Bush Considered Military Invasion of New York
If Dick Cheney and torture promoter John Yoo had had their way, the next front in the War on Terror would have been… the United States of America:
WASHINGTON — Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.
Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.
You might be thinking, “isn’t that kind of military action on U.S. soil several kinds of illegal?” And you’d be right:
The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.
But, as was apparently usual in the Bush administration, the Constitution and the laws of this country don’t apply to the president:
In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.
“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.
The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.
…
The lawyers, in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote that the Constitution, the courts and Congress had recognized a president’s authority “to take military actions, domestic as well as foreign, if he determines such actions to be necessary to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and before.”The document added that the neither the Posse Comitatus Act nor the Fourth Amendment tied a president’s hands.
It’s worth noting that objectors to the Cheney/Yoo plan included then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and then-Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff, and, as we know, Bush eventually rejected the proposal. Still, it does make one wonder just how many constitutional provisions and laws Cheney and Yoo thought the White House was exempt from.
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