[Sosfbay-discuss] Harpers: "This country was a dictatorship"

[Brian Good]

   Formerly secret legal opinions from the Bush administration were released by the Justice Department Monday.  A top DOJ official issued a memo five days before Bush left office repudiating these opinions and claiming they had not been relied upon since 2003.

    Scott Horton doesn't believe it, and questions why the memo took so long. A Columbia University lecturer and Harpers Contributing Editor, Horton wrote: "We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship."  (1)

   According to the New York Times (2), powers conferred by these memos
included:


* Use of US military forces domestically to combat terrorism suspects and conduct raids without obtaining search warrants, and seize property
* unilateral abrogation of foreign treaties
* ignoring guidance from Congress in dealing with suspected terrorists
* warrentless domestic eavesdropping
* subordination of 1st amendment rights to wartime exigencies


    Reasoning justifying these opinions included these claims:

*the right to use of deadly force in self defense makes lesser matters, such as 4th Amendment privacy issues, trivial
*the military could operate against terrorist suspects domestically despite the the Posse Comitatus Act because they would be acting not to enforce laws but to further national security

    Walter Dellinger, a high-level DOJ official under Clinton, called these opinions (largely authored by John Yoo) "irresponsible", saying the assertion “that Congress had absolutely no role in these national security issues was contrary to constitutional text, historical practice and judicial precedent.”

    Horton's abstract:  "[Yoo] concluded that in wartime, the President was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as a counterterrorism operations inside the United States....  John Yoo’s Constitution is unlike any other I have ever seen. It seems to consist of one clause: appointing the President as commander-in-chief. The rest of the Constitution was apparently printed in disappearing ink."

   The broad counterterrorist powers are particularly astounding when contrasted with pre-9/11 behavior by the intelligence agencies as reported by James Bamford in his recent PBS program "The Spy Factory". (3) Bamford says that though then-NSA Director Hayden knew the law allowed eavesdropping on known terrorists, Hayden told the House Intelligence Committee in 2000 that if Osama bin Laden came into the United States he would enjoy 4th Amendment protections on search and seizure.  At some point Hayden told Bamford the NSA was monitoring only six people inside the USA. 

    Before 9/11, NSA was monitoring phone calls between alleged 9/11 hijackers inside the USA and the al Qaeda communications hub in Yemen, Bamford says.  IMHO you needn't be a crazy conspiracy theorist to note that the prospect of new powers and increased funding (Bamford says that between 2000 and 2008 budgets doubled) highly motivated the spooks to "stand down" and allow the 9/11 attacks to go forward, claiming that privacy laws and inadequate funding had made detecting the plot impossible.  

    A whole lot of conscientious and principled public servants resigned from the DOJ, the FBI, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies during the Bush years.  Citizens need to create an environment that encourages whistleblowers to come forward and tell their stories.



http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004488



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/us/politics/03legal.html?_r=1&hp


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/





 
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