Contempt For The Rule of Law

I want to recommend an article called "The Beltway Establishment’s Contempt For The Rule of Law". It makes me almost as sick as the article about the Naomi Klein book I posted about below. Take a look:

The Washington Post’s Editorial Page, in the establishment-defending form of Fred Hiatt, today became but the latest Beltway appendage to urge the enactment of a special law providing amnesty to our nation’s poor, put-upon, lawbreaking telecoms:

"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."

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. Leave to the side the fact that actual “patriotism” would have led these telecoms to adhere to the surveillance and privacy laws enacted by the American people through their Congress in accordance with the U.S. Constitution — as a handful of actual patriotic telecoms apparently did — rather than submit to the illegal demands of the President. Further leave to the side that these telecoms did not merely allow warrantless surveillance on their customers in the hectic and “confused” days or weeks after 9/11, but for years. Further leave to the side the fact that, as Hiatt’s own newspaper just reported yesterday, the desire for warrantless eavesdropping capabilities seemed to be on the Bush agenda well before 9/11.

And finally ignore the fact that Hiatt is defending the telecom’s good faith even though, as he implicitly acknowledges, he has no idea what they actually did, because it is all still Top Secret and we are barred from knowing what happened here. For all those reasons, Hiatt’s claim on behalf of the telecoms that they broke the law for “patriotic” reasons is so frivolous as to insult the intelligence of his readers, but — more importantly — it is also completely irrelevant.
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And our opinion-making elite is eagerly defending this — insisting that while the poor irrelevant souls who buy and sell drugs near the corners of their offices are real criminals and those people belong in prison, our nation’s telecoms and other high officials, when they get caught breaking the law, should have special laws written decreeing that they are immune from all consequences.

Our collective denial as a nation is very, very disturbing. Where is it going to end? Will it end at all? I shudder when I speculate about these things.