1115.org

Yesterday, the Senate — by a vote of 67 to 31 — proudly went on record as supporting retroactive immunity for the telecoms which knowingly agreed to break the law governing wiretapping their customers just because the Bush regime said pretty please when they asked them to break the law.

As I wrote on January 25th:

These telecoms knowingly cooperated with the Bush regime in illegal wiretapping of their customers. They started down this road well before 9/11.

What possible excuse can there be for granting them blanket immunity for this illegal conduct? (In case you are tempted to entertain any, the fact sheet on Sen. Russ Feingold’s web page that I linked to yesterday will do a fine job of disabusing you of any such notion.)

The following 18 Democratic Senators voted with the Republicans anyway to grant retroactive immunity to the telecoms: Evan Bayh (D-IA), Tom Carper (D-DE), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Ken Salazar (D-CO), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Jim Webb (D-VA).

Members of the Senate have one more opportunity today to show us what they’re really made of, to show us how firmly and deeply they are in Bush’s camp (and his back pocket) when it comes to trampling on civil liberties and on our traditional values as a society, to show us how much or how little they care about those civil liberties and those traditional values:

A spending bill to finance the nation’s intelligence efforts went to conference after the House and Senate versions were slightly different, and while there, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) added an important provision — mandating one interrogation standard for the entire U.S. government. The Feinstein measure requires the intelligence community to abide by the same interrogation standards articulated in the Army Field Manual, which, of course, prohibit torture.

Under Senate rules in place for this debate, Dems will need 60 votes to pass the bill, and a handful of Republicans, including Hagel and Snowe, have said they’ll vote with the majority, despite the White House’s opposition to applying Army Field Manual standards to the intelligence community.

If anybody thinks the bill will actually get the 60 votes necessary to pass, I stand ready to take your money.