House Dems capitulate to Bush, allowing illegal spying of Americans

Un-fucking-believeable. Steny Hoyer (who's recently gotten over $12,000 from the telecoms) has reached a "compromise" bill that would grant retroactive immunity for the telecoms and the Bush administration for illegally spying on our phone calls. If this passes, the wording seems to show that we CANNOT pass another law next year repealing this. So we can NEVER hold Bush accountable in a court of law for violating the Constitution. He gets off scot free.

Thanks to Steny Hoyer. A "Democrat". Constitutional law expert Glenn Greenwald explains just how bad this is.

The provision granting amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, Title VIII, has the exact Orwellian title it should have: "Protection of Persons Assisting the Government." Section 802(a) provides:

[A] civil action may not lie or be maintained in a Federal or State court against any person for providing assistance to an element of the intelligence community, and shall be properly dismissed, if the Attorney General certifies to the district court of the United States in which such action is pending that . . . (4) the assistance alleged to have been provided . . . was --

(A) in connection with intelligence activity involving communications that was (i) authorized by the President during the period beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on January 17, 2007 and (ii) designed to prevent or detect a terrorist attack, or activities in preparation of a terrorist attack, against the United States" and

(B) the subject of a written request or directive . . . indicating that the activity was (i) authorized by the President; and (ii) determined to be lawful.

So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words -- the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists -- and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.

That's the "compromise" Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now -- according to very credible reports -- pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It's full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we'll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it -- the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.

And for those of you who think Obama will do anything about this, because he could definitely stop the bill in its tracks if he applies pressure on the House to do so, Glenn also shows it looks like Obama will do nothing about this, and will let Bush get away with this.