Michael Isikoff of Newsweek breaks down the recently released Bush Administration legal memos and finds that the Bush Administration essentially gave itself the powers of a dictatorship.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Justice Department secretly gave the green light for the U.S. military to attack apartment buildings and office complexes inside the United States, deploy high-tech surveillance against U.S. citizens and potentially suspend First Amendment freedom-of-the-press rights in order to combat the terror threat, according to a memo released Monday….
In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Yoo wrote in the memo entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States.”
This claim was viewed as so extreme that it was essentially (and secretly) revoked—but not until October of last year, seven years after the memo was written and with barely three and a half months left in the Bush administration…
The newly disclosed Oct. 23, 2001, memo was in response to a request from Gonzales, at the time President Bush’s top lawyer, and Haynes, who was chief counsel at the Pentagon, to determine if there were any restrictions on the use of the U.S. military inside the country in targeting terror suspects. The Yoo memo essentially concluded there were none. The country, he argued, was in a “state of armed conflict.” The scale of violence, he argued, was unprecedented and “legal and constitutional rules” governing law enforcement—such as the Fourth Amendment prohibition on “unreasonable” searches and seizures—did not apply.
More on this from Kevin Drum.
