1115.org

The Rocky Mountain News had a strange story yesterday, which has been picked up and re-broadcast by a couple of big blogs.

The opening sentence of the story is:

The National Security Agency and other government agencies retaliated against Qwest because the Denver telco refused to go along with a phone spying program, documents released Wednesday suggest.

When I read the story, I mentally watered it down to: convicted insider trader and former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio claimed at his trial that Qwest was retaliated against for refusing to go along with an NSA surveillance program. I’m not sure at all how convincing the evidence for retaliation can be considered:

Nacchio was convicted last spring on 19 counts of insider trading for $52 million of stock sales in April and May 2001, and sentenced to six years in prison. He’s free pending appeal.

The partially redacted documents were filed under seal before, during and after Nacchio’s trial. They were released Wednesday.

Nacchio planned to demonstrate at trial that he had a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., to discuss a $100 million project. According to the documents, another topic also was discussed at that meeting, one with which Nacchio refused to comply.

The topic itself is redacted each time it appears in the hundreds of pages of documents, but there is mention of Nacchio believing the request was both inappropriate and illegal, and repeatedly refusing to go along with it.

The NSA contract was awarded in July 2001 to companies other than Qwest.

They had some (preliminary?) discussions about a $100 million project. The contract was awarded to other companies. And then there’s:

Nacchio also asserts Qwest was in line to build a $2 billion private government network called GovNet and do other government business, including a network between the U.S. and South America.

The documents maintain that Nacchio met with top government officials, including President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza (sic) Rice in 2000 and early 2001 to discuss how to protect the government’s communications network.

They portray U.S. government officials, even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, worried about a “Pearl Harbor” type of attack on the Internet. As early as 1997, a three-star general talked to Nacchio about using Qwest’s new fiber-optic network for government purposes, according to the defense.
[…]
Nacchio was on a Bush-appointed national security telecommunications advisory panel. In March 2001, then-counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke asked the panel if it would be possible to build a private network for the government to protect it from cyberwarfare.

Nacchio piped up: “I already built this network twice” for other government agencies. The defense asserts Nacchio believed Qwest would be asked to build the network and that it could do so in six months.

But the contract didn’t materialize.

If I were a juror and they presented that to me as a retaliation argument, I would have a hard time persuading myself that they had created a reasonable doubt in my mind.

ThinkProgress posted this story with the headline “NSA punishes Qwest for refusing to spy on Americans.” The Carpetbagger Report went with the more temperate “Did the NSA retaliate against Qwest?“.

But the real story, of course, seems to be something else entirely. If Nacchio can be trusted, then George Bush’s government was engaging in NSA surveillance of American citizens’ phone calls and internet usage well before al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The request that Nacchio repeatedly refused to go along with, because he believed it was both inappropriate and illegal, was made in February 2001.

Presumably, when AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth rolled over and gave the NSA exactly what it asked for in terms of customer records, they too were doing this well before 9/11. So their conduct cannot even be explained away as resulting from the myopic “patriotic” fervor that afflicted so many American citizens and corporations in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

So far the entire public discussion of retroactive immunity has been conducted under the assumption that we were addressing post-9/11 corporate behavior. Does it not put an entirely different cast on things, if it is indeed pre-9/11 behavior? Shouldn’t we find out before the Reids and Pelosis of this world agree to furnish retroactive immunity?