If The Framers Of The Constitution Read This….

Ken AshfordConstitution, War on Terrorism/Torture, Wiretapping & SurveillanceLeave a Comment

…they would never stop throwing up.  I’m talking about this:

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.

”Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,” the footnote states, referring to a document titled ”Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”

That’s the United States Justice Department, saying that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations.  The Fourth Amendment, which bars the government from searching and seizing private property, clearly applies to domestic military operations, since it is typically the military who would and could do such a thing in the first place.  In fact, that’s what pissed the early Americans off and set us to war against their British overlords.