Wednesday, May 2, 2012

2001 Administration Memo Says Fourth Amendment Does Not Apply To Military Operations Within U.S. and 2012 CISPA To Remove 4th Amendment Rights – Stop CISPA

(NEWSER) – Just a month after Sept. 11, 2001, the Justice Department concluded that anti-terror military operations on US soil were not constrained by the Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure. The conclusion was detailed in a memo written by John Yoo, the theorist behind many of President Bush’s expansions of presidential power. Though it hasn’t been released, it was referred to in Yoo’s 2003 memo authorizing torture, which was released Tuesday, writes the Washington Post.

April 2, 2008

ACLU Calls For Immediate Release Of Withheld Legal Memo

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 519-7829 or (646) 785-1894; media@aclu.org

NEW YORK – A newly disclosed secret memo authored by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in March 2003 that asserts President Bush has unlimited power to order brutal interrogations of detainees also reveals a radical interpretation of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure. The memo, declassified yesterday as the result of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, cites a still-secret DOJ memo from 2001 that found that the “Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.”

The October 2001 memo was almost certainly meant to provide a legal basis for the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, which President Bush launched the same month the memo was issued. As a component of the Department of Defense, the NSA is a military agency.

“The recent disclosures underscore the Bush administration’s extraordinarily sweeping conception of executive power,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.

CISPA To Remove 4th Amendment Rights -

Stop CISPA Thu, 04/26/2012

- C O N T A C T Y O U R R E P S T O D A Y ! -

TUESDAY, MAR 3, 2009 06:31 AM EST

The newly released secret laws of the Bush administration

Long concealed Justice Department memoranda reveal the true extent of the extremism and radicalism prevailing in the U.S. over the last eight years.

The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens. And it wasn’t only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls “domestic military operations” was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying — in secret and with no oversight — on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

That the U.S. Government had suspended the Fourth Amendment itself isn’t exactly news. A fleeting reference to that event (largely ignored by the media) was made in a footnote to one of Yoo’s previously released torture memos (release of which was also compelled not by the U.S. Congress or the media, but by the ACLU). But reading the document that actually effectuated (in secret) that suspension — released only yesterday — is genuinely breathtaking.

First, the document states its general conclusion regarding the President’s authority to use military force inside the U.S.:

The President not only possesses these powers, but can wield them — including within the U.S. — independent of anything Congress or the courts do: