Dan Gillmor: Blog

Firedoglake: The FISA bill passed by the Senate is a disgrace. By legalizing warrantless spying on Americans and granting retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, the Senate seeks to ensure that the Bush administration’s illegal spying programs are never investigated or subjected to the rule of law. The Senate bill is a profound betrayal of the votes of millions of Americans who voted in 2006 to put Democrats in control of Congress in order to increase, not eliminate, checks and oversight on this administration, and to restore the rule of law to our country.

The above link goes to an online petition that you will want to look at, and perhaps sign.

It is frightening to watch our elected officials systematically shred the Bill of Rights. Now they’ve given a free pass to a president and his lapdog telecommunications companies that deliberately, knowingly broke the law to vastly expand government surveillance of U.S. citizens in their own homes and businesses — we still don’t have a clue how widespread this practice was, or remains — without even the pretense of a warrant or honoring explicit legal prohibitions against such acts.

Glenn Greenwald summed it up well:

What were the consequences for the President for having broken the law so deliberately and transparently? Absolutely nothing. To the contrary, the Senate is about to enact a bill which has two simple purposes: (1) to render retroactively legal the President’s illegal spying program by legalizing its crux: warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and (2) to stifle forever the sole remaining avenue for finding out what the Government did and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its legality: namely, the lawsuits brought against the co-conspiring telecoms. In other words, the only steps taken by our political class upon exposure by the NYT of this profound lawbreaking is to endorse it all and then suppress any and all efforts to investigate it and subject it to the rule of law.

No one who cares about national security — and that includes people who oppose this abdication of duty by the senators — has ever opposed surveillance on actual terrorists or suspects. A system in place for several decades has ensured timely surveillance, and after the fact approval by a special court (a rubber stamp, for the most part). But it has at least ensured that Americans aren’t spied upon by their government without any oversight by anyone.

Yesterday’s majority comprises people who no longer believe that liberty matters. They do believe that power is all, and they and their friends hold it at the moment. They are people who believe that the rest of us answer to increasingly draconian laws and the people at the top answer to no one but themselves. This line of thinking appears to apply almost universally in the Republican party, and widely among elected Democrats.

Not a single Republican — what bogus “conservatism” they practice — voted to hold these companies, never mind the lawless administration, responsible for their lawbreaking; instead Republican senators, and a crew of Democrats who followed like the political cowards they have become, voted to make the criminal behavior legal. John McCain voted against an amendment that would have taken away this retroactive immunity for criminal corporations. Obama voted for the amendment but didn’t vote on the final bill. Clinton was entirely absent; she has little credibility on civil liberties in any case.

I wonder if people who call themselves conservatives are comfortable about having given this kind of power to a President Obama. Possibly, because they probably believe his actual honor will prevent him from abusing it against them. Do they rely on the same notions regarding a President Hillary Clinton, who may soon enough be wielding this power in a brutal fashion against her many enemies, not just terrorism suspects? She is at least as ruthless, I suspect, as Bush, Cheney and their collaborators. For all the wrong reasons, they may come to regret their lockstep dismantling of civil liberties during the current administration.

There are few heroes in this sad tale. One semi-heroic organization is the New York Times, which broke the story about this lawbreaking but held it, at the fervent request of the Bush administration, for more than a year — a story it knew about during the 2004 campaign but kept under wraps until after Bush had won another term in office. For all that, right-wing critics called for the newspaper’s prosecution.

The other hero is Connecticut’s Democratic senator, Chris Dodd, who made restoring presidential lawfulness a centerpiece of his failed campaign for the nomination and who fought this bill, hard. He is a champion of liberty, a true one.

Now it’s up to the House of Representatives to hold firm on at least keeping corporate America halfway honest. It’s too likely that the Democrats there will fold as well, but let’s hope for the best.

The first step toward a police state is to create a surveillance state, and to let the powerful collaborators in this practice break laws with impunity. We are now moving down a path that should make true patriots fear for the future of the republic.

Couched in bogus language like “waterboarding,” a torture technique that this country used to convict Japanese soldiers of war crimes after World War II, our government has made it official that we feel free to torture people.

This is un-American. But it’s just one more example of the corruption of this nation in the past few years.

And it will come back to haunt us. We have just given permission to the rest of the world to torture Americans if they choose.

We should be ashamed. Too many of us are not.

The Citizen Media Law Project has launched the first iteration of its Legal Guide, which

addresses the legal issues you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues. You can search by keyword, browse by state, browse by section, or simply jump right in.

This is prodigious work by David Ardia, Sam Bayard and a team of interns at Harvard Law School. Congratulations to all.

BBC: Afghan senate backs death penalty. Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament has issued a statement backing a death sentence for a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan. Pervez Kambakhsh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge. The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case.

This case shocks the conscience. Journalists — all of us — should be trying hard to stop this outrage.

If Afghanistan kills this man it will lose support from people who care about liberty, and at a time when it most needs that support. Surely Americans will ask themselves why our soldiers are dying to preserve such a loathsome regime. I know I will.

Anonymous Liberal: Bill Clinton’s Selfish Myopia: I sincerely hope that Obama is able to overcome the Clintons’ cynical and destructive attempts to marginalize his impressive victory today and make this a campaign about race. If he’s not, Bill Clinton may one day have to grapple with the reality that he personally set back a lot of the goals he’d spent his life fighting for, all in a myopic attempt to get his wife elected president.

The panic that has hit world financial markets created an undercurrent of worry at the DLD conference in Munich. A most telling panel featured investors, who were plainly worried. And only one of had had much good to say about the immediate future for the United States.

America has borrowed and faked its way into a huge financial hole. The so-called twin deficits of the foreign-trade current account and federal budget are only two of at least five deficits. The other obvious ones: the housing bubble’s deflation, leaving borrowers and financial institutions (and ultimately taxpayers) deeply in the hole; the credit-card crunch that is seeing a big jump in defaults and late payments; and the utter lack of savings in the U.S.

We face a generation of trouble in America. Panic is the wrong response, because it’ll only make things worse. But anyone who’s not fretting about this is oblivious to reality. It’s going to get very, very rough in the near term.

Glenn Greenwald accurately explains the grotesque result of laws that seek to curb that amorphous problem of “hate speech” — a concept that turns free speech on its head. And unlike many of his colleagues on the political left, Greenwald explains why he’s defending people whose speech frequently deserves contempt:

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing “offensive” or “insulting” or “wrong” political ideas. The mere existence of the “investigation,” interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

How many times can we say this? If you care about your own free speech rights, you must defend the rights of people whose speech makes your blood boil.

In order to vote in next month’s primary in Arizona, my new official residence, I have had to declare a party affiliation. What a travesty.

I’m independent, and have voted for people from both major parties and several minor ones. I do lean left on many issues, which tends to lead me to more Democrats — though the current Democratic Party is in many ways just a me-too version of the Republicans.

In any event, I registered as a Democrat in Arizona. As soon as the primary is finished I plan to remove that designation. In some future primary I’ll be a Republican, no doubt.

The candidates get to decide how to triangulate the voters. Why can’t we voters triangulate the candidates? Some system.

Moe Lane at Red State, a right-wing blog, gets it precisely and depressingly right in “Sweet Jeebus, is there nobody in the Democratic Party who understands national party unity?”

Let me put this in very stark terms: there is no Democratic Party in Congress. There are, instead, a bare majority of Congressmen and Senators who have banded together in order to gather power, influence, and money. Which is fine, as far as it goes - except that they are not actually using any of the resources that they are gathering to benefit the groups and causes who worked to put them in power. At best they are operating under terms of enlightened self-interest, albeit a very small-minded version of it: they are keeping their geographical constituents as sweet as is necessary to ensure re-election. And the Republicans know all of this, and will use this knowledge to pass the bills that we feel the country needs to thrive. And all of this is why 2007 was such a horrible legislative year for the progressive movement - and why 2008 will be no better for them.

There are any number of reasons for the pathetic approval ratings for Congress. This is the clearest explanation I’ve seen yet.

The Democrats not only have no collective spine (nor, obviously, much in the way of individual courage), but they have no serious principles for governing. I now suspect they will lose their majority next year.

Why? Because the Democrats’ utter failure to do their job is going to spur more third-party efforts, especially if Hilary Clinton is nominated for president. The likes of Ralph Nader, who remains one of the principal causes of George Bush’s presidency, will have a more convincing argument than in the past that there is not sufficient different between the parties to care which governs. This is dangerous nonsense, of course, but the Democrats are asking for such treatment. Does America deserve such non-leadership? Maybe not, but that’s where we’re heading.

Glenn Greenwald: Whether it’s the war in Iraq or illegal surveillance or the abolition of habeas corpus and now the systematic use of torture, it’s the Bush administration that conceived of the policies, implemented them and presided over their corrupt application. But it’s Congressional Democrats at the leadership level who were the key allies and enablers, never getting their hands dirty with implementation — and thus feigning theatrical, impotent outrage once each abuse was publicly exposed — but nonetheless working feverishly the entire time to enable all of it every step of the way.

When the historians mark turning points in America’s decline, these deeds will be key evidence.

Also, from Andrew Sullivan:

This is not to say that there is no difference between the parties, with the GOP shamefully defending war crimes the United States once prosecuted as such. The Democrats, for the most part, have been their usual selves on this: still in a defensive crouch against any notion that they might be soft on terror, and implicitly adopting the fallacious logic that somehow opposing torture means being soft on terror. Au contraire. Torture has weakened the West’s war against barbarism by blurring the critical lines needed to win the long war, and by injecting into intelligence the falsehoods, exaggerations and lies that always come from the tortured.

And, finally, it’s worth noting that not a single U.S. newspaper that I can find is referring to what was on the tapes in accurate language. All are using the administration’s “harsh interrogation techniques” lingo or something close to that. Folks, it’s torture. Period. We prosecuted Japanese soldiers for war crimes — and got convictions — for exactly this stuff. The Independent in London is one of the non-U.S. papers telling it honestly in an article entitles, “Call for criminal inquiry as CIA destroys torture tapes” — why won’t our own press? Why won’t even one paper?

The same reason that Democrats are so spineless? Is there any other explanation?