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Senator Christopher J. Dodd Thursday promised to use a senator’s power to put a “hold” on pending legislation to block President Bush’s deal with other Senate Democrats to give telephone carriers legal immunity for any role they played in the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program on the private phone calls and emails of Americans.
President Bush said Wednesday that he had found “common ground” with Congress on giving immunity to the “the phone companies that allegedly helped [his administration]” procure the telephone records of thousands of American citizens without judicial authorization and in violation of the Constitution.
The ACLU of Connecticut is one of several state affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union that have challenged the telephone companies’ disclosing the information without court warrant. All the cases have been consolidated in a suit now pending in San Francisco federal court. The proposed deal would obviate those court actions.
“While the President may think that it's right to offer immunity to those who break the law and violate the right to privacy of thousands of law-abiding Americans,” Dodd said in a statement, “I want to assure him it is not a value we have in common and I hope the same can be said of my fellow Democrats in the Senate.
“For too long we have failed to respect the rule of law and failed to protect our fundamental civil liberties. I will do what I can to see to it that no telecommunications giant that was complicit in this Administration's assault on the Constitution is given a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Dodd said.
The proposed immunity provision is part of a tentative agreement to extend, with modifications, a law passed earlier this year authorizing the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program.
The New York Times reported that “Senators this week began reviewing classified documents related to the participation of the telephone carriers in the security agency program and came away from that early review convinced that the companies had ‘acted in good faith’ in cooperating with what they believed was a legal and presidentially authorized program and that they should not be punished through civil litigation for their roles.”
In discussions with Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican, the White House had been pushing for weeks to get immunity for the telecommunications companies.
The draft agreement between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Bush administration would reportedly also include a greater role for FISA, the secret intelligence court, in overseeing and approving methods of wiretapping used by the security agency. But it has been unclear whether the toughened civil liberties safeguards will go far enough to mollify senators on the Senator Judiciary Committee, who will also review the plan once the intelligence panel finishes its work.
Read more on the ACLU’s position: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/32207prs20071017.html
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