Memos gave Bush overriding powers

The memos provide a detailed glimpse into the thinking of President Bush's Justice Department legal advisors at a time of national emergency.

They embraced the view that the president, acting alone, had the authority to override the other branches of government on a broad range of issues.

The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, in a memo written six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, would have allowed U.S. troops to search houses and seize suspected terrorists without a court-approved warrant. The Pentagon never used that power, although it considered it, according to a former Bush administration lawyer.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Justice Department lawyers also said the military's need to go after terrorists in the U.S. could override constitutional protections guaranteeing the right to free speech.

By then, the memos showed, the Bush administration was already discussing ways to wiretap U.S. conversations without warrants, and to take other steps without the traditional oversight of Congress and the courts.

Another memo said the president could unilaterally abrogate treaties with other nations.

The just-released memos also showed that five days before Bush left office, the Justice Department issued a secret but remarkable retraction of some of these same sweeping definitions of presidential authority.

In a Jan. 15 "memorandum for the files," Principal Deputy Assistant Atty. Gen. Steven G. Bradbury said many of the Office of Legal Counsel opinions issued between 2001 and 2003 no longer reflected the views of the Justice Department and "should not be treated as authoritative for any purpose."

The Justice Department had secretly withdrawn some of its more controversial legal memos years earlier, Bradbury added, "and on several occasions we have already acknowledged the doubtful nature of these propositions."

The memos released Monday go well beyond what was known about the Bush administration's assertion of presidential power.

The Oct. 23, 2001, memo on the use of the military in the U.S. was written by then-Deputy Assistant Atty. Gen. John C. Yoo -- now a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange -- and Special Counsel Robert J. Delahunty.

Yoo did not return calls seeking comment, and Bradbury declined to comment.

"These military operations, taken as they may be on United States soil, and involving as they might American citizens, raise novel and difficult questions of constitutional law," they wrote.

But they said the president, as commander in chief in a time of war, had the right to authorize such extraordinary actions to protect the American public.

"The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically," Yoo and Delahunty added.

For several years, the Bush administration and its Justice Department have come under intense criticism for writing other legal memos pertaining to the war on terrorism.

Some of those legal opinions held that the administration did not need to abide by laws requiring court approval of wiretaps, while others provided legal cover for coercive interrogation techniques that many critics considered to be torture.

Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., have vowed to release other still-secret Bush legal memos as soon as possible.