Last night Senator Dodd took to the Senate floor to speak for nearly three hours into the night. At this point, Dodd has spent over twenty hours speaking on the floor of the Senate against retroactive immunity. Sadly, it has not succeeded in convincing his colleagues to stand up with the same degree of spine as he posses.
Below the fold is the full text of Dodd’s remarks last night.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd
Retroactive Immunity/Rule of Law Speech
February 11, 2008
Mr. President:
I rise to urge my colleagues, in the strongest terms I can find, to vote to strip retroactive immunity from this bill, and, if it is not stripped, to vote against cloture. Not only will this bill ratify a domestic spying regime that has already concentrated far too much unaccountable power in the president’s hands; in its current form, it places above the law the telecommunications companies that may have violated the privacy and the trust of millions of Americans. In December, I opposed retroactive immunity on the Senate floor for ten hours. And in the weeks since, I have continued to speak out against it.
Mr. President, unwarranted domestic spying didn’t happen in a panic or short-term emergency, not for a week, or a month, or even a year. If it had, I might not be here today. But the spying went on, relentlessly, for more than five years. And if the press didn’t expose it, I imagine it would still be happening today.
I might not be here, either, if it had been the first offense of a new administration. Maybe not if it had even been the second or the third. I am here today because after offense after offense after offense, my frustration has found its breaking point. I am here today because of a pattern—a pattern of continual abuses against civil liberties and the rule of law. When faced with that pattern, we shouldn’t act in the interest of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. We should act in the interest of the Constitution—because we are, above anything else, its temporary custodians. If these abuses had been committed by a president of my own party, I would have opposed them, just as passionately.
I am here today because of the latest link in that long chain of abuse. It is alleged that giant telecom corporations worked with our government to compile Americans’ private, domestic communications records into a database of enormous scale and scope. Secretly and without a warrant, those corporations are alleged to have spied, on their own American customers.
Here’s only one of the most egregious examples. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Clear, first-hand whistleblower documentary evidence [states]…that for year on end every e-mail, every text message, and every phone call carried over the massive fiber-optic links of sixteen separate companies routed through AT&T’s Internet hub in San Francisco—hundreds of millions of private, domestic communications—have been…copied in their entirety by AT&T and knowingly diverted wholesale by means of multiple “splitters” into a secret room controlled exclusively by the NSA.
The phone calls of millions of Americans diverted into a secret room controlled by the National Security Agency. That allegation still needs to be proven in a court of law; but before that happens, there’s an even simpler question: What do you see in it?
If you only see cables and computers there, the whole thing seems almost harmless. Certainly nothing to get worked up about—a routine security sweep, and a routine piece of legislation authorizing it. If that’s what you see in the NSA’s secret room, I imagine you’ll vote for immunity.
But if you see a vast dragnet for millions of Americans’ private conversations, conducted by a government agency without a warrant—then, I believe, you’ll recognize what’s at stake here. You’ll see that what’s at stake here is the sanctity of the law and the sanctity of our privacy. And you’ll oppose this immunity.
Maybe that sounds overdramatic to some of my colleagues. They’ll ask, “What does it matter, at the end of the day, if a few corporations aren’t sued?” They’ll say, “This is a small issue. This is an isolated case. The law is still safe and sound.”
I find that view profoundly wrong, Mr. President. But I will give them this: As long as they keep this small, they win. As long as they keep this case isolated and technical, they win. As long as it’s about a few lawsuits and nothing more, they win. They are counting on the American people to see nothing bigger here than that.
I am counting on them to see more, and to fear less. So much more is at stake here than a few phone calls, a few companies, a few lawsuits. Equal justice is at stake—justice that makes no exceptions. Openness is at stake—an open debate on security and liberty, and an end to warrantless, groundless spying. Retroactive immunity stands against those principles.
It does not say, “I trust the American people; I trust the courts and judges and juries to come to just decisions.” Retroactive immunity says, “Trust me.”
There are classified documents, we are told, that prove the case for retroactive immunity beyond a shadow of a doubt. But we’re not allowed to see them! I’ve served in this body for 27 years, and I’m not allowed to see them! Neither are a majority of my colleagues. We are left in the dark.
I cannot speak for my colleagues—but I would never take “trust me” for an answer, not even in the best of times.
“Trust me.” It is the offer to hide ourselves in the waiting arms of the rule of men. I can’t put it better than this:
“Trust me” government is government that asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what’s best for us. My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties.
Ronald Reagan spoke those words, in 1980. They are every bit as true today, even if some have chosen to forget them. But times of threat and fear blur our view of transcendent values; and those who would exploit those times urge us to save our skins at any cost.
The rule of law has rarely been so fragile. The rule of law has rarely seemed less compelling. What, after all, does the law give us? It has no parades, no slogans. It lives in books and precedents. It can’t entertain us or captivate us or soothe our deepest fears. When set against everything the rule of men has to offer, the rule of law is mute.
And that is the precise advantage seized upon, in all times, by the law’s enemies. “It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger…from abroad.” James Madison, the father of our Constitution, made that prediction more than two centuries ago. With the passage of this bill, his words would be one step closer to coming true. So it has never been more essential that we lend our voices to the law, and speak on its behalf.
This is our defining question, the question that confronts every generation: The rule of law, or the rule of men? How many times must we get the wrong answer?
To those who say that this is just about a few telecoms, I answer: This is about contempt for the law, large and small.
This is about the Justice Department turning our nation’s highest law enforcement offices into patronage plums, and turning the impartial work of indictments and trials into the machinations of politics.
This is about Alberto Gonzales coming before Congress to give us testimony that was at best, wrong—and at worst, perjury.
This is about Congress handing the president the power to designate any individual he wants an “unlawful enemy combatant,” hold him indefinitely, and take away his right to habeas corpus—the 700-year-old right to challenge your detention. If you think that the Military Commissions Act struck at the heart of the Constitution, you’d be understating things—it struck at the Magna Carta while it was at it.
And if you think that this only threatens a few of us, you should understand that the writ of habeas corpus belongs to all of us—it allows anyone to challenge their detention. Rolling back habeas rights endangers us all: Without a day in court, how can you prove that you’re entitled to a trial? How can you prove that you are innocent? In fact, without a day in court, how can you let anyone know that you have been detained at all?
The Military Commission Act also gave President Bush the power some say he wanted most of all: the power to get information out of suspected terrorists—by almost any means. The power to use evidence potentially gained from torture.
This is about torture—officially-sanctioned torture. As a result of decisions made at the highest levels of our government, America is making itself known to the world with stories like this one: A prisoner at Guantanamo—to take one example out of hundreds— was deprived of sleep over fifty five days, a month and three weeks. Some nights, he was doused with water or blasted with air conditioning. And after week after week of this delirious, shivering wakefulness, on the verge of death from hypothermia, doctors strapped him to a chair—doctors, healers who took the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”—pumped him full of three bags of medical saline, brought him back from death—and sent him back to his interrogators.
To the generation coming of age around the world in this decade, that is America. Not Normandy, not the Marshall Plan, not Nuremberg. Guantanamo.
This is about the CIA destroying tapes containing the evidence of harsh interrogations—about the administration covering its tracks in a way more suited to a banana republic than to the home of freedom.
This is about waterboarding, a technique invented by the Spanish Inquisition, perfected by the Khmer Rouge, and in between, banned—originally banned for excessive cruelty—by the Gestapo!
Waterboarding’s not torture? Listen to the words of Malcolm Nance, a 26-year expert in intelligence and counter-terrorism, a combat veteran, and former Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School. While training American soldiers to resist interrogation, he writes,
I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people….Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word….
It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result…and the obstinacy of the subject.
Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation…usually the person goes into hysterics on the board….When done right it is controlled death.
And in spite of all that, last week the White House declared that waterboarding is not torture, that waterboarding is legal, and that, if it chooses, America will waterboard again.
This is about Michael Mukasey coming before the Senate and defending the president’s power to openly break the law. When he came to the Senate before his confirmation, Mr. Mukasey was asked, bluntly and plainly: “Is waterboarding constitutional?”
He replied with a head-scratching tautology: “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”
Surely we could expect a little more insight from someone so famously well-versed in national security law! But Mr. Mukasey pressed on with the obstinacy of a witness pleading the fifth: “If it’s torture….If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.”
And that is the best this noted jurist, this legal scholar, this longtime judge had to offer on the defining moral issue of this presidency. Claims of ignorance. Word games.
And again, last month, he refused to categorically denounce waterboarding.
In fact, Mr. Mukasey was asked the easiest question we have in a democracy: Can the president openly break the law? Can he—as we know he’s done already—order warrantless wiretapping, ignore the will of Congress, and then hide behind nebulous powers he claims to find in the Constitution?
Mukasey’s response: The president has “the authority to defend the country.”
And in one swoop, the Attorney General conceded to the president nearly unlimited power, as long as he finds a lawyer willing to stuff his actions into the boundless rubric of “defending the country.” Unlimited power to defend the country, to protect us as one man sees fit, even if that means listening to our phone calls, even if that means holding some of us indefinitely.
This is about extraordinary rendition—outsourced torture. It’s about men this administration would prefer we didn’t know exist. But we do know, Mr. President.
One was a Syrian immigrant raising his family in Canada as a citizen. He wrote computer code for a company called MathWorks and was planning to start his own tech business. On a trip through New York’s JFK Airport, he was arrested by U.S. federal agents. They shackled him and bundled him onto a private CIA plane, which flew him across the Atlantic Ocean to Syria.
This man spent the next 10 months and 10 days in a Syrian prison. His cell was three feet wide—the size of a grave. Some 300 days passed alone in that cell, with a bowl for his toilet and another bowl for his water, and the door only opened so he could go wash himself once a week—though it may have been more or less, because the cell was dark and he lost track of time.
The door only opened for one other reason: for interrogators who asked him, again and again, about al-Qaeda. Here’s how it was described:
The interrogator said, “Do you know what this is?” I said, “Yes, it’s a cable,” and he told me, “Open your right hand.” I opened my right hand, and he hit me like crazy. It was so painful, and of course I started crying, and then he told me to open my left hand, and I opened it, and he missed, then hit my wrist. And then he asked me questions. If he does not think you are telling the truth, then he hits again.
The jail and the torturers were Syrian, but America sent this man there with full knowledge of what would happen to him—because it was part of the longstanding secret program of “extraordinary rendition.” America was convinced that he was a terrorist and wanted the truth beaten out of him.
No charges were ever filed against him. His adopted nation’s government—Canada, one of our strongest NATO allies—cleared him of all wrongdoing after a year-long investigation, and awarded him more than $10 million in government compensation for his immense pain and suffering. But not before he was tortured for 10 months in a cell the size of a grave. Our own government, I would note, has refused to even acknowledge that his case exists.
It’s about a German citizen, living in the city of Ulm with his wife and four children. On a bus trip through Eastern Europe, he was pulled off at a border crossing by armed guards and held for three weeks in a hotel room, where he was beaten regularly . At the end of three weeks, he was drugged and shipped on a cargo plane to Kabul, Afghanistan.
For five months, he was held in the Salt Pit—a secret American prison staffed by Afghan guards. All he had to drink was stagnant water from a filthy bottle. Again and again, masked men interrogated him about al-Qaeda, and finally, he says, they raped him.
He was released in May of 2004. Scientific testing confirmed his story of malnourishment, and the Chancellor of Germany publicly acknowledged that he was wrongly held. What was his crime? Having the same name as a suspected terrorist. Again, our own government has refused to even acknowledge that his case exists.
There aren’t enough words in the world to cover the facts. If you’d like to define torture out of existence, be my guest. If you’d rather use a Washington euphemism—“tough questioning,” “enhanced interrogation”—feel free. Feel free to talk about “fraternity hazing,” like Rush Limbaugh did, or to use a favorite term of Vice President Cheney’s, “a dunk in the water.” You can call it whatever you’d like.
And when you’re through with your evasions, the facts will still be waiting for you. The fact of waterboarding, “controlled death.” The fact of outsourced torture. The fact of secret prisons. The fact of month-long sleep deprivation. The fact of the president’s personal power to hold whomever he likes for as long as he’d like.
Have I gone wildly off-topic, Mr. President? Have I brought up a dozen unrelated issues? No, Mr. President, I have not.
We are deceiving ourselves when we talk about the U.S. attorneys issue, the habeas issue, the torture issue, the rendition issue, the secrecy issue. As if each one were an isolated case! As if each one were an accident! When we speak of them as isolated, we are keeping our politics cripplingly small; and as long as we keep this small, the rule of men is winning.
There is only one issue here. Only one: the law issue. Does the president serve the law, or does the law serve the president? Each insult to our Constitution comes from the same source; each springs from the same mindset; and if we attack this contempt for the law at any point, we will wound it at all points.
That is why I’m here today: Retroactive immunity is on the table today; but also at issue is the entire ideology that justifies it, the same ideology behind torture and executive lawlessness. Immunity is a disgrace in itself, but it is far worse in what it represents. It tells us that some believe in the courts only so long as their verdict goes their way. It puts secrecy above sunshine and fiat above law.
Did the telecoms break the law? That, I don’t know. Pass immunity, and we will never know. A handful of favored corporations will remain unchallenged. Their arguments will never be heard in a court of law. The truth behind this unprecedented domestic spying will never see light.
“Law” is a word we barely hear from the supporters of immunity. They offer neither a deliberation about America’s difficult choices in the age of terrorism, nor a shared attempt to set for our times the excruciating balance between security and liberty. They merely promise a false debate on a false choice: security or liberty, but never, ever both.
I think differently. I think that America’s founding truth is unambiguous: security and liberty, one and inseparable, and never one without the other.
Secure in that truth, I offer a challenge to immunity’s supporters: You want to put a handful of corporations above the law. Could you please explain how your immunity makes any one of us any safer at all?
The truth is that a working balance between security and liberty has already been struck. In fact, it has been settled for decades. For three decades, FISA has prevented executive lawbreaking and protected Americans, and that balance stands today.
In the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Senate convened the Church Committee, a panel of distinguished members determined to investigate executive abuses of power. And unsurprisingly, they found that when Congress and the courts substitute “trust me” for real oversight, massive lawbreaking can result.
They found evidence of U.S. Army spying on the civilian population, federal dossiers on citizens’ political activities, a CIA and FBI program that had opened hundreds of thousands of Americans’ letters without warning or warrant. In sum, Americans had sustained a severe blow to their Fourth Amendment rights “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
But at the same time, the senators of the Church Committee understood that surveillance needed to go forward to protect the American people. Surveillance itself was not the problem; unchecked, unregulated, unwarranted surveillance was. What surveillance needed, in a word, was legitimacy.
And in America, as the Founders understood, power becomes legitimate when it is shared, when Congress and the courts check that attitude which so often crops up in the executive branch—“if the president does it, it’s not illegal.”
The Church Committee’s final report, “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” put the case powerfully:
The critical question before the Committee was to determine how the fundamental liberties of the people can be maintained in the course of the Government’s effort to protect their security.
The delicate balance between these basic goals of our system of government is often difficult to strike, but it can, and must, be achieved.
We reject the view that the traditional American principles of justice and fair play have no place in our struggle against the enemies of freedom. Moreover, our investigation has established that the targets of intelligence activity have ranged far beyond persons who could properly be characterized as enemies of freedom….
We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes.
We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as “vacuum cleaners,” sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens.
The senators concluded: “Unless new and tighter controls are established by legislation, domestic intelligence activities threaten to undermine our democratic society and fundamentally alter its nature.”
What a strange echo we hear in those words! They could have been written yesterday. Three decades ago, our predecessors in this chamber understood that when domestic spying goes too far, it threatens to kill just what it promises to protect—an America secure in its liberty. That lesson was crystal-clear 30 years ago. Why is it so clouded now?
And before we entertain the argument that “everything has changed” since those words were written, remember: The men who wrote them had witnessed world war and Cold War, had seen Nazi and Soviet spying, and were living every day under the cloud of nuclear holocaust.
I’ll ask this, Mr. President: Who will chair the commission investigating the secrets of warrantless spying, years from today? Will it be a young senator in this body today? Will it be someone not yet elected? What will that senator say when he or she comes to our actions, reads in the records how we let outrage after outrage after outrage slide, with nothing more than a promise to stop the next one? I imagine that senator will ask of us, “Why didn’t they do anything? Why didn’t they fight back? In February 2008, when no one could doubt anymore what the administration was doing—why did they sit on their hands?”
Since the time of the Church Commission, Mr. President, the threats facing us have multiplied and grown in complexity, but the lesson has been immutable: Warrantless spying threatens to undermine our democratic society, unless legislation brings it under control. In other words, the power to invade privacy must be used sparingly, guarded jealously, and shared equally between the branches of government.
Or the case can be made pragmatically. As my friend Harold Koh, the Dean of Yale Law School, recently argued, “The engagement of all three branches tends to yield not just more thoughtful law, but a more broadly supported public policy.”
Three decades ago, Congress embodied that solution in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. FISA confirmed the president’s power to conduct surveillance of international conversations involving anyone in the United States, provided that the federal FISA court issued a warrant—ensuring that wiretapping was aimed at safeguarding our security, and nothing else.
The president’s own Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, explained the rationale in an interview this summer: The United States “did not want to allow [the intelligence community] to conduct…electronic surveillance of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required.”
As originally written in 1978, and as amended many times since, FISA has accomplished its mission; it has been a valuable tool for conducting surveillance of terrorists and those who would harm America.
And every time presidents have come to Congress openly to ask for more leeway under FISA, Congress has worked with them; Congress has negotiated; and together, Congress and the president have struck a balance that safeguards America while doing its utmost to protect privacy.
This summer, Congress made a technical correction to FISA, enabling the president to wiretap, without a warrant, conversations between two foreign targets, even if those conversations are routed through American computers. For other reasons, I felt that this past summer’s legislation went too far, and I opposed it. But the point is that Congress once again proved its willingness to work with the president on FISA.
Isn’t that enough?
Just this past October and November, as we’ve seen, the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees worked with the president to further refine FISA and ensure that, in a true emergency, the FISA court would do nothing to slow down intelligence gathering.
Isn’t that enough?
And as for the FISA court? Between 1978 and 2004, according to the Washington Post, the FISA court approved 18,748 warrants—and rejected five.
The FISA court has sided with the executive ninety nine point nine percent of the time.
Isn’t that enough?
Is anything lacking? Have we forgotten something? Isn’t all of this enough to keep us safe?
We all know the answer we received. This complex, fine-tuned machinery, crafted over three decades by three branches of government, four presidents, and 12 Congresses was ignored. It was a system primed to bless nearly any eavesdropping a president could conceive—and spying still happened illegally.
If the shock of that decision has yet to sink in, think of it this way: President Bush ignored not just a federal court, but a secret federal court; not just a secret federal court, but a secret federal court prepared to sign off on his actions ninety nine point nine percent of the time. A more compliant court has never been conceived.
And that still wasn’t good enough.
So I will ask the Senate candidly, and candidly it already knows the answer: Is this about security—or about power?
Why are some fighting so hard for retroactive immunity? The answer, I believe, is that immunity means secrecy, and secrecy means power.
It’s no coincidence that the man who proclaimed “if the president does it, it’s not illegal”—Richard Nixon—was the same man who raised executive secrecy to an art form.
The senators of the Church Committee expressed succinctly the deep flaw in the Nixonian executive: “Abuse thrives on secrecy.” And, in the exhaustive catalogue of their report, they proved it.
In this push for immunity, secrecy is at the center. We find proof in immunity’s original version: a proposal to protect not just the telecoms, but everyone involved in the wiretapping program.
In their original proposal, that is, they wanted to immunize themselves.
Think about that. It speaks to their fear and, perhaps, their guilt: their guilt that they had broken the law, and their fear that in the years to come, they would be found liable or convicted. They knew better than anyone else what they had done—they must have had good reason to be afraid!
Thankfully, immunity for the executive is not part of the bill before us. But the original proposal tells us something very important: This is, and always has been, a self-preservation bill.
Otherwise, why not have the trial and get it over with? If the proponents of retroactive immunity are right, the corporations would win in a walk.
After all, in the official telling, the telecoms were ordered to help the president spy without a warrant, and they patriotically complied. We’ve even heard on this floor the comparison between the telecom corporations to the men and women laying their lives on the line in Iraq.
But ignore that. Ignore for a moment the fact that in America we obey the laws, not the president’s orders. Ignore that not even the president has the right to scare or bully you into breaking the law.
Ignore that the telecoms were not unanimous; one, Qwest, wanted to see the legal basis for the order, never received it, and so refused to comply. Ignore that a judge presiding over the case ruled that “AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal.”
Ignore all that: If the order the telecoms received was legally binding, they have an easy case to prove. The corporations only need to show a judge the authority and the assurances they were given, and they’ll be in and out of court in five minutes.
If the telecoms are as defensible as the president says, why doesn’t the president let them defend themselves? If the case is so easy to make, why doesn’t he let them make it?
It can’t be that he’s afraid of leaks. Our federal court system has dealt for decades with the most delicate national security matters, building up expertise in protecting classified information behind closed doors—ex parte, in camera. We can expect no less in these cases.
No intelligence sources need be compromised. No state secrets need be exposed. After litigation at both the district court and circuit court level, no state secrets have been exposed.
In fact, Federal District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, a Republican appointee, has already ruled that the issue can go to trial without putting state secrets in jeopardy. He reasonably pointed out that the existence of the terrorist surveillance program is a hardly secret at all: “The government has [already] disclosed the general contours of the ‘terrorist surveillance program,’ which requires the assistance of a telecommunications provider.”
As the state secrets privilege is invoked to stall these high-profile cases, it’s useful to consider that privilege’s history. In fact, it was tainted at its birth by a president of my own party, Harry Truman. In 1952, he successfully invoked the new privilege to prevent public exposure of a report on a plane crash that killed three Air Force contractors.
When the report was finally declassified—some fifty years later, decades after anyone in the Truman administration was within its reach—it contained no state secrets at all. Only facts about repeated maintenance failures that would have seriously embarrassed some important people. And so the state secrets privilege began its career not to protect our nation—but to protect the powerful.
In his opinion, Judge Walker argued that, even when it is reasonably grounded,
the state secrets privilege [still] has its limits. While the court recognizes and respects the executive’s constitutional duty to protect the nation from threats, the court also takes seriously its constitutional duty to adjudicate the disputes that come before it. To defer to a blanket assertion of secrecy here would be to abdicate that duty, particularly because the very subject matter of this litigation has been so publicly aired.
The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.
And that ought to be the epitaph for the last six years: “sacrificing liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.” Worse than selling our soul—giving it away for free!
It is equally wrong to claim that failing to grant this retroactive immunity will make the telecoms less likely to cooperate with surveillance in the future.
The truth is that, since the 1970s, FISA has compelled telecommunications companies to cooperate with surveillance, when it’s warranted—and what’s more, it immunizes them. It’s done that for more than 25 years.
So cooperation in warranted wiretapping is not at stake today. Collusion in warrantless wiretapping is. And the warrant makes all the difference, because it is precisely the court’s blessing that brings presidential power under the rule of law.
In sum, we know that giving the telecoms their day in court—giving the American people their day in court—would not jeopardize an ounce of our security. And it could only expose one secret: the extent to which the rule of law has been trampled.
And that is the choice at stake today: Will the secrets of the last years remain closed in the dark? Or will they be open to the generations to come, to our successors in this chamber, so that they can prepare themselves to defend against future outrages of power and usurpations of law from future presidents, of either party?
Thirty years after the Church Committee, history repeated itself. If those who come after us are to prevent it from repeating again, they need the full truth.
Constitutional lawyer and author Glenn Greenwald expressed the high stakes this way:
The Bush administration will be gone in 11 months, but—in the absence of some meaningful accountability—all of this will remain….If…these theories remain undisturbed and unchallenged, and…all of these crimes go uninvestigated and unpunished, that will have a…profound impact on changing our national character, in further transforming the type of country we are.
And that is why we must not see these secrets go quietly into the good night. I am here because the truth is no one’s private property—it belongs to every one of us, and it demands to be heard.
“State secrets,” “patriotic duty”—those, as weak as they are, are the arguments the telecoms’ advocates use when they’re feeling high-minded! When their thoughts turn baser, they make their arguments as amateur economists.
Here’s how Mike McConnell put it: “If you play out the suits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies. So…we have to provide liability protection to these private sector entities.”
To begin with, that’s a clear exaggeration. We are talking about some of the wealthiest, most successful companies in America. Some of them have continued to earn record profits and sign up record numbers of subscribers at the same time as this very public litigation—totally undermining the argument that these lawsuits are doing the telecoms severe “reputational damage.”
Companies of that size couldn’t be completely wiped out by anything but the most exorbitant and unlikely judgment. To assume that the telecoms would lose, and that their judges would then hand down such backbreaking penalties, is already to take several leaps. The point, after all, has never been to financially cripple our telecommunications industry. The point is to bring checks and balances back to domestic spying. Setting that precedent would hardly require a crippling judgment.
It’s much more troubling, though, that our Director of National Intelligence even bothers to pronounce on “liability protection for private sector entities.” How does that even begin to be relevant to letting this case go forward? Since when did we throw entire suits out because the defendant stood to lose too much?
Translate the point into plain English, and here’s what Adm. McConnell is arguing: Some corporations are too rich to be sued. Even bringing money into the equation puts wealth above justice, above due process—rarely in public life have I heard an argument so venal.
It astounds me that some can speak in the same breath about national security and bottom lines. Approve immunity, and Congress will state clearly: The richer you are, the more successful you are, the more lawless you are entitled to be. A suit against you is a danger to the Republic! And so, at the rock-bottom of its justifications, the telecoms’ advocates are essentially arguing that immunity can be bought.</