Close calls of a Constitutional kind

Today we entered some scary territory, Constitutionally-speaking, and it is apparent that more is yet to come. Memos from the period immediately following 9/11 have been released by the Obama Justice Department that were written by the Bush Administration's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and that justified, rather speciously, a range of extra-constitutional presidential prerogatives. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff has more:

In 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. [snip]

[/snip] In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in the memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States."

This claim was viewed as so extreme that it was essentially (and secretly) revoked—but not until October of last year, seven years after the memo was written and with barely three and a half months left in the Bush administration.

This is the stuff Orwell's nightmares were made of, and it is this type of legal rationale to justify presidential actions that was one of the greatest fears of constitutional lawyers for the past eight years. Beyond the warrantless wiretapping of foreign and domestic targets, extraordinary rendition, and CIA "black sites" in foreign countries, these memos outlined the legal procedures for the establishment of no less than a police state.

The implications of what these memos could have meant for the general population, for you and for me, are staggering. One does not need to be a legal scholar to understand that the President suspending free speech protections and being able to direct the military inside US borders is a serious threat to American civil liberties. Keith Olbermann and constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley have more from Countdown tonight:

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What is perhaps most disturbing of all is that there are apparently a number of other legal opinions from the Bush Administration that the Justice Department is considering making public. What else could be contained in those opinions is anyone's guess, but the fact that the Justice Department has hesitated to release them suggests that they are either more controversial or more nefarious, or both. I'll update again when/if they are released, watch this space.