http://www.newsweek.com/id/187342In 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.
Many of the actions discussed in the Oct. 23, 2001, memo to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's chief lawyer, William Haynes, were never actually taken.
But the memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel—along with others made public for the first time Monday—illustrates with new details the extraordinary post-9/11 powers asserted by Bush administration lawyers. Those assertions ultimately led to such controversial policies as allowing the waterboarding of terror suspects and permitting warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens—steps that remain the subject of ongoing investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. The memo was co-written by John Yoo, at the time a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo, now a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has emerged as one of the central figures in those ongoing investigations.
These legal technicians somehow came to believe that they could just jury-rig things so that entire, inconvenient portions of the Constitution would go away. Yoo is very much like Rahm Emanuel in this respect, who thinks that a no-fly list is sufficient to do away with the 2nd Amendment. (I don't know where he went to law school. The Rahm Emanuel Strip-Mall School of Adult Educations for the Active Adult Lifestyle. Psst!: [loud, strained whisper] I think he practices some other kind of law!!!)
And by the way, if your political inclination had ever led you to think that guns should be banned and that we should do away with the 2nd Amendment, do you now see why it is necessary that the people keep guns? Do you now see the value of the 2nd Amendment? It's so that when all the legal technicians have had their fill of mucking up the works and magically doing away with fundamental law, the people can just say, "Wow. We're happy that you folks think that you have all these new powers. So we're gonna remove ourselves from your monster baby and form a new political union to defend ourselves from your new creation. ...Oh: If y'all ever come around trying to assert your conception of law, we'll drop you where you stand."
If it were not for the estimated one hundred million persons in this land who are willing, able, and equipped to defend themselves and their lawful government, you'd be in a concentration camp by now. The only thing preventing the Pentagon from lowering the hammer for their banker masters is the knowledge that they'll get their clocks cleaned. (Again, they can't prevail against rice farmers and goat herders. And this is something that they are aware of.)
This will go down in history as the most boneheaded move ever: What caused the United States to lose the ability to enforce a parking ticket? The loss of due process. See, the United States somehow came to believe that it had the authority to label anyone an enemy combatant and spirit that person off to be tortured and killed. This designation of enemy combatant is secret. Therefore, the man on the street cannot know if a United States agent wants merely to collect on a parking ticket or if he intends to torture and kill him without trial. Therefore, the reasonable person has every moral right to immediately neutralize any United States agent who so much as reaches for a pair of handcuffs.
Smooth move. I think it's funny how you destroyed your own ability to enforce your laws. It's like the snake eating its own tail. Yum yum munch munch Bloop! Now it's gone. Extinguished like a micro black hole produced in John Yoo's Linear Accelerator of Legal Genius.
The United States accidentally publicly stated that it is morally proper to use all most minimally effective degrees of force, up to and including lethal force, to prevent being taken into custody by its agents.
What would Ephraim Zimbalist, Junior think?
He would probably recommend that no lawyer be permitted to practice law.
