Jay Rockefeller (D-AT&T)

Over at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald kicked the crap out of West Virginia’s biggest Dick Cheney fan, Jello Jay Rockefeller.

Jay Rockefeller channels Dick Cheney’s fear-mongering to urge telecom amnesty

Leading telecom advocate Fred Hiatt this morning turned over his Washington Post Op-Ed page today to leading telecom advocate Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, to explain why it is so “unfair and unwise” to allow telecoms to be sued for breaking the law. Just as all Bush followers do when they want to “justify” lawbreaking, Rockefeller’s entire defense is principally based on one argument: 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. Thus he melodramatically begins:

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the Bush administration had a choice: Aggressively pursue potential terrorists using existing laws or devise new, secret intelligence programs in uncharted legal waters. . .

Rockefeller’s claims that surveillance efforts will “come to a screeching halt” without his amnesty plan is nothing more than the sort of deceitful fear-mongering which the Bush administration has relentlessly churned out over the last six years.

Worse, still, Rockefeller worked out this retroactive amnesty boondoggle with Sith President Dick Cheney himself:

Last June, in a phone conversation with Vice President Dick Cheney, John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, set down his conditions for revising the law governing the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping. Only when the committee got access to secret administration documents authorizing surveillance without court warrants, Mr. Rockefeller told the vice president, would it consider such legislation.

That vow paid off this week when, after some last-minute brinkmanship, the committee got to see the documents and then on Thursday night passed a bipartisan bill that offers a compromise between Congress and the Bush administration on the contentious eavesdropping issue. (NYTIMES)

What was the point of Rockefeller’s quid pro quo? What did he do with those secret documents? Dick.

Rockefeller and President Cheney had tangled previously over the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program. In July 2003, after a briefing for leaders of the Intelligence Committees from which staff members were barred, Mr. Rockefeller hand-wrote a protest note to the vice president, saying that as ”neither a technician nor an attorney,” he was not able to satisfy his concerns about the legality of eavesdropping without warrants.  He then locked the note in his safe.  I am not kidding.  A lot of good that did.