Arlen Specter is lying about his own bill -- again

by Glenn Greenwald

In June, both the ACLU and The Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported that the FISA bill proposed by Arlen Specter would expressly immunize Bush officials from any legal consequences arising out of their illegal eavesdropping -- giving them what Pincus called "blanket amnesty" -- by retroactively legalizing warrantless eavesdropping going back to 1978. But that weekend, Specter went on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and categorically denied that his bill contained any such provision, stating:

Absolutely not. That was an erroneous report. If anybody has violated the law, they'll be held accountable, both as to criminal conduct and as to civil conduct. And in no way did I promise amnesty or immunity or letting anybody off the hook.

At the time of Specter's denial on national television, there was no copy of his bill available online, so I actually wrote a post aggressively criticizing Pincus for his erroneous claim, because I assumed that Sen. Specter (due to self-interest, if for no other reason) would not go on national television and categorically deny that his bill contained what amounts to a Congressional pardon for the administration if it really did contain such a provision.

But once a copy of Specter's became available that week, it turned out that Specter's bill did contain the very blanket amnesty provision which he falsely denied on national television he was offering. As I wrote at the time, the Post and the ACLU were completely correct and Specter -- in order to make his bill seem less draconian than it really was -- simply lied about what his own bill said (that express amnesty provision was thereafter removed from the bill, though the effect of the current Specter bill might be the same).

(There's more, here.)