Must-read Glenn Greenwald on Telecom Amnesty

[TwilightGardener]

(Salon) Glenn Greenwald: Telecom Amnesty would forever foreclose investigation of vital issues

Monday October 15, 2007 09:45 EST

--snip--
(1) The cooperation between the various military/intelligence branches of the Federal Government -- particularly the Pentagon and the NSA -- and the private telecommunications corporations is extraordinary and endless. They really are, in every respect, virtually indistinguishable. The Federal Government has its hands dug deeply into the entire ostensibly "private" telecommunications infrastructure and, in return, the nation's telecoms are recipients of enormous amounts of revenues by virtue of turning themselves into branches of the Federal Government...

...There is obviously nothing inherently wrong with corporations competing for lucrative government contracts. But the work they were to perform here -- in providing unfettered data and other information regarding the communications of Americans -- was illegal under multiple federal laws enacted precisely to prohibit telecoms from providing access without warrants to the data and content of their customers's calls.

--snip--
(2) We know so little about what they were doing and are doing. The term "we" includes not only American citizens generally, but the Congress as well. All of this takes place completely in the dark, in total secrecy, with no oversight and no checks....

...Congress has no intention of investigating any of this, and even if they wanted to -- which they don't -- their subpoenas would simply be ignored and they would do nothing about it. Congress has spent the last six years shutting its eyes towards all of this, except when the White House demanded that it be legalized....

....These private lawsuits -- brought by heroic privacy and civil liberties groups -- are the only real mechanism left for discovering what the telecoms and our Government have been jointly doing when it comes to spying on our communications, maintaining surveillance data bases of our actions, and violating a whole litany of long-standing federal laws designed to protect the confidentiality of citizens' communications. A law that gives amnesty to telecoms would mean that those lawsuits are stopped in their tracks, and we would likely never find out -- at least not for a long, long time -- the extent of this oversight-less surveillance by our government on Americans, nor would we be able to obtain a judicial ruling as to its illegality.

--snip--


http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/15/amnesty/

This is the same conclusion I've been coming to: The Telecom Amnesty Bush is demanding is NOT just a personal favor for the telecoms in question as reward for their "patriotic" eavesdropping service to the country. The primary reason to grant them immunity is to STOP the lawsuits that will bring to light the dark secrets and illegal activities of this administration--in short, the immunity helps BushCo also remain immune from accountablility. As Glenn points out, when these suits are buried, all of the evidence of lawbreaking will be buried with them. Also, read the update at the end: The GOP is planning to use the 3 kidnapped soldiers from last May as a way of blaming Democrats for not acting quickly enough on the FISA measure--sickening.

[robinlynne]

1. exactly!

[november3rd]

2. The documents

You used to be able to pull a document off of the internet that showed the NSA informing Clinton in December of 2000 that their current security arrangements involved tapping everybody's phone and scooping up everybody's emails.

This was almost a year before September 11!

I don't know where I saved that thing.

[TwilightGardener]

3. They were getting the program up and running before Chimpy took office--

I have no doubt about that. Same as invading Iraq was in the works by the neocons before he took office, too. Because Congress refuses to stand up to Chimpy on wiretapping, on torture, on pre-war intelligence, on 9/11, the mountains of evidence we would need in order to impeach are slowly, systematically being buried, and Congress knows it, despite the "appearance" of investigations--then Nancy can say, well, we don't have enough evidence to impeach.