John Yoo

= Yoo Torture Memo Says Fourth Amendment Doesn’t Apply in War on Terror =

John Yoo, the former Bush Administration lawyer who now teaches at UC Berkeley’s law school,


 * Brazil.jpg

authored the torture memo that cleared the way for the U.S. military to begin torturing suspected Al Qaeda members in Guantanamo and black site prisons, as well as Iraqis in Abu Ghraib.

Perhaps less well known is that Yoo also wrote a legal opinion blessing the president’s targeting of American citizens for wiretapping, a memo that even members of Congress have not seen.

There have been clues before in the administration’s defense of its wiretapping program. For instance, the Justice Department said (.pdf) the Authorization to Use Military Force and the president’s war making powers in the Constitution.

But in the Yoo torture memo (.pdf) which was just released and declassified yesterday, Yoo himself seems to clue us in:

Citing cases that prevented companies from suing the U.S. government for losses they sustained overseas during wartime, You writes “These cases and the untenable consequences for the President’s conduct of a war that would result from the application of the Due Process Cluse demonstrate its inapplicability during wartime–whether to the conduct of interrogations or the detention of enemy aliens.”



Lest it not be clear enough that Yoo is arguing the President is King in wartime, thanks to the Constitution’s Article II powers, two footnotes surrounding the former sentence make it clear.

In footnote 10, Yoo writes “our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to military operations.”

Remember that Bush said the wiretapping program was part of his war on terrorism.

And there it is. In the war on terrorism, the bill of rights does not apply.
Footnote 11 adds to it: “We conclude that the restrictions outlined in the Fifth Amendment simply do not address actions the Executive takes in conducting a military campaign against the Nation’s enemies.”

Congress still hasn’t seen this memo, and yet they are prepared to hand over more wiretapping powers to this Administration.

And John Yoo teaches at UC-Berkeley.

Meanwhile not a single Congressional committee will let AT&T whistle blower Mark Klein testify.


Fox News won't carry this story. I wonder why?

Will MSNBC?

What about NPR?

or BBC?

or CBS, ABC? TBN? ESPN? CSPAN?

we SRSLY doubt it!

Harry Tuttle: ...well, that's a pipe of a different color.

Harry Tuttle: Listen, this old system of yours could be on fire and I couldn't even turn on the kitchen tap without filling out a 27b/6... Bloody paperwork.

Harry Tuttle: My good friends call me Harry.

Sam Lowry: Tuttle! Harry Tuttle: Call me Harry!

As in modern America, there is some doubt about whether Brazil’s "War on Terrorism" is really working. At the opening of the film Minister Helpmann, the Deputy Minister of information (the internal security agency), appears on TV immediately after a bombing takes place:
 * INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?


 * HELPMANN: Oh yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs, we're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.


 * INTERVIEWER: But the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year.


 * HELPMANN: Beginner's luck.

Now in the US, we are told by the Bush administration that the war on terrorism will become a more or less permanent state of affairs.
 * [http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/topstory2/1099172 U.S. war may last decades

Military pushed to think broadly]'By KAREN MASTERSON


 * WASHINGTON – The U.S. war on terrorism may rage for decades and has forced Pentagon strategists to think more broadly than they've had to since World War II, a top military official said Sunday.


 * "The fact that it could last several years, or many years, or maybe our lifetimes would not surprise me," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday on ABC's This Week.

The film has been reissued on DVD with commentary by the director in which he states that it was his intention to convey that there were so many government plants, double agents, agents provocateurs, moles, infiltrators, etc. that at some point even the government did not know for sure whether there were any real terrorists or whether all of the terror was fabricated by the police as part of their anti-terror campaign.

In a conversation between Sam and Ministry of Information office Jack Lint, Lint reveals how he – as a key member of the internal security department – understands the events that are taking place:
 * SAM: You don't really think Tuttle and the girl are in league?


 * JACK: I do. Goodbye. 


 * SAM: It could all be coincidental.


 * JACK: There are no coincidences, Sam. Everything's connected, all along the line. Cause and effect. That's the beauty of it. Our job is to trace the connections and reveal them. This whole Buttle/Tuttle confusion was obviously planned from the inside. 

As the audience of the film, we know that the Tuttle/Buttle confusion was caused by a computer error within the department, and that "the girl" (Jill Layton) became involved as a concerned citizen trying to investigate a wrongful arrest. The irony here is that a random chain of events kicked off by the Ministry’s own error is seen from inside ministry as further evidence of a terrorist conspiracy.



Revisionist historians have suggested that many wars and other events are staged or at least allowed to happen and then used by the government to manipulate public opinion in the direction that they want it to go. Michael Ruppert has provided voluminous research suggesting that the US intelligence agencies had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and chose to allow them to occur, much the way that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor and did not prevent it. And there is the tradition of US enemies having once been funded by US intelligence agencies.


 * [http://www.msnbc.com/news/190144.asp?cp1=1 Bin Laden comes home to roost

]His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful storyBy Michael Moran MSNBC




 * http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/blumen3.html



Harry Tuttle: Listen, kid, we're all in it together.