It’s possible you’ve had your fill on secret memos written for the Bush administration by John Yoo. But just in case, you may also find it interesting to know that for over a year after 9/11, the Bush gang operated under the assumption that the “war on terror” trumped the Fourth Amendment. Seriously.
For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn’t apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.
That view was expressed in a secret Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration on Wednesday stressed that it now disavows that view.
The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.
The 37-page memo is classified and has not been released. Its existence was disclosed Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Specifically, the footnote said Yoo and Gonzales had concluded that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution “had no application to domestic military operations.” The name of the memo was, “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <The Carpetbagger Report>
Considering that we were just discussing Yoo’s torture memo yesterday. There is a guy who would say anything at the request of his Fuhrer! Just to demonstrate how ridiculous a legal opinion this is, consider this: The term for domestic military operations is posse comitatus. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids domestic military operations, except as authorized by Congress.
Therefore Yoo’s opinion stated that the Bush/McvConJob/GOP Reich could legally violate the Constitution as long as they were violation the law at the same time. How do you spell I-M-P-E-A-C-H?
Cross-posted from Politics Plus
