info from Coleen Rowley on the Telecom spying

[annm4peace]

I really like her last paragraph.. I copy and pasted it in the email to Amy
(last paragraph)
It appears the Bush Administration's push to provide blanket immunity for telecoms is on a par with the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotaped harsh interrogations in the midst of ongoing legal inquiries, the millions of White House e-mail records missing in violation of the Presidential Records Act and Bush's commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence. In the Bush administration, protection of the guilty from accountability under the Constitution requires suppressing the truth. * But if Congress allows it to happen, the suppression of the truth will come at a high cost to the integrity of the Constitution, to Americans' civil liberties and potentially also to the national security of the United States.***

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1st two paragraphs
Dick Cheney was at his best shilling for immunity for telecom companies today before the Heritage Foundation. His speech came one day before the Republican rubber stamp machine in the Senate attempts another push to give blanket immunity to the telecommunication companies suspected of engaging in illegal eavesdropping and surveillance of Americans. Although wiretapping is usually justified as a necessary tool in the "War on Terror", there is good reason to doubt the official story and question the legality of the Bush administration's practices.

Already a series of Bush administration lies on the subject has collapsed. First, there was President Bush's repeated public statements back in 2004 that wiretapping occurs in the United States only pursuant to court order. NY Times writers who had found out otherwise were threatened and cajoled into silence for an entire year. When the government's massive warrantless surveillance program was finally exposed in 2005, we were told the "terrorist surveillance program" had been instituted in response to the 9-11 attacks and the threat of terrorism. But a number of credible sources have since reported that the NSA's domestic phone record program began 7 months before 9/11.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/telecom-immunity-coverin_b_82931.html