I've summarized the FISA issue before, but it's important to reflect on where this single issue rests in the whole scheme of things political.
I could never summarize it as well as commenter ondelette, so I'm just going to cut and paste his/her reminiscence on the totality of the Shrubya years. And at the end, there's another cool video. Guess not, I liked the one I already posted better.
This is why I said the corpies are calling in their chips on this. The administration has built a huge illegal house of cards, and everyone who has participated in it -- corporations on the NSA spying, the CIA on torture and rendition, the military on Guantanamo, foreign governments on a variety of things, even news media on keeping a lid on everything -- wants to know whether they can deliver on the promises that no one will get hurt. This showdown is all about showing the dark side that they can deliver on getting immunity through a congress controlled by the enemy. It isn't about this particular immunity, except to a handfull of telecom companies, it's about all the future immunities they need to promise to provide. They got important immunities rammed through before the Democrats took control -- the Military Commissions Act contains an retroactive clause similar to the one in the FISA bill making procedures at Guantanamo legal that had previously been violations of Geneva.
This is literally about the investors threatening to pull the plug unless the blanket immunity part of the overall project, of which FISA is just one piece, rolls out on schedule and according to plan. It's plain old corporate restructuring as they see the Republicans about to lose the governing power which constituted the sum total of their employable assets.
What else is there to learn? On FISA, the full extent of the spying. On torture and rendition, the legal opinions and the full extent of the program. On Guantanamo, the rigging of the military commissions. On the OLC and the U.S. Attorneys, the racketeering going on for the White House in the Justice department, and whether or not there have been clandestine election rigging moves. On intelligence and diplomacy, whether or not we have had an accurate picture of the world through the government for a long time.
It is also probably a very, very bad idea to believe there aren't programs violating either U.S. or international law, about which we currently still know nothing, and also a bad idea to assume that the press knows nothing about any of them. One thing I'm intrigued with [Warning: conspiracy theory alert] is the character of the vote rigging in Pakistan by PML-Q and MQM. It seemed to be designed to prevent a working majority, not to win an election. Odd for a dictator who doesn't care what people think when he suspends the Constitution. The result was an election in which everyone knew there was vote rigging but decided to accept it. That kind of subtlety looks very Rovian. Either Musharraf is a good student of Rove or he had help. We know he had an American campaign advisor...
As Taobhan and others point out well, the press is a large factor in this. With the current torture debate, for instance, the press is largely guilty of facilitating Stephen Bradbury's contention that if the interrogation method doesn't involve prolonged severe pain and suffering it isn't torture, as a legitimate side in an even debate. The Torture Act's definition of prolonged severe pain and suffering doesn't apply to the process of interrogation at all. It applies to the damage it causes. And it would include totally painless interrogation methods that cause painful psychological problems or damage later (spec. "procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality"). Look it up. (Title 18 U.S.C. 2340).
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