America's Shame Memos - #2

We began a series of posts on the Bush II regime memos just released by Attorney General Holder in the Department of Justice. Memos which originated in the Bush II Department of Just Us.

We covered the "C.Y.A." memo first.

Now lets turn to the "Jesus is just all right with me" memo, written on September 25, 2001.

That memorandum was directed to David S. Kris and was written by John C. Yoo.

Yoo for some reason took a leave of absence from his tenured professorship where he "taught law" at the University of California at Berkeley, and came to work for the Bush II Department of Just Us.

The setting is shortly after 9/11. If you remember the rhetoric of the republican congress and the propagandists at the White House, it was that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was antiquated and could not work because there were too many requirements to get a warrant.

If you fell for the propaganda you surmised that the Bush II regime could not get warrants very easily, and that the FISA law was on the side of terrorists.

That was propaganda designed to deceive the public, because Yoo comes out saying:

... the courts have been exceedingly deferential to the government and have almost invariably declined to suppress the evidence, whether they applied the 'primary purpose' test or left open the possibility of a less demanding standard ... We believe that the Department would continue to win such deference from the courts ...

(11-25-01_Yoo-Memo, PDF, emphasis added). In other words the courts would let the Bush II regime get away with almost everything under FISA, even when they sometimes violated FISA.

An article in Salon written in May of 2007 points out that the government propaganda was saying the opposite of what Yoo was saying in classified (hidden from public scrutiny) documents. For example:

The same President who demanded changes to FISA in light of the terrorist threat, who received all the changes he demanded, and who then assured the nation he had all the surveillance tools he needed under the law, then proceeded -- the very same month -- to eavesdrop on Americans in violation of that law. Then, once caught, he sought to excuse his lawbreaking by claiming that the law (which his own administration re-wrote and heralded as sufficient) was somehow inadequate.

(Salon Article May 2007). Clearly and without any doubt the propaganda of the Bush II regime was designed to deceive the public, you and me.

The truth is much more likely that the Bush II regime had already started a massive and illegal spy program against its own American citizens a few days into the regime, and months before 9/11, and they needed to change the law to try to cover their illegal activities.