Home > The Barr Code > Archives > 2008 > April > 04
Friday, April 4, 2008
Documents reveal sweep of Bush doctrine on domestic spying
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For those who still believe the current Bush Administration respects the Fourth Amendment, they might have an interest in reading a recently-released Department of Justice Memo from 2003 that provides legal opinion that torture of detainees in US custody is permissible unless it causes “death, organ failure or permanent damage.”
While this “torture memo” does not deal directly with the broader issue regarding whether President Bush is bound by the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures when conducting warrantless surveillance of US citizens on domestic soil, a footnote in the document refers to another — still classified — memo written also by Department of Justice lawyers in 2001. That footnote reveals that at least at the time it was written in late 2001, the Administration believed the president was not bound by the Fourth Amendment in conducting warrantless surveillance within the United States, so long as the chief executive believed he was doing so for national security reasons as “commander-in-chief.”
While more recently, government lawyers have indicated this dismissive view of the Fourth Amendment’s protections is no longer “operative,” the fact that Justice Department lawyers had concluded the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees against warrantless searches and seizures can be ignored at will by a president, is truly breath-taking in its scope and effect. And even the more recent statements by government lawyers seeming to disavow the 2001 position are unclear.
