drug smugglers, porn peddlers, and our white collar bread and butter to enhance our conviction rate stats...And they and most of the other half would insist on sitting on the warrant for weeks or months "so review can be done." Even the FISA Court back then entailed great delay and insistance on individual warrants on not just individuals, but individual records, individual phones.
chris ford, please, please speak english. You know, nouns, verbs, complete thoughts. All you've got there is gibberish.
Telcom immunity has nothing to do with racial profiling or anything else you're on about.
It's plain old contract law. The telcoms promised to never tell anyone about my calls without a court order. They broke their promise. Why shouldn't they bear the responsibility for it? Shouldn't companies be held accountable for their actions?
Great, Harry Reid will drop the new FISA bill with telecom immunity, in favor of an extension of the "just temporary" Bill-of-Rights-gutting Protect America Act that had civil libertarians shitting bricks when it got stampeded through last summer, given its basket warrants, bypassing of the FISA Court, etc, etc. Hooray for the good guys!
Ford, if the FBI had followed up on the suspicions about the 9/11 hijackers - as opposed to ignoring them on the orders of higher ups - they could easily have followed them around enough to discern what their plan was - especially if the same higher-ups had read the warnings from half the intelligence services on the planet that something was going down involving planes and buildings.
None of which would have required a warrant until it was clear that what was going down was a threat - and it would have been clear. At that point, any judge would have issued a warrant.
None of which has anything to do with wire-tapping.
Nitwit.
Good, it would be unfortunate for Reid to lose his position.
Is it just me (and I don't think it is), or does the fact that the telecoms just blithley accepted gov't assurances that "this is legal" and went ahead and turned over private info? I mean, it's not like they don't have armies lawyers. Hell, it seems Qwest turned them down b/c their lawyers said "this is not legal". I suppose some would argue the gov't held out the lure of large, lucrative contracts to ensure cooperation without examination, but it just seems totally irresponsible for the compliant telecoms to skip a legality gut check when the gov't comes in after decades of getting warrants, waves their hands, and states "we don't need no stinking warrants" in an authoritative voice.
This is not a victory even if it's true, as mds and Hans B have pointed out. Chris Bowers' post is not helpful. Digby was on this earlier and with the right analysis:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/choices-we-have-by-dday-so-yesterday-we.html
Letting the vile bill passed in August (amid bogus terror threats) expire and reverting to the perfectly adequate previous FISA law would be victory. Extending the "temporary" bill would be a massive sellout and defeat many times worse than the August collapse.
Greenwald, Firedoglake, Digby and others with a platform need to push back hard an immediately against this uninformed happy talk, in concert with the organizations that have really led the charge from the beginning, particularly the ACLU.
Comments closed January 26, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Or, you know, one might see it as a big win for civil rights and transparency in government. There was a time when this blog didn't cast every single conflict as a personality-based horse race, and I have hope that it may yet not again.
Posted by James Gary | January 12, 2008 3:18 PM