With Liberty and Justice for Some by Glenn Greenwald Page B

essentially legitimized the president’s warrantless spying program. The only concession to the fact that the Democrats had enacted the new law with such haste—Senator Chris Dodd told me in an interview the day after the vote that senators had no idea why the new provisions were warranted but were “not secure enough in their own beliefs” to object—was a “sunset” provision they inserted into the bill, which called for the new regulations to expire in six months. The plan was that the six-month period would give Congress time to craft a new, permanent eavesdropping bill that would be considered in a more deliberative manner.
    The hurried FISA revision accomplished one of the Bush administration’s goals: eliminating the need for warrants for future eavesdropping. But what about the liability of the telecoms who had illegally helped them over the previous years? It was later reported by numerous Senate sources that during the  frenzied campaign of pressure, the Bush administration had several times raised the issue of immunity for telecoms, but there was simply too little time for it to be drafted and included in the new bill. The White House made clear to congressional Democrats, however, that inclusion of telecom immunity in the permanent eavesdropping bill would be a nonnegotiable condition.
    Indeed, as soon as the temporary six-month bill was passed in early August, the White House issued a statement unveiling, for the first time in public, a demand for full retroactive legal immunity—both criminal and civil—for all telecommunications companies that had participated in the warrantless eavesdropping program. The demand for telecom immunity was spelled out in the very first paragraph of the press release posted on the official White House Web site:
    Our Work Is Not Done—This Act Is A Temporary, Narrowly Focused Statute To Deal With The Most Immediate Needs Of The Intelligence Community To Protect The Country. When Congress returns in September, the Intelligence Committees and leaders in both parties will need to complete work on the comprehensive reforms requested by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, including the important issues of providing meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
     
    That same month, McConnell gave an interview in which he finally unveiled the real impetus behind his op-ed call for a “modernized” FISA bill. Like the White House press release, McConnell expressly stated for the first time in public that the new FISA bill must include retroactive immunity for telecoms that had participated in the administration’s illegal eavesdropping activities.
    McConnell began by unintentionally providing an unusually clear and straightforward summary of federal law regarding eavesdropping on Americans by the U.S. government—unusually clear in that it highlighted how patently illegal Bush’s domestic spying activities had been. McConnell explained:
    The reason that the FISA law was passed in 1978 was an arrangement was worked out between the Congress and the administration, we did not want to allow this community to conduct surveillance, electronic surveillance, of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required.
     
    What McConnell euphemistically referred to as an “arrangement…worked out between the Congress and the administration” is what most people call a “federal law.” But McConnell’s basic point—that FISA required a warrant to conduct surveillance of Americans—was exactly correct. Despite that, McConnell now insisted that the bill he expected Congress to pass would vest full immunity in the administration’s “private partners” who had broken that law. The real goal of the new bill, he explained, was to force the termination of the lawsuits that were proceeding in court against the telecoms.
    The government’s “terrorist