1115.org

The allegation that telephone companies shared data about the phone calls and Internet usage of American citizens with the government became public in 2006. USA Today broke the story in May. The allegation was that the telcos did this out of patriotic fervor, without being served with anything approximating a legal warrant (although money may have changed hands too). USA Today alleged that the NSA launched this “program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks”. (Hold that thought for now; I will return to it in a “Part 2″ post later in the day.)

This has, of course, been in the news again recently, due to President Bush’s strong push to include retroactive immunity for telcos in the new FISA bill currently making its way through Congress. That would be the most ultra-Christian kind of forgiveness — blanket absolution for unspecified and unknown prior acts of patriotic fervor. All their sins washed away, without even the formality of confession. Very much the contrary, actually. (Presumably, not even John McCain thinks we are such a Christian nation.)

Three of the big telcos were alleged sinners: AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. One was not: Qwest.

Two of those alleged sinners (Verizon and BellSouth) stoutly denied furnishing the NSA with any customer data. In the strangest possible words. After staying unaccountably silent for more than four days.

The third pretty much kept its mouth shut.

So this whole retroactive immunity thing is pretty damn weird. Bush wants Congress to forgive the telcos for nobody-knows-what-exactly, which the telcos have already denied doing. The presidential plea is: forgive them for doing what they say they did not do. Oh, and anything else besides that may not have leaked out yet. Which could be any damn violation of any damn thing.

For some reason, the Democratic response to these ludicrous suggestions from the Immunity-dispenser-in- chief has not been a very firm: “Go to bloody hell, you effing madman, you’re out of your everloving mind!” There have been rumors that the Senate version of the bill may include immunity. There have been rumors that the Democrats are willing to offer immunity in exchange for information about what the hell the telcos got up to with the NSA. And Reid-Pelosi, to their eternal shame, have not put those rumors to rest.

Has the Democratic party, at this point, managed to lose its way as comprehensively, as irretrievably as the Republican party has? If so, what hope can there possibly be of getting back to the country we used to be, just seven years ago?

Who shall we bribe next to allow us to exercise oversight over government fraud and waste and just plain skullduggery? Shall we give Blackwater USA (and its contractors) retroactive immunity for all acts of wrongful killing and murder (and everything else besides), in exchange for telling us how thoroughly screwed up the State Dept.’s oversight of contractors has been? Shall we give First Kuwaiti retroactive immunity for all acts of employment of slave labor in the construction of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad (and everything else besides), in exchange for providing Henry Waxman a list of all the construction defects in the embassy (so that we can have them fixed)? Shall we give Bush-and-Bushies retroactive immunity for all crimes they may have committed in office, in exchange for Bush publicly confessing: “We do, too, torture, suckers!”?

Why the hell not?