"You never know what's really going on."

Glenn Greenwald circulates important information about the privatizing of the governments spying functions. Are you down with that?

Suppose Obama had said this about the amendments to FISA? Maybe put the burden back on Bush and the defenders? How powerful do you think "soft-on-terrorism" attacks would have been if these issues had been prominently raised?

“It puts too much power in the hands of the president to spy on his or her political enemies. That wastes your money that they are supposed to use to fight terrorism. Also, too much of the nation’s spying – maybe too much information about you -- is being put in the hands of private corporations who are being hired to do the government’s supposedly super-secret work. That makes these changes to FISA completely irresponsible.”

Of course, there was something subterranean going on there that doesn’t meet the eye. Looking back, it looks obvious that nobody, not even those ostensibly heroic opponents (except maybe for Kucinich), had any intention whatsoever of killing those amendments, especially the one granting retroactive immunity against crystal-clear violations of the law by the telecom companies.

Indeed, as you look back at the number of Democrats inexplicably backing that bill favored by a deeply unpopular President, or giving lukewarm opposition at best, it more and more seems clear: it was the immunity that was driving the bill, not the alleged improvements to FISA. We can be fairly sure from public information that FISA before the amendments worked just fine from an espionage standpoint. It was no impediment whatsoever to any bona fide activity. Bush was adding in the so-called substantive improvements because he could get away with them, given that everyone, including the Democratic members of the intelligence committees who knew all about and caved in to the illegal electronic spying, were most desperate to get the immunity amendments to prevent their central role from becoming public.

As Jack Nicholson said in "Chinatown," explaining his fascination, "You never know what's really going on."