Nine secret, Bush-era documents that the Obama administration released this week demonstrate the hubris of a powerful government and the danger posed by it.
Some of these documents are among the dozens of memos that the ACLU has been suing the Department of Justice to release. To echo Glenn Greenwald from last year: “Yet again, the ACLU has performed the function which Congress and the media are intended to perform but do not.”
One of the legal opinions, written in October 2001 by John Yoo, a lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel, one who needs a Conscience, argued that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to military activities inside the United States. That is, the federal government thought it could get away with illegal searches and seizures and spying on innocent U.S. citizens, all without a warrant, as long as it could make it look like part of a military operation.
Yoo also advised that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war,” without saying specifically how that might play out, adding that the fight against “terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”
This opinion continued in force until just this past October, when the OLC finally issued a memo advising that “caution be exercised.” Not a resounding retraction, but at least it put the brakes on. So for 7 years, the federal government willfully discarded the Fourth Amendment rule of law, refusing to admit that it was doing so. This seemed to be part of a carefully laid plan, a legal evasion designed to help the government thwart the law.
Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch called it “telling people how to get away with sending someone to a nation to be tortured,” and said, “The idea that the legal counsel’s office would be essentially telling the president how to violate the law is completely contrary to the purpose and the role of what a legal adviser is supposed to do.”
Said Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU on the day the documents were released, “These memos essentially argue that the president has a blank check to disregard the Constitution during wartime, not only on foreign battlefields, but also inside the United States. We hope today’s release is a first step, because dozens of other OLC memos, including memos that provided the basis for the Bush administration’s torture and warrantless wiretapping policies, are still being withheld.”
Fearing Fear Itself
As you may know, I’m no big fan of FDR. Not only were his economic policies marked by the worst depression in American history, his administration also allowed and perpetuated the 9/11-analogue of his day, Pearl Harbor.
But FDR was a grand politician, and you know the rule about politicians: listen to what they say, just never follow what they do. Such it was in FDR’s first inaugural address, in which he coined a now-famous quote, reflecting a principle which we ought to remember in the current day:
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
This fear enabled the abuses and travesties of the past 8 years, and following FDR’s advice, none of it was actually necessary. Writes Tony Rhodin:
Our initial task in Afghanistan was clear. It didn’t require eliminating freedom of the press or require we illegally wiretap Americans. It required us to send enough troops, develop local intelligence and put to death a 6-foot-4 guy…
Instead we failed to get bin Laden, we failed to fully curtail the Taliban, we took in lots of prisoners — torturing some of them — and made ourselves a renewed target for whatever radicals seek to do us harm. That al-Qaeda showed up in Iraq after we, out of choice, attacked that sovereign country is clear evidence of that.
That the sun is finally shining on the remarkably unAmerican views of some in the previous administration I suppose should make us feel lucky that we survived until a new government could be elected.
I, however, am not ready to feel at ease, because I turn the page and read that a lawyer for the Obama administration will argue in the Supreme Court that a prisoner who claims he is innocent has no constitutional right to have DNA from the crime scene tested — even if he is willing to pay the costs himself.
Always watching!
-TimK
Comments
Post new comment