One man wrecking ball

Alternate title: John Yoo - the gift that keeps on giving

Spot and many other commentators have discussed John Yoo's torture memo. The memo contains in footnote ten a reference to another memo authored by John Yoo - and Robert Delahunty - about the application of the Fourth Amendment to "domestic military operations":

[The entire Yoo memo is linked in the link above.]

Here's what the Associated Press said about the footnote and the memorandum referred to in it:

WASHINGTON — 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.

This earlier memorandum apparently gave the go ahead for the NSA's warrantless wiretap program:

Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.

That program intercepted phone calls and e-mails on U.S. soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court. The program began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and continued until Jan. 17, 2007, when the White House resumed seeking surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

John Yoo is a one man constitutional wrecking ball.

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