As evidenced by today's Washington Post lead editorial on "FISA Follies," http://www.washingtonpost.com/..., we in the blogosphere have certainly touched a nerve. This was also apparent to me when I called a Congressman yesterday and was told that if I was a blogger, I had to speak with someone other than a staffer . . . who then promptly transferred me to the dead end of voice mail.
The Washington Post lead editorial is really amazing, especially in its admission that bloggers
snarled Senate passage of the latest rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before lawmakers left town for the July 4 recess.
The editorial spares no words when it claims that
the FISA debate hasn't been overpopulated by reasonable people
--that would include Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) (mentioned at the end of the same paragraph), a number of Kossacks, Glenn Greenwald, and other blog rebels.
So we're unreasonable? As a woman, I've certainly heard that tired trope before. But let me tell you what's unreasonable:
Releasing a 140-page bill 24 hours before a scheduled vote, ramming it through the House, and assuming easy and expected passage in the Senate, à la Patriot Act.
The editorial then goes on to say that
the immunity issue has assumed a significance in the legislative process that far exceeds its underlying importance.
Really? Ok, so maybe other parts of the expanded eavesdropping bill are equally alarming because they would protect the President, legalize the extremely illegal spying regime that he secretly ordered in 2001, and allow for mass and untargeted surveillance of Americans' communications. But the telecom amnesty provision is just as repugnant because it would permanently block the lawsuits that would have revealed what Bush did and would have ruled that he broke the law. Moreover, discovery in those suits is our last real hope of revealing the details of the warrantless wiretapping program.
Then the editorial states:
the fact remains that no one can claim with certainty that his or her communications were monitored.
This is flatly wrong. In the Al-Haramain lawsuit, which the Administration has already tried to block with its bogus state secrets privilege, the plaintiffs can actually demonstrate that the government listened to their conversations. How? Because the Treasury Department inadvertently sent the Islamic charity's attorneys an NSA log, classified as "Top Secret," of intercepted calls.
Finally, the icing on the cake of the editorial claims that
retroactive immunity . . .is the least--not the most--important aspect of the complex FISA debate.
The fact that the Washington Post devoted its lead editorial today to trying to counter that notion proves the opposite.