Telecommunications companies won a skirmish in the Senate on Monday as a bill to protect them from lawsuits for cooperating with the Bush administration's eavesdropping programs easily overcame a procedural hurdle.
By 76 to 10, with Democrats divided, the Senate voted to advance the bill for consideration. A measure to block it, which was led by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut fell short, as those who wanted the bill to reach the floor got 16 votes more than the 60 needed to achieve that goal.
What happens next is not immediately clear. A different bill, which would not grant immunity to the companies, was also expected to be introduced by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Judiciary Committee. And whatever bill emerges from the Senate may have to be reconciled with a House version that does not include immunity.
The measures are meant to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legislation that has deeply divided the White House and Capitol Hill and members of the House and Senate. Some action is necessary fairly soon, because the current FISA law expires in February.
In his unsuccessful bid to block the legislation, Senator Dodd urged his colleagues not to immunize the telecommunications industry for cooperating with the National Security Agency's secret program of eavesdropping without warrants. The program was disclosed late in 2005 by The New York Times.
"For the last six years, our largest telecommunications companies have been spying on their own American customers," Dodd said. "Secretly and without a warrant, they delivered to the federal government the private, domestic communications records of millions of Americans — records this administration has compiled into a data base of enormous scale and scope."
"I have seen six presidents — six in the White House — and I have never seen a contempt for the rule of law equal to this," Dodd asserted....
...But supporters of the administration's program of surveillance without warrants have described it as necessary to protect Americans from terrorists, and they insist the program strikes a sensible balance between national security and personal
liberty....
...Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he would offer an amendment that would substitute the U.S. government as defendant in lawsuits, in place of the companies.
"The telephone companies have, I believe, acted as good citizens," Specter said.
President George W. Bush has threatened to veto any measure that does not grant immunity to the companies.The House version of the legislation, enacted a month ago, was approved by 227
to 189, or dozens of "yes" votes short of the two-thirds needed to overcome a
presidential veto.
The "...National Security Agency asked Qwest to allow it to conduct electronic surveillance without a court order in February 2001, six months before the Sept. 11 attacks." Onnesha Roychoudhuri provides an excellent documentation of the Qwest affair on TruthDig.
Warrantless, electronic surveillance of all Americans for 7 months prior to 9/11 sure didn't seem to protect Americans from "terrorism" in 2001. Since the Bush Administration has declared that 9/11 was such a surprise ... how is it that they knew to conduct warrantless wiretapping on all of America 7 months prior to 9/11? What spurred that action? ... Probably the same mysterious force of the universe that caused Bush to submit NSPD-1 (National Security Policy Directive) mere weeks after his 2001 inauguration, severing all official channels of information sharing between the CIA, FBI, etc., on the National Security Council, and instead forcing all "info sharing" through his staff, which, strangely, was never shared.
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