Phase III – Stealth Is.

In 2007, Senator Rockefeller began steering the Senate Intelligence Committee to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who were accused of unlawfully assisting the National Security Agency (NSA) in monitoring the communications of American citizens (see Hepting v. AT&T).[9]

This was an about-face of sorts for Senator Rockefeller, who had hand-written a letter to Vice President Cheney in 2003 expressing his concerns about the legality of NSA’s warrantless wire-tapping program. Some have attributed this change of heart to the spike in contributions from telecommunications companies to the senator just as these companies began lobbying Congress to protect them from lawsuits regarding their cooperation with the NSA[10].

Between 2001 and the start of this lobbying effort, AT&T employees had contributed $300 to the senator.[10]. After the lobbying effort began, AT&T employees and executives donated $19,350 in 3 months[10]. The senator has pledged not to rely on his vast fortune to fund his campaigns[11], and the AT&T contributions represent about 2% of the money he raised during the previous year[10].

[edit] Retroactive immunity for torture

Though publicly deploring torture, Rockefeller was one of two Congressional Democrats briefed on waterboarding and other secret CIA practices in the early years of the Bush Administration, as well as the existence of taped evidence of such interrogations (later destroyed).[12] In December 2007, Rockefeller opposed a special counsel or commission inquiry into the destruction of the tapes, stating “it is the job of the intelligence committees to do that.”[13]