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President Bush signed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that was passed by the Senate on Wednesday with the help of, as Paul Krugman put it, the “coalition of the craven” Democrats. 

Bush gave a short speech before signing the bill that basically went like this: “FEAR!  FEAR!  FEAR!  I WILL PROTECT YOU!”  But because his fascist regime needs help from telecommunications corporations to gather phone records, emails, and other forms of electronic communications, and he doesn’t want any citizens checking up on the legality of whatever he’s doing, he added:

“This law will ensure that those companies whose assistance is necessary to protect the country will themselves be protected from lawsuits from past or future cooperation with the government.”

And that is how the Bush Administration operates.  Scare people.  Tell them spying is necessary to protect them.  Claim presidential power to ignore laws or articles of The Constitution that might hinder him.  Get corporations to go along with his plans.  Grant retroactive immunity to them and everyone else involved.  All is well, see?  No laws were broken because now the laws that were in place at the time the laws were broken don’t matter anymore.  Those OLD laws were for pre-9/11 Americans.  We are the new fearful Americans, and we will sell our liberty to a con man so that we can feel safe.

How does the most unpopular president in modern history continue to get away with this total disregard of law and all the principles of individual freedom and liberty?  Well I guess that has to be because congress, lead by the “opposition party” Democrats, is disliked even more than the president.  Why are they loathed?  You have to ask?  Because they are weak!  They are weak minded and weak willed, and they are afraid.  Their weak little minds tell them that it’s political suicide to vote against a bill that helps our government thwart terrorist attacks, even if it contains what is clearly a CYA clause for the president, his staff, and hall his corporate sponsors.

We the people have just been shafted and we know it.

So who will stick up for us if your representatives in Congress won’t? 

The ACLU and The Nation:

A few hours after Bush’s signing, The Nation joined with the ACLU in a lawsuit filed in the US District Court (Southern District) of New York challenging the constitutionality of the Act. The Nation is suing on behalf of itself, our staff and two of our contributing writers–Chris Hedges and Naomi Klein.

…

Hedges, in his reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the so-called war on terror regularly communicates with sources in countries like Palestine, Iran, Syria and Sudan. Klein, in her essential critique of the extension of radical free-market capitalism and the resurgence of imperial militarism, routinely communicates with journalists, political activists, human rights campaigners in the Middle East, South America, and around the world. Sadly, we believe that the communications critical to their reporting could and would be monitored under the FISA Amendments Act. Certainly scores of other journalists would shoulder the same risk.

We are proud, then, to join with other patriots who understand the government’s legitimate interest in protecting the nation against terrorism can be fulfilled without sacrificing the constitutional liberties that make the US worth defending.

We at harikari.com ask you to support them in their cause – OUR CAUSE.  Please donate to the ACLU and keep reading The Nation and spreading the word to anyone who will listen.

About two weeks ago the Senate passed their version of the RESTORE Act – the bill that updates FISA for new types of communications that have been developed since FISA was enacted in 1978.  The House version of the bill does not include a grant of immunity to all the telecommunications companies that participated in the government’s spying program.  House Democrats argue that there is no reason to grant immunity because they’ve always had immunity so long as they obeyed the law.  The House version of the RESTORE Act includes protection for telecommunications companies that lawfully participate in the surveillance program in the future.  (Scroll down for my reaction to the eighteen Spineless Motherf@#*ing Democrats that voted for the Senate version of the bill that includes the immunity clause that Bush says absolutely must be included in the final bill.)

Bush has been bashing the House Democrats since Congress reconvened last week.  He has been making false claims about how intelligence agencies haven’t been able to do their jobs since the Protect America Act expired, and about how, without immunity, there would be frivolous lawsuits against telecoms that would lead to their financial ruin.

First off, the intelligence agencies have not been affected in any significant way, because the laws that are in place now allow them to continue their surveillance programs.  The New York Times reported yesterday:

One lawyer in the telecommunications industry, who spoke on condition of anonymity because wiretapping operations are classified, said he had seen little practical effect on the industry’s surveillance operations since the law expired. Most operations appear to have continued unabated, the lawyer said.

Secondly, if the telecoms did not break any laws as Bush claims, then why does he want to grant them immunity?  Furthermore, any lawsuits that do arise would be dismissed by the courts if they were found to be groundless.

Some of the pending lawsuits probably do have merit, and that’s what worries Bush.  A successful lawsuit against a telecom would not only expose the illegal actions of the telecommunications company, it would also expose the lawlessness of the Bush Administration.  So by immunizing the telecoms Bush would in effect be immunizing himself, and that’s what he’s really wants – to save his own ass.

We already know he lied to us about the warrantless spying operation up until December 2005 when he was forced to acknowledge it after the New York Times story was published.  He should have been impeached right then and there, but the anti-American, freedom-hating Republicans in the Senate would never agree to removing their man from the White House.  (And apparently some craven Democrats too.)

So are there grounds for successful lawsuits against any of the telecoms?  Probably.  Here’s an excerpt from a nice rant that Keith Olbermann delivered a couple weeks ago describing what happened at AT&T:

… Did you see Mark Klein on this newscast last November?

Mark Klein was the AT&T whistleblower who explained in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood IT desk how he personally attached all AT&T circuits, everything, carrying every one of your phone calls, every one of your e-mails, every bit of your Web browsing into a secure room, room No. 641-A at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco, where it was all copied so the government could look at it.

If we are to believe Bush, the government went to the FISA court and requested permission to tap into communication lines of a suspected terrorists.  AT&T responded by turning over everything they had on everyone using their service.  That’s kind of like the police getting a warrant to search one office in a ninety-story office building and having the security firm for the building giving the police the keys to every office in the building.  Maybe the police would only search the one office they had obtained the warrant for, and maybe they wouldn’t.  Either way, what the security firm did was wrong.

Bush says: 

At issue is a dispute over whether telecommunications companies should be subjected to class-action lawsuits because they are believed to have helped defend America after the attacks of 9/11.

“…believed to have helped defend America?”  Excuse me?  That’s not what the lawsuits are about.  Nobody has any issue with the telecoms legally complying with government warrants that would help find terrorists.  The issue is how these companies violated the privacy of their customers simply because the government asked them to do so.

Bush then played his Fear Card: 

Without the cooperation of the private sector, we cannot protect our country from terrorist attack.

There is a key word missing in that statement:  “legal” and it belongs right before “cooperation.”

There’s a name for the merger of business and state interests in a consolidated effort to deny citizens their privacy and freedoms – it’s called fascism.

The House Democrats are heroically standing up to fascism by not giving in to Bush’s demands.  They should be applauded.

What can you do?  Write your House Reprenstative and urge him or her to not back down on the issue of immunity for telecoms.

And, if you have not signed this petition, do so now.

Today’s New York Times editorial expresses their concerns about last week’s Senate debate of the FISA Amendments Act of 2007. 

The Senate debated a bill that would make needed updates to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — while needlessly expanding the president’s ability to spy on Americans without a warrant and covering up the unlawful spying that President Bush ordered after 9/11.

The Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, John Rockefeller of West Virginia, led the way in killing amendments that would have strengthened requirements for warrants and raised the possibility of at least some accountability for past wrongdoing.

…

Congress was certainly not informed, and if Mr. Ashcroft or later Alberto Gonzales certified anything under oath, it’s a mystery to whom and when. The eavesdropping went on for four years and would probably still be going on if The Times had not revealed it.

…

So Mr. Rockefeller and other senators want to give the companies immunity even if the administration never admits they were involved. This is short-circuiting the legal system. If it is approved, we will then have to hope that the next president will be willing to reveal the truth.

…

This whole nightmare was started by Mr. Bush’s decision to spy without warrants — not because they are hard to get, but because he decided he was above the law. Discouraging that would be a service to the nation.

Funny that they should bring up “service to the nation.”  You might recall that The New York Times sat on the story for over a year before they published it in December 2004.  That’s right, AFTER the 2004 election.

In today’s editorial, they have the audacity to say how this program “would probably still be going on” if they had not revealed it.  They also argue that Bush’s wiretapping program was illegal, so the Senate should not vote to circumvent the legal system by granting immunity to the telecommunications companies involved.  If the Senate does pass the bill and Bush is not held accountable as he should be, then they “hope that the next president will be willing to reveal the truth.”

Had The New York Times released the story before a very close 2004 election, we might already be beyond “hoping.”  We might already have a new president, and he probably would have revealed the truth.

The New York Times failed in its service to the nation by not reporting the story in time for the people of this country to assimilate it and factor it into their choice for president in November 2004.  The Times was complicit in allowing the illegal wiretapping program to continue on unchecked for a whole year after they found out about it, and they are disingenuous now because they do not admit that they were part of the very problem they addressed in today’s editorial.

P.S.  If you want the lowdown on why Jay Rockefeller joined sides with The Dark Lord to undermine our civil liberties, read Glenn Greenwald.