In Courtroom Showdown, Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms

The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation’s telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans’ private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants. At issue in the high-stakes showdown are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program in the years following the 11 Spetember terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution