The Justice Department recently released another of the now-notorious Office of Legal Counsel memos written by John Yoo — memos that authorized torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention,” reports Patrick Toomey for justsecurity.org. “The new memo, written as a ‘letter’ to then-presiding FISC Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in May 2002, addresses the legal basis for the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ communications under the ‘Stellar Wind’ program.
Nearly 15 years later, he Obama administration continues to “embrace” Yoo’s legal arguments to spy on Americans, allowing that privacy interests of US persons in international communications are “significantly diminished, if not completely eliminated,” when communicating with foreigners abroad.
Obama’s Cyberwarfare First Strike directive “essentially reiterates the doctrine of preventive warfare, enunciated by George W. Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq,” wrote Patrick Martin in 2013, globalresearch.ca. “Bush declared that the United States had the right to attack other countries, not merely to preempt an impending attack, but to prevent any potential attack at any time in the future — a formula for unlimited worldwide aggression.”