Specter says no amnesty in his bill

Well, it turns out that a Washington Post report on which many of us relied seems to have been inaccurate, at best. That report said Arlen Specter was proposing blanket amnesty for all violations of the FISA act. Specter now denies it, saying the WaPo report was erroneous, and Glenn Greenwald has now read the actual langage of the proposed legislation and says he can find nothing there about amnesty. Read Greenwald's post for yourself.

Notwithstanding all of that, I'm still dubious about the Specter legislation (particularly after reading Greenwald's update about a part of the proposed legislation that's not publicly available yet). In one of my early posts yesterday, I quoted an article which opined that Specter's earlier proposals would grant de facto amnesty even though they didn't explicitly mention amnesty by retro-actively ratifying the activities at issue. As a non-lawyer, I have no idea whether that article is correct, but if it is, Specter's proposals may well grant amnesty even if Specter says they don't. As that piece said:

In legal jargon, a confirmation or adoption of the act of another even though it was not approved or legally authorized at the time the act was conducted is a ratification.

Frankly, I really don't hold out much hope for Specter, but perhaps all is not yet lost.