Yesterday, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) gave a magnificent speech on the Senate floor in opposition to the FISA bill before that body. Among its other reprehensible provisions, the bill would give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that fed information to the National Security Administration, without judicial warrant and without notifying the individuals.
But Dodd went much further than the bill, indicting all of the Bush administration’s human rights crimes: torture, extraordinary rendition, designating people “unlawful combatants” without recourse to any court, etc.
Here’s just a small excerpt:
… Controlled death. Outsourced torture. Secret prisons. Month-long sleep deprivations. The president’s personal power to hold whomever he likes for as long as he’d like. It is as if we woke up in the middle of some Kafka-esque nightmare.
Have I gone wildly off-topic, Mr. President? Have I brought up a dozen unrelated issues?
I wish I had, Mr. President. I wish that none of these stories were true.
But, we are deceiving ourselves when we talk about the U.S. attorneys issue, the habeas issue, the torture issue, the rendition issue, or the secrecy issue as if each 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 that defends 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. That some only believe in the rule of law, so long as exceptions are made at their desire. It puts secrecy above sunshine and fiat above law.
