Cheney’s Plans for a Military Coup

...Even the Times article makes clear that other considerations drove the preparation of the Yoo memoranda, namely to “test the Constitution.” The Lackawanna Six were being tightly monitored by the FBI, which believed it had the situation well in hand. But Cheney lacked confidence in the nation’s criminal justice system, as many of his public comments reflect.

...The new disclosure seems again designed to show Cheney as an extremist whose advice was not always followed by Bush.

But it is relevant to another issue now looming before the Obama Administration. The theories that Yoo and his colleagues concocted on White House commission were realized in a sense when Bush agreed to designate certain individuals as “enemy combatants” and then have them held by the military outside of the American legal system. This step was uncontroversial when applied to a person captured on a foreign battlefield. But when applied to an American citizen who arrived off a plane at O’Hare Airport (Jose Padilla), or to a foreign national lawfully in the country on a student visa (Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri), it raised serious questions. President Obama has stated that he is now considering whether he has the power to order the detention of persons outside of both the laws of armed conflict and the U.S. criminal justice system. While the Yoo memoranda have been repudiated, their arguments of almost limitless presidential power seem almost as appealing to the current White House as the old one.