Accountability

New York Times
More Terror Memos to be Released
WASHINGTON — One day after releasing a set of Bush administration memorandums claiming sweeping presidential powers to bypass legal constraints when fighting terrorism, Justice Department officials said on Tuesday that they may soon disclose further secret opinions about interrogation, surveillance, and other national security policies.

“These memos appear to have given the Bush administration a legal blank check to trample on Americans’ civil rights,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. Referring to the Office of Legal Counsel, the section of the Justice Department where Mr. Yoo worked, Mr. Whitehouse said, “We need to get to the bottom of what happened at O.L.C. and ensure it never happens again.”

Other critics of the Bush administration insist that a criminal investigation is crucial for restoring the rule of law.

One of them, Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed to language in one of the memos released on Monday that said that the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution were trumped by the president’s power as commander-in-chief, saying it was even more alarming than critics had imagined.

“This was an assault on the law itself,” Mr. Ratner said. “It’s as if 200 years of our history and the Constitution could just be dispensed with in the face of a terrorist attack. For me, it totally intensified the absolute need for a serious criminal investigation of both the authors of these memos as well as the people who put them up to it.”