If someone is arrested on suspicion of a crime, what do you do?

Do you:

a) investigate, gather all the facts, then let the law take its course, with the hope and belief that justice prevails?

b) investigate, gather all the facts, then release them with a stern warning, and plan to convict and imprison them next time?

c) do absolutely no investigation, gather no facts whatsoever, and grant them immunity for whatever they’ve been arrested for, before the facts are even known?

Most people like me opt for “a”. On Tuesday, July 8, 2008, Congress is poised to act on option “c” on a bill that will have reverberations for decades to come. On June 20, The House of Representatives rolled over, and in a 293-129 vote, approved the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. The Senate is taking up this amendment in just a matter of hours from now. This bill contains option “c”– it will grant retroactive immunity to our telecommunications companies (AT&T and Verizon among them) in dozens of lawsuits that allege that these companies aided our gummint in conducting a warrantless spying system on American citizens. This spying didn’t occur just in the wake of 9/11; the program was developed BEFORE 9/11 even happened.

These actions by the telecoms and by our gummint are in violation of FISA, which was enacted in the wake of the Church Committee’s findings on wiretapping abuses conducted by the government against its own people. Even though the President admitted to breaking the law in 2005, and even though the telecoms are being sued, Congress is poised to let the telecoms permanently off the hook, and so far has failed to hold any of our government officials accountable for any lawbreaking.

I have blogged quite a few times about FISA, as many of my readers know; you can see some of my past posts here, here, here, and here. I continue to do so because even though I am a political animal, and partisan to a large extent, above all I cherish the U.S. Constitution and our civil liberties. To me, these freedoms trump just about every other issue there is.

Over 230 years ago, our forefathers declared independence from their parent nation; after independence was won, these same leaders debated long and hard about how to structure our new nation. The safeguards they instituted, the system of checks and balances, were inserted in the document they drew up: our constitution. Further wrangling led to the first ten amendments, collectively known as the Bill of Rights.

The constitution and those first ten amendments are what constitutes America. Our growth, our development, our destiny since then is owed to the structure provided within this document. If you remove these rights, if you desecrate and ignore the checks and balances, then you no longer have the United States of America. You still have a nation, yes; you still have an entity known politically as “the United States of America.” But the America that began in the summer of 1776, that declared its independence in Paris in 1783, that enshrined its freedom(s) in 1787: that America will not exist.

Over the decades, this country has flirted, dangerously at times, with irrevocable changes. The Civil War constituted one pivotal crisis; the Great Depression was another such period (if FDR hadn’t instituted the reforms he did (regardless of their success), it’s very possible the country we live in would not be the one we recognize today). I submit we are now in another such moment, and this bill is a visible symptom of that change.

I am not the most persuasive writer, nor the most eloquent one. However, I’d like to direct your attention to a few articles and posts elsewhere on the web:

* Mark Klein, now retired from AT&T, witnessed the surveillance being carried out. He terms the pending FISA bill as laying “the infrastructure for a police state.”

* Over at Slate, Patrick Radden Keefe outlines why the FISA bill is a horrible idea.

* Kevin Bankston at Electronic Frontier Foundation also joins Keefe in exploring the myths surrounding FISA.

* Senator Chris Dodd, among only a handful of lawmakers who have actively stepped up against warrantless wiretapping, gave an outstanding speech on the subject last month. You should read the speech in full, but here’s a pertinent quote or two:

“Secretly and without a warrant, those corporations are alleged to have spied on their own customers – American customers.

Here’s only one of the most egregious examples. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Clear, first-hand whistleblower documentary evidence [states]…that for year on end every e-mail, every text message, and every phone call carried over the massive fiber-optic links of sixteen separate companies routed through AT&T’s Internet hub in San Francisco—hundreds of millions of private, domestic communications—have been…copied in their entirety by AT&T and knowingly diverted wholesale by means of multiple “splitters” into a secret room controlled exclusively by the NSA.” [bold emphasis is mine, not Dodd’s]

Later in his speech, Dodd quotes the findings of the Church Commission:

“The Church Committee’s final report, “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” put the case powerfully:

The critical question before the Committee was to determine how the fundamental liberties of the people can be maintained in the course of the Government’s effort to protect their security.

The delicate balance between these basic goals of our system of government is often difficult to strike, but it can, and must, be achieved.

We reject the view that the traditional American principles of justice and fair play have no place in our struggle against the enemies of freedom. Moreover, our investigation has established that the targets of intelligence activity have ranged far beyond persons who could properly be characterized as enemies of freedom….

We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes.

We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as “vacuum cleaners,” sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens.”

As Dodd then noted, the Church Committee’s statements above could have been written yesterday. Rather chilling, really.

* Last but not least, one of the best writers on this subject, Glenn Greenwald, has been holding court over at Salon, where he has written several outstanding posts on FISA and its potential consequences should it pass Congress. Although all of his posts from the last three weeks are worth reading, I’m linking to this one. It’s Greenwald’s rebuttal to Obama advisor Greg Craig over Obama’s stance on FISA. Currently, Obama is for the FISA bill, claims he will “try” to strip immunity out of the bill, and did not lift a finger when this bill came up in the House of Representatives, despite his de facto status as leader of the Democratic Party. Obama’s name is mud in my book. More on that later.

Shorter version of the above: do you want to be spied upon? Is it okay with you to have your friends, family, neighbors and acquaintances spied upon without their knowledge? Can you trust an administration that brought you a war in Iraq based on lies, a botched response to Hurricane Katrina, a partisan politicization of the Department of Justice, and outed a CIA agent solely for the purpose of political revenge? Because this is what it comes down to: letting the President who brought you all of the above off the hook, and letting the phone companies off the hook too.

My answer is easy: it’s “No.” If that’s your answer as well, call your U.S. Senators today. Call Barack Obama. E-mail them. Send them faxes. Tell them you do not want our nation to start down a path that leads to a surveillance state. If you don’t think it can happen here, well– it can. It will.