I thought innocent people had nothing to fear?
March 18th, 2008, 6:20 am · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
Director of National Intelligence Michael Mukasey to House Speaker Pelosi last week on the need to give legal immunity to telecoms who give the government our phone records: “Even prior to the expiration of the Protect America Act, we experienced significant difficulties in working with private sector companies because of the continued failure to provide liability protection for such companies.”
As I’ve said before, if the corporations were obeying the law, why would there be a problem? And if they’re not obeying the law, why should they be given immunity?
Of course, Mukasey has also asserted that the White House had no choice but to break the laws requiring warrants for intelligence wiretaps because it’s just too much darn paperwork and they might not be able to put a wiretap in place fast enough. I’ve never heard an explanation why they made no attempt to change these supposedly onerous requirements until after the programm went public.
The House, fortunately, seems to be seeing through Bush flimsy rubber-stamp-my-wishes-or-the-terrorists-will-kill-us rationalizations: The bill that was passed last week doesn’t give telecoms immunity but does allow themselves to show records to a judge to prove that what they were asked to do was within the law.
Of course, Bush has announced he’ll veto this, even if it passes the Senate. Because taking anything to a judge might reveal who the supposed “terrorists” were that the administration has been spying on, and for some reason, Bush just doesn’t want anyone to know. Gee, I wonder why?
