MR. DODD GOES TO WASHINGTON
In my youth, I watched Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In it, against enormous odds, a young congressman played by Jimmy Stewart triumphed over that body’s corruption and indifference to the U.S. Constitution. I felt truly inspired at being an American. But growing up, after more than 50 years of reporting on Congress, I never expected that movie to become real.
On December 17, 2007, it became real. Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut successfully stopped the Bush Administration’s fierce attempt to push through a bill that would give amnesty from prosecution to the huge telecommunications companies that have been—and still are—partners with the President and the National Security Administration in unlawful wiretapping and other eavesdropping on millions of us in pursuit of links to terrorism.
Like Jimmy Stewart, Dodd stayed on the floor for some ten hours to stymie Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), who was willing to accede to Bush’s “compromise” Foreign Intelligence Service Act “reform” bill that would let the telecommunications companies off the hook.
Also capitulating to Bush was Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Said Caroline Frederickson, the ACLU’s admirably tough legislative director on National Public Radio (October 18, 2007): “The Democrats seem consistently worried. Every time the President mentions the word terrorism, they fall down and roll over.”
Chris Dodd—author of the Restoring the Constitution Act, ignored by the Senate—wouldn’t roll. “For the last six years,” he said while blocking the Bush Administration deal, “our largest communications companies have been spying on their own American customers. 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 database of enormous scale and scope.”
Then, without a touch of exaggeration, Chris Dodd added that in his long career in public office, he has never seen a President of the United States with “contempt of the rule of law equal to this.”
Two days later and not at all surprisingly, our new attorney general, Michael Mukasey (far more dangerous than Alberto Gonzales because he is light-years smarter and more cunning), told an American Bar Association panel in Washington that these telecom giants must be protected from lawsuits by us citizens that would “run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Good Lord, laments Mukasey, they “face bankruptcy, they face loss of reputation, they face millions of dollars in legal fees—all because they are alleged to have helped the government in obtaining intelligence information after 9/11.” They were good soldiers.
Alleged to have helped the government? The evidence against the cooperative telecommunication companies is so clear that so far some lower court lawsuits have been silenced by the government, which claims the “state secrets” privilege. Thus, the evidence is sealed from us.
Fighting forcefully against these companies is the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Hepting v. AT&T, which may yet tear down the “state secrets” wall. On the day Dodd stopped Bush, Cheney, Reid and Rockefeller—December 17, 2007—EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohen said, “The biggest hero today is Senator Dodd, who recognized the profound Constitutional issues at stake in [the government’s] taking this key issue away from the courts, and [Dodd] refused to let it be rammed trough the Senate without a fight.”
With the Senate back in session, Dodd continues his fight. Even if he gets enough of his colleagues—and some Republican senators who fear the growing outrage of their constituents, many of whom, as in the Jimmy Stewart movie, bombarded the Senate in support of Dodd’s battle—George W. Bush vows to veto any FISA “reform” bill that does not grant immunity to the telecommunications companies.
Since the Roberts-Bush Supreme Court is far from a notable defender of our Constitutional liberties, unless the next President and Congress protect us from immersion into the quicksand of these databases provided to the government by the communication companies, here is what we’re in for: Former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that, while in its employ, he found a secret room in which the National Security Administration was tapping into the fiber optic cables. This made George W. Bush the master spy of all time.
On National Public Radio (November 7, 2007), whistleblower Klein described what he had already told the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “It’s not just AT&T’s traffic going through these cables, because these cables connected AT&T’s network with other networks like Sprint, Qwest, Global Crossing, UUNet. … These cables went through what they called a splitter…a device that just copies the entire data without any selection going on. So it’s a complete copy of the data stream.”
And that unfiltered stream can be sent to the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, and state and local police and intelligence agencies—without your knowing anything of what’s in that stream about you.
George Orwell was a piker. If he were still with us, he’d have to rewrite 1984. But as for us now, have any of the Presidential candidates of either party—except for Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, who have dropped out for lack of support from civil libertarians—shown any alarmed interest in preserving even part of what Justice Louis Brandeis insisted is the most basic of all our rights: “the right to be left alone”?
Tags: Chris Dodd, Nat Hentoff