Monday, December 20, 2004
2001 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers
A Justice Department lawyer may have been laying the groundwork
for the Iraq invasion long before it was discussed publicly by the
White House
By Michael
Isikoff (18 Dec 2004, Newsweek)
Just
two weeks after the September 11 attacks, a secret memo [The President's Constitutional
Authority to Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists and
Nations Supporting Them] to White House counsel Alberto White
House counsel Alberto Gonzales’ office concluded that President
Bush had the power to deploy military force “preemptively”
against any terrorist groups or countries that supported them—regardless
of whether they had any connection to the attacks on the World
Trade Towers or the Pentagon.The memo,
written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo,
argues that there are effectively “no limits” on the
president’s authority to wage war—a sweeping assertion
of executive power that some constitutional scholars say goes
considerably beyond any that had previously been articulated by
the department.
[...]
Addressed
to Gonzales’ chief deputy at the time, Tim Flanigan, the
memo lays out a line of argument about broad presidential wartime
powers that would be repeated time and again in a series of secret
memos to the White House about controversial decisions in the
war on terror. The arguments pushed by Yoo, a prolific conservative scholar who has since left the
Justice Department, reached what many view as its apex nearly
a year later when, in another memo written by a colleague Jay
Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel concluded
that the president’s powers were so expansive that he and
his surrogates were not bound by congressional laws or international
treaties proscribing torture during the interrogation of detainees.
The
disclosure last June of that Aug. 1, 2002, torture memo, in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal in
But
neither the White House nor the Justice Department has ever disavowed—or
for that matter publicly discussed—the similar assertions
of presidential power in Yoo’s
Sept. 25, 2001, memo. What is particularly striking is that it
goes beyond the joint congressional resolution passed on Sept.
14, 2001, authorizing the president to respond to the terror attacks.
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