The Obama administration’s strained defense of its targeted killing program is continuing to make people think long and hard about the government’s asserted authority to mark an American for death without any judicial oversight whatsoever.
Today the first hour of NPR’s On Point was devoted to this issue, along with the general expansion of authority claimed by the executive branch since 9/11. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero debated Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith, who worked in George W. Bush’s Justice Department. You can listen here.
By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 1:55pm
As I noted in a previous post, the two Bush administration surveillance memos we obtained last Friday are very heavily redacted. They’re interesting nonetheless.
The first memo, written by Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo in November 2001, contends that the president has authority as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a statute that “purports” (Yoo’s word) to regulate government surveillance. It also contends that Congress doesn’t have the power to regulate the president’s authority to gather intelligence for national security purposes. And it contends that intelligence gathering in support of military operations “does not trigger constitutional rights against illegal searches and seizures.” These are radical and insupportable claims, but they’re consistent with the claims that Yoo made in other OLC memos.
