Cheney Demanded To Use US Troops To Arrest People And Destroy The Constitution.

It would appear as if there really was no limit to the number of ways in which Dick Cheney wanted to test the limits of the US Constitution.

Glenn Greenwald:

This new report today from The New York Times' Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston reveals an entirely unsurprising though still important event: in 2002, Dick Cheney and David Addington urged that U.S. military troops be used to arrest and detain American citizens, inside the U.S., who were suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda. That was done pursuant to a previously released DOJ memo (.pdf) authored by John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, addressed to Alberto Gonzales, dated October 23, 2001, and chillingly entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the U.S." That Memo had concluded that the President had authority to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens on U.S. soil. Far worse, it asserted that in exercising that power, the President could not be bound either by Congressional statutes prohibiting such use (such as the Posse Comitatus Act) or even by the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which -- the Memo concluded -- was "inapplicable" to what it called "domestic military operations."

Though it received very little press attention, it is not hyperbole to observe that this October 23 Memo was one of the most significant events in American politics in the last several decades, because it explicitly declared the U.S. Constitution -- the Bill of Rights -- inoperative inside the U.S., as applied to U.S. citizens.

Cheney's extraordinary lack of respect for the notion that any limitation should ever be placed on the power wielded by the executive is no great surprise. This was the argument which essentially ran beneath every stance that the Bush regime took during it's war on a noun.

What's extraordinary to me is that one can take this stance whilst simultaneously pretending to be against "big government".

That's so contradictory it makes one's head spin. And is anyone surprised that the memo which claimed this was legal came from the pen of John Yoo? Has he not been disbarred yet? How may more of his insane memos have to come to light before everyone can agree that this man is not fit to practice law?

Click title for New York Times article.

Tags: Cheney, Bush, US Constitution, John Yoo