Stellar Wind Pros And Cons

Yoo’s continued fabrication of constitutional cover with his memos abetted the executive to excel in policies that dramatically reduced the civil liberties. Stellar Wind, for example, was initially maintained through his legal opinion that the “Court’s jurisdiction over electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence” to be “an unconstitutional infringement on the President’s Article II authorities” (112).
Greenberg also discusses the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, which “privileged intelligence collection over constitutional protections” (17). The Act significantly reshaped the relationship that U.S. citizens have to the power of their own government. The provisions of the Patriot Act helped allow intelligence and law enforcement agents to communicate to one another more easily. More controversial
The government bureaucracy rebuked Stellar Wind and the executive pushed to get the program in line with American law. In 2004 the Rasul v. Bush decision asserted that non-citizen enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay could challenge their detention in federal court, thereby putting GTMO within the reach of federal jurisdiction. In the same year, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld authorized that the habeas petition can proceed for Hamdi and the U.S. government could not detain him indefinitely without due process of some kind. Despite these rulings and executive actions, the initial steps taken by members in the White House and the Office of Legal Counsel closely following the attacks on 9/11 were not guided by traditional interpretation of American law. Instead of refitting programs to tailor to American law, officials such as Yoo tailored the American law to fit contentious programs that dramatically diminished the U.S. civil