FISA/PAA update, such as it is.

It appears now certain that the Democratic Party-controlled Senate will pass the PAA/FISA amendments, intact as Mr. Bush wants them, complete with retroactive immunity, blanket wiretapping of Americans, and no accountability or enforceability of the few protections it claims to have. The FISA court will be weakened to irrelevancy, since the amendments edit FISA to allow illegally-collected material to be used anyway, without penalty. There won't be an actual filibuster; there'll be a cloture vote tomorrow that will pass. As it will include retroactive immunity for telecom lawbreaking, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Reid, Senator Rockefeller, the Democratic leadership, and the GOP will have done their jobs well to insure that the only functional investigative path into Mr. Bush's massively and prima facie illegal warrentless wiretapping programme gets halted.

Next, the bill will have to be resolved against the House version, which, while bad, is significantly less bad, and does not include retroactive immunity for telecom lawbreaking. As I understand it, the best we can hope for here is a conference committee; the worst case would be that the House accepts the Senate version as passed in place of their own. I hear mixed messages on this; whether the House goes along with the Senate or stands against retroactive immunity for clear and massive lawbreaking to spy on American citizens in the US will certainly be close.

Greenwald is not optimistic about tomorrow (see Update III):

Contrary to the emphatic promise Dodd repeatedly made during his presidential campaign to lead a filibuster on the floor of the Senate to stop any bill that has telecom immunity in it (a promise which, incidentally, led to hundreds of thousands of dollars being donated to his campaign), there isn't going to be any actual filibuster tomorrow. Under the Unanimous Consent framework agreed to by all Senators (including Dodd), there will be a 60-vote requirement to invoke cloture on the FISA bill and for ultimate passage, followed by an allotted 4 hours of post-cloture "debate," but there will not be any real filibuster to prevent cloture. When Leahy says that he will "join" Dodd's filibuster, what he means is that he will merely cast a vote against cloture.

Dodd's efforts against this bill have been quite commendable, and the UC Agreement isn't completely worthless. It means that Democrats do not need 60 votes, or even 50 votes, to stop this bill. Rather, they only need 41 Senators willing to oppose cloture (which everyone knows they're not going to get).

Still, Dodd is not, after all, going to lead an actual filibuster on the floor of the Senate to stop the bill. Worse, the Republicans are going to be permitted to impose 60-vote requirements on key Democratic amendments without actually having to filibuster at all -- exactly the situation which Harry Reid vowed just two weeks ago he would not permit.

By the way, the Bush Administration is testing a case of going after a lawyer for issuing a legal opinion that turned out to be wrong - they're trying to charge him with criminal conspiracy. Local lawyers are calling it the criminalisation of defense attourneys. Harper's asks whether this standard could be applied to John Yoo, Steven Bradbury, and others who have worked to invent bullshit legal justifications for illegal torture.

ETA: Hey, does this new biometric system remind anybody else of some Schwarzenegger movie?