By Dan Eggen, Washington Post
When previous Republican administrations were accused of illegality in the FBI and CIA spying abuses of the 1970s or the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, Democrats in Congress launched investigations or pushed for legislative reforms.    But last week, faced with admissions by several telecommunication companies that they assisted the Bush administration in warrantless spying on Americans, leaders of the Senate intelligence committee took a much different tack — proposing legislation that would grant those companies retroactive immunity from prosecution or lawsuits.
…”It’s particularly unusual in the case of the telecoms because you don’t really know what you’re immunizing,” said Louis Fisher, a specialist in constitutional law with the Law Library of the Library of Congress. “You don’t know what you’re cleaning up.”