This is certainly good news. I don't know if it has a snowball's chance in hell of passing, but you never know:

Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Russ Feingold (D-WI), and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) announced today that they will introduce the Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act, which eliminates retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that allegedly participated in President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.

“I believe we best defend America when we also defend its founding principles,” said Dodd. “We make our nation safer when we eliminate the false choice between liberty and security. But by granting retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies who may have participated in warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, the Congress violated the protection of our citizen’s privacy and due process right and we must not allow that to stand.”

Senator Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “Last year, I opposed legislation that stripped Americans of their right to seek accountability for the Bush administration’s decision to illegally wiretap American citizens without a warrant. Today, I am pleased to join Senator Dodd to introduce the Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act. We can strengthen national security while protecting Americans’ privacy and civil liberties. Restoring Americans’ access to the courts is the first step toward bringing some measure of accountability for the Bush-Cheney administration’s decision to conduct warrantless surveillance in violation of our laws.”

“Granting retroactive immunity to companies that went along with the illegal warrantless wiretapping program was unjustified and undermined the rule of law,” Feingold said. “Congress should not have short-circuited the courts’ constitutional role in assessing the legality of the program. This bill is about ensuring that the law is followed and providing accountability for the American people.”

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The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer does a great job here and explains what needs to happen in regard to torture prosecutions:

Jaffer: I disagree with former Vice-President Dick Cheney about the investigation. I think the problem with the investigation is, it's not the existence of the investigation but the scope of the investigation. The problem with it is that it's focused right now at least on interrogators who exceeded their authority. And I don't have any problem with prosecuting and investigating interrogators who exceeded their authority.

But any fair investigation has to be broad enough to encompass not just those interrogators but also the senior officials who authorized torture and the lawyers who facilitated torture. And among the senior officials, who I think are most responsible for putting this torture program into place is former Vice-President Cheney. And so I don't think it's a big surprise, certainly not a big surprise to me that former Vice-President Cheney is opposed to any investigations.

So what do we get in response in this segment. Author Joseph Finder repeating the right wing talking point I aleady addressed in this post, and Jamie Rubin saying we should white wash the whole thing and "decriminalize the whole process". Yeah, that will get these guys to come clean about what happened. All the facts will come out if we give them immunity from criminal prosecutions. Riiiggghhhttt.

Who ever could have guessed that an NSA analyst would look at someone's personal emails for their own purposes? (And of course, how certain are we that they weren't working for someone else?) I guess we should assume that there's an audience for anything we say or do!

A secret NSA surveillance database containing millions of intercepted foreign and domestic e-mails includes the personal correspondence of former President Bill Clinton, according to the New York Times.

An NSA intelligence analyst was apparently investigated after accessing Clinton’s personal correspondence in the database, the paper reports, though it didn’t say how many of Clinton’s e-mails were captured or when the interception occurred.

The database, codenamed Pinwale, allows NSA analysts to search through and read large volumes of e-mail messages, including correspondence to and from Americans. Pinwale is likely the end point for data sucked from internet backbones into NSA-run surveillance rooms at AT&T facilities around the country.

Those rooms were set up by the Bush administration following 9/11, and were finally legalized last year when Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act. The law gives the telecoms immunity for cooperating with the administration; it also opens the way for the NSA to lawfully spy on large groups of phone numbers and e-mail addresses in bulk, instead of having to obtain a warrant for each target.

The NSA can collect the correspondence of Americans with a court order, or without one if the interception occurs incidentally while the agency is targeting people “reasonably believed” to be overseas. But in 2005, the agency “routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants,” according to the Times, through this loophole. The paper reports today that the NSA is continuing to over-collect e-mail because of difficulties in filtering and distinguishing between foreign and domestic correspondence.

If an American’s correspondence pops up in search results when analysts sift through the database, the analyst is allowed to read it, provided such messages account for no more than 30 percent of a search result, the paper reported.

The NSA has claimed that the over-collection was inadvertent and corrected it each time the problem was discovered. But Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, disputed this. “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental,” he told the Times.

No, it didn't go away. In fact, the daughter of one of my best friends was just diagnosed:

Two more New Yorkers have died with confirmed cases of swine flu, the city’s health commissioner said on Tuesday, bringing the city’s total number of deaths related to the virus to four. Emergency room visits and hospitalizations also continued to rise.

The commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said the two latest casualties, a 41-year-old woman in Queens and a 34-year-old man in Brooklyn, were linked to the H1N1 virus by lab tests completed on Monday and Tuesday. Both patients had underlying health conditions that put them more at risk, he said. He added that he could not say officially whether the flu had caused their deaths until autopsies were finished. Both died on Friday.

Officials have cited underlying conditions as a factor in all four deaths in the city, but they have not revealed those conditions, citing medical confidentiality.

[...] Dr. Frieden, speaking at a news conference at the health department, noted that both patients who died were relatively young. Health officials have said that there is some evidence that people born before 1957 may have been exposed to a similar virus and may have some immunity to the novel strain of flu that is circulating.

Hospitals that normally get about 200 visits to the emergency room each day are getting 2,000 per day, he said, and more than 25,000 people have gone to emergency rooms over the past month. The numbers are highest in Queens, but are increasing in Brooklyn and, to a lesser extent, in the Bronx and Manhattan.

Over the last five days, he said, 20 to 25 people a day have been hospitalized with the flu. Before the weekend, the city had recorded only 57 hospitalizations for flu during the entire preceding 30 days.

An analysis by LightMAP.org reveals that the 94 Democrats who changed their position on FISA since March are being flooded with donations from the companies who they now want to give a free pass. Shouldn't this be illegal or something?

Politico:

Dems who flipped on FISA immunity see more telecom cash

House Democrats who flipped their votes to support retroactive immunity for telecom companies in last week’s FISA bill took thousands of dollars more from phone companies than Democrats who consistently voted against legislation with an immunity provision, according to an analysis by MAPLight.org.

The 94 Democrats who changed their positions received on average $8,359 in contributions from Verizon, AT&T and Sprint from January, 2005, to March, 2008, according to the analysis by MAPLight, a nonpartisan organization that tracks the connection between campaign contributions and legislative outcomes. 

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), who along with Russ Feingold has been the fiercest defender of Constitutional rights, took to the floor last night to deliver a two-hour impassioned speech in defense of the rule of law, and offered a scathing critique of the sham FISA bill about to become law.

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"Mr President, I had hoped that I would not have to come to the floor under these circumstances again. I've fought this with everything I have in me. Today we are being asked to pass the so-called compromise that was reached by some of our colleagues and approved by the other body, the House of Representatives. I'm here this evening to say that I will not and I can not support this legislation. This legislation goes against everyhting I've stood for, everything this body ought to stand for in my view."

I'm somewhat of a CSPAN junkie, but Dodd's sincere respect and concern for this country's sacred principles and his passionate defense last night of those principles was the most uplifting yet depressing thing I have ever seen; uplifting because it proved to me that there are leaders out there who still give a damn, but depressing because, with rare exceptions, he is alone. When the history of the Bush years is written and future generations look back and wonder how we sank so low, how an abject failure like George W. Bush successfully transformed our national character, at least we can look back to times like these and know that there were some true patriots sounding the alarm.

Glenn Greenwald sums up the floor speech thusly:

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