House Republicans spent their efforts to intimidate Democrats into backing down and they threatened to use a parliamentary maneuver that would have skidded the entire process to a stop. It convinced enough Dems to settle for a compromise. And the illegal wiretapping by telecoms now could be given amnesty, depending on what the Senate does.

Stacey Bernards, a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), called the Republican maneuver “a cheap shot, totally political.”

Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called it a “perfect storm” of progressive Democrats who did not think the bill protected basic constitutional rights and of Republicans who took advantage of the lack of unity. “It was too precipitous a process, and it ended up in a train wreck,” she said. “It was total meltdown.”

The House bill contained safeguards against spying on U.S. citizens that the Bush administration said would have interfered with its national security investigations. Some liberals, on the other hand, complained that it still allowed the surveillance of Americans to occur without individual warrants.

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald published this:

Today I interviewed Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the lead counsel in the pending litigation against AT&T, alleging that AT&T violated multiple federal laws by providing (without warrants) unfettered access for the Bush administration to all telephone and Internet data concerning its customers. The Bush administration intervened in that lawsuit to argue that the “state secrets” doctrine compelled dismissal of the lawsuit, but the presiding judge, Bush 41-appointee Vaughn Walker, last year rejected that argument and ordered the case to proceed (Oral Argument on the administration’s appeal of that ruling was heard by the 9th Circuit earlier this year).

Cindy Cohn defines Bush’s intent in seeking the amnesty the House just gave them:

CC: Yes. Their goal is plainly to get rid of these litigations full stop. They don’t want the courts to ever rule on whether this is legal or not. That’s their goal. . . .

It’s certainly the goal of the administration and the phone companies to ensure that there’s never a decision about what’s been going on is legal or not. The telecom cases are the last, best hope.

She also delivers the critical point:

the FISA law already has very broad immunities for the telecoms, and if it was the case that they were acting in good faith with an honest belief that what they were being asked to do was legal, then they would already have immunity, and they don’t need an additional immunity from Congress for that.

So Bush is acting in the belief that the courts would rule that the telecoms were not acting in good faith but were willfully breaking the law with full knowledge that their actions were completely illegal.

For a direct example of how illegal actions have already impacted innocent US citizens, listen to Brandon Mayfield describe his ideal in this mp3 broadcast.

ACLU attorney Melissa Goodman adds further chilling examples, also in mp3.

But the attempt to gain retroactive amnesty is especially troubling when you consider the tenth step of Naomi Wolf’s description of the ten steps to fascism. Be sure to read her article (and a h/t to David Neiwert for that)

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as W.H. Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realizing it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

It was only three decades ago when we were facing a far more dangerous enemy possessing tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. In that war on Communism, intelligence agents were spying on peaceful, innocent US citizens with no connections at all to the USSR or any Communist nation. They were also spying on activists, reporters and opposition politicians.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Frank Church (D-ID) helped expose and change the intelligence laws to prevent future abuse. He said: “If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…

“I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

This is what the House has surrendered on. Now Arlen Specter and Pat Leahy are the only hurdles left to make the new state of tyrannical reach a legal entity beyond our control. And it’s being done in the name of protecting us from a far weaker foe without any advanced weaponry.

That’s called selling out our liberty on the cheap. That most of the general public won’t rise up to oppose it indicates the saddest fact of all: the majority of Americans have become fearful cowards, waving the white flag as they surrender our freedoms.