The terror memos: Suspending the Constitution

Torture is one thing, said The Philadelphia Inquirer in an editorial; tyranny is another. We’ve known since last year that the Bush administration relied on secret memos from in-house lawyer John Yoo as legal cover to waterboard and brutalize suspected terrorists. Only now are we finding out what the Bush White House had in mind for the rest of us. Last week, the Obama administration released nine more of Yoo’s secret memos, in which he advises Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al., that in light of the “overriding need to wage war successfully” the administration could suspend “First Amendment speech and press rights,” and put the military on the streets of American cities, arresting suspects and breaking down doors. The days after 9/11 were desperate ones indeed for this nation, but reading Yoo’s memos, it’s hard not “to hear the chilling sound of jackboots on pavement echoing from the pages.”

This may be hard to believe, said John Yoo in The Wall Street Journal, but “the overthrow of constitutional government in the United States” was not my intention. My job, in those terrifying weeks, was “preparing for the unthinkable.” For all we knew, the homeland was riddled with al Qaida sleeper cells, armed with “biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons” that they would use to slaughter thousands of American civilians. We’d never faced a major terrorist threat before, and it was my responsibility, as part of the Office of Legal Counsel, to let the president know exactly what his options were in the event—and only in the event—that such a threat materialized, “even if, thankfully, those circumstances never materialized.”

Nice try, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. As support builds for a public inquiry into the abuses of the Bush administration, it’s not surprising that Yoo would try to pass off his memos as abstract thought-experiments that were never acted on. But it isn’t true. President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was premised on Yoo’s “secret proclamation” that the war on terror superseded all constitutional protections. It was also thanks to Yoo that “American citizens captured on U.S. soil were put in cages for years with no trial or charges,” and that a “systematic torture regime led to the brutalization and even deaths of many detainees.” Let’s be clear, said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. These weren’t good-faith legal opinions. They were willful distortions of the law that quite deliberately brought us “to the brink of executive tyranny.”

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