Telecom companies already have amnesty. If they were acting in good faith that their activities were legal. So why is Congress working to give them additional amnesty?
Read the latest from Glenn Greenwald, where he interviews one of the lawyers suing AT & T. The facts of the case make a devastating argument against granting Congressional Amnesty, and they raise questions about the Democrats enabling behavior.
If the Democrats roll over on telecom amnesty, which it appears they're trying to do, it will be a travesty of justice. Literally.
The truth of the matter is: the telecoms already have amnesty provisions for good faith actions. A Federal judge has ruled they were NOT acting in good faith. And there is evidence, which the phone companies have admitted is true, of wholesale monitoring of all Internet communications of millions of people.
There will be a judicial ruling, assuming your case goes forward, as to whether or not the activities the telecoms engaged in, in concert with the Bush administration, actually broke the law?
CC: Yes - and that I think is tremendously important even if we don't end up knowing every nook and cranny of what the Government has been doing.
The FISA law really makes it illegal for the phone companies to give this information to the Government, and what the Government does with it afterwards isn't really relevant to our claim.
We have evidence of an NSA-controlled room in the Folsom Street AT&T facilities in San Francisco. We have evidence that AT&T diverted copies of everyone's Internet traffic into that room. And we know that there's very sophisticated equipment in that room that is capable of doing real-time analysis of the Internet traffic that is getting routed into there.
....
as we've been talking to members of Congress about the immunity provision, as the amnesty provision has been moving to Congress, it's shocking to me that they don't know what Mr. Klein has told a federal judge.
It's been on Frontline, and it was on a whole bunch of things -- you've been talking about it -- but there's a sense that members of Congress don't understand the kind of wholesale dragnet surveillance that Mr. Klein's evidence demonstrates . . . It's undisputed, this evidence. They have never said that Mr. Klein is lying or that the documents are phony.
To the contrary, AT&T itself said they were all true and were trying to argue that they were their trade secrets and we should have to give them all back. It's undisputed evidence and it is surprising that Congressional members still don't know about it and haven't asked Mr. Klein to come tell them himself.
And finally, what I think should be one of the strongest talking points going forward for progressives (That's why I put it in the title of this diary. My emphasis below):
the FISA law already has very broad immunities for the telecoms, and if it was the case that they were acting in good faith with an honest belief that what they were being asked to do was legal, then they would already have immunity, and they don't need an additional immunity from Congress for that.
And it's also the case that they made all these arguments to Judge Walker and Judge Walker's decision on this addresses those arguments very directly -- he said no reasonable phone company in the position of AT&T could have thought that what they were being asked to do was legal. It is not the case that this phone company could have believed that the wholesale surveillance of millions of its customers for five years, six years and counting, could be legal under the law.
These lawsuits represent the one chance, in the face of a passive Congress, for us to find out the truth about the Bush/Cheney spying programs. And yet the Congress, strangely, is about to vote to make sure the truth doesn't come out. Strange, isn't it? Why could that be? Personally, I think there's something embarassing in here for Democrats, and they'd rather not let it get out. At least, unless they're forced to.
But that's just speculation on my part. Please read up on the facts, and I'm curious if people agree that there's a strong message in "The telecoms already have an amnesty provision".