Glenn Greenwald beat me to the punch this morning. His essay on the Washington Post’s advocacy for immunity for the telecommunications corporations hits all the right points. In fact, he was so thorough that I am left with nothing to say but, what he said.
I will reiterate one part that touches on Fred Hiatt. Hiatt says the following:
There is one major area of disagreement between the administration and House Democrats where we think the administration has the better of the argument: the question of whether telecommunications companies that provided information to the government without court orders should be given retroactive immunity from being sued. House Democrats are understandably reluctant to grant that wholesale protection without understanding exactly what conduct they are shielding, and the administration has balked at providing such information. But the telecommunications providers seem to us to have been acting as patriotic corporate citizens in a difficult and uncharted environment.
To which, Greenwalds responds in part:
Let’s leave to the side Hiatt’s inane claim that these telecoms, in actively enabling the Bush administration to spy on their customers in violation of the law, were motivated by the pure and upstanding desire to be “patriotic corporate citizens” — rather than, say, the desire to obtain extremely lucrative government contracts which would likely have been unavailable had they refused to break the law.
I previously editorialized that I could forgive the telecoms for cooperating with the administration in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, provided that the corporations and the administration divulge everything that they were doing. There can be no forgiveness for cooperation in the spring of 2001, regardless of their cooperation. That is just lawbreaking, with no mitigating circumstances.
In fact, if we know nothing else, we now that that the administration totally failed to take the terrorism threat seriously when they first came into office. Whatever their motivation for warrantless eavesdropping, it was not related to the terrorism threat.
We know we have criminal acts here. We know they are almost certainly impeachable offenses. But Fred Hiatt says the telecos “were motivated by the pure and upstanding desire to be “patriotic corporate citizens””.
That is why the Washington Post editorial board is now considered a full-time wanking operation. They’ve lied down on the job. They no longer can be taken seriously as free press.
