Here comes Mr. Broken Record…:

President Bush today urged Congress to pass legislation that would give telecom companies immunity from class-action lawsuits for cooperating with U.S. intelligence services in monitoring terrorist communications.

“Allowing these lawsuits to proceed would be unfair,” Bush said at a White House news conference. “If any of these companies helped us, they did so after being told by our country their assistance was legal.”

Wrong. “The country” told these people jack shit, the administration basically lied to them, using the formulation “when the government does it, it’s not illegal”. What they were doing was not as cut and dried as “monitoring terrorist communications” either, otherwise they could’ve easily gotten warrants like they were supposed to. Also, notice the convenient omission of the word suspected from that phrase?

Noting that the litigation process could lead to disclosure of surveillance techniques and make other countries less likely to cooperate with U.S. intelligence services, Bush said, “You cannot expect phone companies to participate if they feel like they’re going to be sued. It’s patently unfair.” Without impugning the motives of those seeking to sue, Bush said he suspected “they see a gravy train” and urged House leaders to act so calls to the United States from overseas can be monitored. (emphasis mine)

Curious turn of phrase by the writer of this article, wouldn’t you say? Put the word “impugn” into a dictionary search and you get the following: To attack as false or questionable; challenge in argument. Johanna Neuman, the LA Times staff writer involved, says that Bush isn’t attacking as false or questionable the motives behind the lawsuits, and then quotes Bush himself saying “they see a gravy train”. Me and Bush do come from drastically different cultures and generations, so there’s a chance of things being lost in translation, but last I recall “gravy train” was slang for easy money. In effect, he is claiming that the only reason anyone would have to sue is to get rich, with no regard whatsoever for the law. How is that not calling their motives questionable?

BTW: international calls involving the US already can be monitored, and have been able to be monitored for a long time. The sole catch is that you have to have a legitimate reason to do so, which is what the purpose of a warrant is. The court that dealt with such warrants had no problem whatsoever issuing them until the reign of Bush the 2nd. Josh Marshall observed that the amount of requests that had to be modified (meaning in their original form the warrants were rejected) before moving forward shot up drastically around 2003; in the year prior, the Justice Department apparently pissed off the FISA judges so badly that they made one of their rulings against them public — remember, this is supposed to be a “secret” court. To me, this suggests that the Bush Administration started to openly go overboard with the warrant requests, and initiated this whole blatantly criminal mess as a hissy fit against being told to take a hike.

“There are enough votes in the House to pass this bill,” Bush said. “House leaders need to put the bill on the floor and give professionals the tools they need.” Noting that phone companies are less likely to cooperate without protections, Bush said, “They’re facing billions of dollars of lawsuits. They have a responsibility to their shareholders.” (emphasis mine)

It’s already been established that they don’t need warrantless wiretaps to do their jobs, so this is a lie, plain and simple. As for the phone companies, that any of them cooperated shows what they expected from this administration. They knew there’d be an attempt to shield them, they just didn’t anticipate it not being rubber-stamped.

Eh, serves ‘em right for being so gullible, far as I’m concerned.