BUsh Considered Scrapping The 1st Admendmant & Other Horrors

Extraordinary Measures

A new memo shows just how far the Bush administration considered going in fighting the war on terror.

“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.

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.

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."cont…

http://www.newsweek.com/id/187342

What stopped them?

The press was already in their pocket. Fucking stenographers.

They didn't need to to achieve their goals?

:shrug:

-Hoot

:nuke:

wanted to become Big Brother

Or, at the very least, can we call it malfeasance due to the deliberate and willful violation of the Oath of Office?

Always will be

I'll bet Nancy Pelosi is still glad to have kept impeachment off the table. I mean, if impeachment had been on the table, maybe we wouldn't be in the middle of the 2nd Great Depression. :eyes:

This confirms the type of thing that was discussed on DU during the Bush-Cheney years. Of course, there were those who said such talk was "paranoid."

Nominated.

At how close we came to the "paranoia" being made manifest

The same folks who said such talk was paranoid are likely some of the same ones who believe the official 9/11 story as well.

Honestly, if an administration is going to go as far as we now know Bushco went, are the 9/11 conspiracy theories that far out? I don't think so. :shrug:

I wonder what's next...as time goes by, I'm sure we'll learn that a lot of what many suspected at the time about Bushco was indeed true. :(

If you didn't hear it or see it for yourself, it's just heresay and not to be taken as gospel

How do we know what stories may have been squashed by the administration? :shrug:

Thanks for this, Me. Just goes to show there is no question about what they wanted. The only question was "What can we get away with?"

There should be no question about investigations

Remember the Pentagon's "Message Force Multipliers"? Remember how Donahue was cancelled, and how a few members of the Press claimed that they were pressured into following prescribed stories and ignoring others? Remember Valerie Plame?

Thank you for that list, which is actually just some of the highlights.

snip...

At one point, the memo says, the U.S. military could be used for "targeting and destroying" a hijacked airline or "attacking civilian targets, such as apartment buildings, offices or ships where suspected terrorists were thought to be." At another point, the memo advices: "Military action might encompass making arrests, seizing documents or other property, searching persons or places or keeping them under surveillance, intercepting electronic or wireless communications, setting up roadblocks, interviewing witnesses or searching for suspects."


again

"or "attacking civilian targets, such as apartment buildings, offices or ships where suspected terrorists were thought to be."

--------------

They were ready to bomb ..

apartment buildings ?

offices?

In the USA


WTF ?

knr

"searching persons or places or keeping them under surveillance, intercepting electronic or wireless communications"

FISA ring a bell?

Why isn't this the top news story!?

stripping private property from and interring "undesirables" in concentration camps we got! They were trying to justify this crap with some kind of phony war powers precedent.

Why didn't they implement these memos? Maybe Blackwater didn't have the "facilities" completed in time(don't they have a history of not getting things done?)

I'll bet the members of this administration will never be brought to justice either.

who would have willingly, openly, and freely gone along with that program...one of these days, someone should compile a comprehensive list of the "dissent = treason" shills from 2001-2003, because they were ALL over the place, and not just on Fox News...

Justice Department and John Conyers' Truth Commission for investigation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/support-john-conyers-trut_b_158016.html

on a banana republic is how Isikoff described it on Tweety