Screwing with the Constitution

No, I'm not going to stop going after Obama. In fact, the real dirt has yet to come out. (Check in tomorrow.) But this blog, like most others, has become so stricken by election fever that important issues have gone ignored.

Such as, you ask? This:

NEW YORK – A newly disclosed secret memo authored by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in March 2003 that asserts President Bush has unlimited power to order brutal interrogations of detainees also reveals a radical interpretation of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure. The memo, declassified yesterday as the result of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, cites a still-secret DOJ memo from 2001 that found that the “Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.”

The October 2001 memo was almost certainly meant to provide a legal basis for the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, which President Bush launched the same month the memo was issued. As a component of the Department of Defense, the NSA is a military agency.

Larisa Alexandrovna adds:

If I am reading this correctly, it seems to me that this administration has justified its crimes by NOT suspending the state of emergency that went up on September 11, 2001. They are using emergency powers if you look at the whole of the spying, military actions inside the US, etc. I would wager that if asked, this administration will admit that we have been in a state of emergency for their tenure in office. Congress? Was the state of emergency lifted, yes or no?

She raises an interesting point: States of emergency are rarely declared over.

See, for example, here. According to the official White House site, we are living in multiple states of emergency!

I've been told that the state of emergency declared by President Truman at the beginning of the Korean conflict has never been officially rescinded. So if any president can't find a better excuse for robbing Americans of their rights, there's always that.