Spy Games

Today is a fairly big day on Capitol Hill (no, not the speech)... the Senate will be taking up the FISA revision bill, including the controversial, and odious, proposed immunity for the telecom companies who helped the President violate the FISA law to begin with.

Here's the backstory...The Democrats passed a temporary Bush-friendly revision in August (after weeks of GOP scare tactics), promising to fix it in the Fall. Instead, Senate Majority Leader Reid-- who really, really needs to go-- decided to rebuke the House's better bill and capitulate (again) to the White House. Sen. Dodd fulfilled a promise and filibustered this bill, thus shelving it for 2007. Now the FISA revision is near expiration, meaning that the old 1978 FISA bill (you know, the one that served us well through the end of the Cold War, and that Bush decided to secretly violate for years for reasons that have never been honestly explained) will become the ruling law again. God forbid! So Sen. Reid is again trying to pass the White House-preferred bill to make permanent the '07 changes, but Dodd and Feingold and others are standing firm. So Reid asked Bush to pass a 30-day extension on the revised bill while this is worked out. Process that for a bit.

And so here's where we stand now, prior to the voting-

The White House told Democratic congressional leaders Saturday that President Bush opposes a 30-day extension of an expiring eavesdropping law and instead wants an expanded version to be passed by Friday.

“The president would veto a 30-day extension,” a senior administration official said.

In short, passing this bill is super, super important (terrorists will murder us all if we don't) immediately, unless the President doesn't get his way, in which case... fuck it, it's veto time. Ted Kennedy summed this attitude up during the debate last month: "The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retroactive immunity. No immunity, no FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he's willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies." But God forbid the media reports on that aspect of this debate.

That senior administration official adds-

"They’re just kicking the can down the road. They need the heat of the current law lapsing to get this done."

Yes, that's a Bush administration official chastising someone for... kicking the can down the road. I literally have no words. Just a migraine.

Glenn Greenwald has much, much more on this debate, with regular updates.