Yesterday at his press conference President Bush said he'd found "common ground" with Senate Dems on telecommunications company immunity. It seemed odd that Bush would break this story, which had not really been confirmed elsewhere, ahead of today's Senate Intelligence Committee reporting of the bill. I didn't see any traffic on this subject after the Bush press conference, but Senator Dodd responded to Bush's comments yesterday with this statement:
"While the President may think that it's right to offer immunity to those who break the law and violate the right to privacy of thousands of law-abiding Americans, I want to assure him it is not a value we have in common and I hope the same can be said of my fellow Democrats in the Senate.
"For too long we have failed to respect the rule of law and failed to protect our fundamental civil liberties. I will do what I can to see to it that no telecommunications giant that was complicit in this Administration's assault on the Constitution is given a get-out-of-jail-free card."
Today, however, both the Washington Post and New York Times confirms that the Senate Intel Committee has indeed found common ground with the Bush administration on telecom immunity. Eric Lichtblau of the Times reports:
Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday with the Bush administration that would give telephone carriers legal immunity for any role they played in the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Congressional official said Wednesday.
Senators this week began reviewing classified documents related to the participation of the telephone carriers in the security agency program and came away from that early review convinced that the companies had "acted in good faith" in cooperating with what they believed was a legal and presidentially authorized program and that they should not be punished through civil litigation for their roles, the official said.
As part of legislation on the security agency's wiretapping authorities, the White House has been pushing hard for weeks to get immunity for the telecommunications companies in discussions with Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican.
Glenn Greenwald has documented that the actions by companies like AT&T are currently being reviewed by the courts and, in one case, has already rejected the "good faith" defense.
The question of whether the telecoms acted in "good faith" in allowing warrantless government spying on their customers is already pending before a court of law. In fact, that is one of the central issues in the current lawsuits -- one that AT&T has already lost in a federal court.
Thus Bush and the Senate appear to be acting in a way that will cut off ongoing judicial review of this matter and inject themselves in direct contravention of what the law has said. This is not how the rule of law is supposed to work.
Moreover, the judicial path to review these companies' actions allows both sides of the argument to be presented. As it stands now, the Senate Intelligence Committee has reviewed the side of the Bush administration and telecommunications companies who are under scrutiny for breaking the law. The virtue of standing by and for the law is that it allows proper adjudication of the actions that have been taken and does not presume to know what is right and wrong. Leave it up to the courts to figure out what happened and under what circumstances. If companies did act in "good faith," as the Senate Intel Committee and Bush administration hold, then they have nothing to fear about letting America's judicial system resolve the matter at hand.
UPDATE:
Big Tent Democrat of MyDD has highlighted Dodd's leadership on the rule of law and Bush's push for telecom amnesty.
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