New BUSHCO Docs Reveal How Yoo Eliminated 4th Amendment So Cheney Could Wiretap Illegally

Newly Released OLC Opinion Reveals How Yoo Relied on Eliminating Fourth Amendment to Wiretap Illegally
By: emptywheel Saturday March 19, 2011 7:05 am-According To Yoo It's The 4th Amendment That's Quaint

As Josh Gerstein http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0311/Justice_Department_details_legal_blessing_of_warrantless_wiretapping_in_2004.html?showall and Jack Goldsmith http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/03/doj-releases-redacted-version-of-2004-surveillance-opinion/ note, DOJ just released two of the opinions underlying the warrantless wiretap programs. They both focus on the May 6, 2004 opinion https://webspace.utexas.edu/rmc2289/OLC%2054.FINAL.PDF Goldsmith wrote in the wake of the hospital confrontation; I’ll have far more to say about that opinion later today and/or tomorrow.

But I wanted to look at what the highly redacted opinion John Yoo wrote on November 2, 2001 tells us.

The opinion is so completely redacted we only get snippets. Those snippets are, in part:



................

Cheney’s illegal wiretapping program was totally legal. What you didn’t know, though, is that the Fourth Amendment is just a quaint artifact of time before 9/11.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/03/19/newly-released-olc-opinion-reveals-how-yoo-relied-on-eliminating-fourth-amendment-to-wiretap-illegally/

.... story. The first wiretaps were put into use in Feb. 2001 @ a ATT building in San Francisco 7 months
before 9/11. "They" also routinely circuited domestic calls to outside of the United States so as to
give them cover and say that "they" were only looking @ international calls coming into the United States.

Once Again:

Bush/Cheney/Rove/&Company used the NSA to do their spying, the department of justice was their muscle,
and some of the U.S. Attorneys were their "button men." And Eric Holder is not going to do squat about it, fact.

BTW all freepers, Rush Limbaughs, right wing lurkers, or useless members of the media please check out
if what I have posted here is true. "The Google" is your friend.

;)

:shrug:

K&R

Practice extends to other communications and web-based services.

Didn't help matters in 2006. But, yeah, where the heck is Congress?

Yoo is as corrupt as they come.

If I remember correctly, the Bush adm. main argument for eliminating the warrant requirement was that it simply took too long to get a warrant.
However, at that time, the argument was undermined by the fact that original FISA already allowed that under 'exceptional circumstances', a President could authorize a wiretap to exist for 48 hours before a warrant was approved by the FISA court.

Am I recalling this correctly?
:shrug:

oh forcryingoutloud!!!!

Hmmm... I wonder if muammar walker and his little GOP pals in the other statehouses they've taken hostage are looking at this and trying to figure out how to apply it for their own purposes. Hell, seems like they've done everything else BUT this!

:nuke: :mad: :grr: :banghead: :thumbsdown: :puke:

Garry Wills is also very upset about George - but Bush, now. A prolific author of astonishing range - from St. Augustine to Henry Adams to Richard Nixon - Wills in "Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State" offers a forceful indictment of the 43rd president, and even more of his vice president, Dick Cheney. Wills' outrage is broad: torture, abuse of secrecy, illegal covert operations, signing statements and (in Wills' estimation) unconstitutional expansion of the commander-in-chief power expressed in Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution. We have come a long way from the framers.

His second goal is to explain how we got here, as in the book's first sentence: "This book has a basic thesis, that the Bomb altered our subsequent history down to its deepest constitutional roots." He explains in the next paragraph that today's abuses "grew out of the Manhattan Project, out of its product, and even more out of its process. The project's secret work, secretly funded at the behest of the President, was a model for the covert activities and overt authority of the government we now experience." For the first half of this impassioned book, Wills offers a condensed account of the development of the atomic bomb in World War II and the rise of the "national security state" under President Harry Truman. He proposes that the first led to the second.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-01-24/books/17835152_1_atomic-bomb-modern-presidency-manhattan-project

In his 28th book, "Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State," he amplifies an idea he first raised a decade ago in "A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government" -- that the dawn of the Atomic Age fundamentally changed our institutions of republican government.

"George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change . . . the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. . . . The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire National Security State, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the Cold War and the Cold War with the 'war on terror' -- all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order."

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/20/entertainment/la-et-rutten20-2010jan20

Some suggest that Germany had made at least two atomic weapons which we took over.

That the two first two bombs dropped were perhaps made in Germany -- and that only

the 3rd bomb dropped on Nagasaki was one produced by US.

We should also keep in mind what Pres. Jimmy Carter made clear -- that when he asked

for information on UFO's, George Bush, Sr. -- then head of the CIA -- told him that

he didn't have high enough security clearance to see that information!

In other words, information about UFO's were a higher security issue than the atomic bomb!

And, as Truman made clear, the CIA as it developed was not something he had envisioned

when he approved it. Without doubt, many elites here in America supported fascism --

and post WWII saw to it that it didn't end in Germany but was imported to the US -- tens

of thousands of NAZIS and their families brought here -- and used to found the CIA and

also funneled into the FBI and other government agencies. Werner Von Braun, of course,

heading up NASA!


Much, indeed, was hidden behind the Cold War -- and it is still going on.

in fact I have never heard that and it frankly sounds like more than a bit of a stretch.

That being said, Wills talks about General Grove's administration of the building of the bomb and the incredible secrecy (Truman didn't know about it until he became President) and almost unlimited funding he had to make it. That was the beginning of the "national security" secrecy culture, Truman's Presidency was the infantcy period and Truman was fully involved and supportive.

Jim Marrs in one of his most recent books -- "The Rise of the Fourth Reich" --

I'm sure you know that under Operation Paperclip we pretty much transferred Nazism to

the US -- while simutaneously putting Operation Gladio in place to keep rightwing

leadership in office in Europe and Japan, etal.

Not sure about Truman -- he is someone who was obviously moved into place as Henry Wallace

was moved out and the rightwing began to control the party. Obviously, Truman was no FDR.

Granted the atomic bomb was an excuse for the McCarthy Era, the executions of the Rosenbergs,

but that period was mainly about ousting liberals and progressives from government after WWII.

Not only from government and politics, of course, but from the arts -- and journalism.

Though Edward R. Murrow struck a deadly blow at McCarthy, it was pretty much the end of his

career.

Certainly one of the most startling periods of Truman's administration was flying saucers

over the Capitol --- and Roswell -- !!

Time will tell -- perhaps!!


:)

thanks for the tips.

And I mean the VERY least.

I imagine work like this would not pass for a minute in a legitimate law school. To put it at the service of evil is a tremendous blot on the legal profession.

Evidently high level officials believe they are not accountable to the public.

further is going to come from this.

The malfeasance has been softened and covered.

Friday January 29, 2010
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/01/29/opr-report-altered-to-cover-bush-doj-malfeasance/

Yoo walks on mere "bad judgment".

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/2010/01/29/justice-official-clears-bush-lawyers-in-torture-memo-probe.html

And we won't be revisiting DOJ reviews of old misconduct under the new improved management.

January 18, 2011
http://www.mainjustice.com/2011/01/18/former-holder-chief-of-staff-to-lead-new-misconduct-unit/

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. Unless you're in Quantico, in which case the lesson is that you're better off facilitating crimes of the state than exposing them.

the Patriot Act since this enormous document was written prior to that disaster. The Patriot Act just opened the door for more laws to be added on to it.

The linking of 911 and Patriot Act spawned laws is another lie-- just like linking 911 and Iraq, and part of the big lie that started our state of eternal war and loss of Constitutional rights.

This is all a part of the coup of 2000.

the rule of law has completely broken down, except for those at the bottom.

abuses of the power of surveillance which Nixon exercised for, among other things, alleged security reasons.

If I am correct about that, then it would appear to me that FISA was specifically enacted to curtail the president's ability to circumvent or ignore the 4th Amendment restrictions on various kinds of surveillance.

It is incredible to me that John Yoo is teaching in a law school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me like he is one of these lawyers that has only worked for the government -- throughout his entire career.

That means to me that he has never had to submit his work to an ordinary state court judge. I don't think his work would be nearly so sloppy if he had begun, not as a Supreme Court clerk, but as an ordinary associate in a law firm somewhere.

At least from the Wikipedia article on him, I can't see that his ability as a lawyer was ever really put to a test. Yet he is teaching at a prestigious law school.

It's all who you know I guess.

and able to do their dirty work --

Same with John Dean -- there's a section in the Nixon tapes where Dean is pushing

for using the IRS to go after Nixon's "enemies."

Another section, where John Dean is commenting on what looks like Chappaquiddick

before it happens -- he is saying to Nixon, something like ... "Wouldn't Ted Kennedy

be surprised to know the bear trap he is walking into." That was the Friday before

the Chappaquiddick weekend.

And its the same arrangement where MAFIA members also do the bidding of elites

who keep them in business, largely undisturbed. J. Edgar Hoover even denied their

existence!

Some say that FISA itself, while allegedly preventing what Nixon did, was simply

another violation of the Constitution -- and, of course it is!

And post Bush, that violation has been greatly expanded!

criminal behavior because he acted on advice of counsel. I think that is not such a good argument, but judges would have the last word.

....for failure to prosecute. if there's no prosecution, it's as good as law.

the cartel on many illegal acts. They just said their counsel (Yoo) advised them it was legal. They knew damn well what they were doing was wrong and illegal. Just because a lawyer says it's legal doesn't make it so. Yoo should be water boarded until he flips on the cartel.

nothing we shouldn't have already known. Laws are made for the people, but can be "cleverly" avoided by the people that we put in power to protect and uphold them.

Yup. Sounds about right.

Makes clearer than ever that we need to overturn this "national security state"

and our state of perpetual war!!

Is it any clearer to the nation today why the Cold War was such a necessity to those

who wish to control us and why they continue still to reestablish it?

And nothing will come of this.

nothing to see here.

Even a century from now, people will refer to the Bush Era policies and activities as some of the darkest moments in world history.

Forget American History, the world will continuously use them as an example of the worst of humanity.

What a Legacy!

http://washingtonindependent.com/50380/the-inspector-generals-report-on-warrantless-surveillance#

Inspector Generals Report on Warrantless Surveillance.

btw, Obama doesn't appear to care about the Constitution any more than Bush did.