Washington: For at least 16 months after the September 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on US soil did not apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.

That view was expressed in a Justice Department legal memo dated October 23, 2001. The administration yesterday stressed that it now disavows that view. The October 2001 memo was written at the request of the White House by John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, and addressed to Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time. The administration had asked the department for an opinion on the legality of potential responses to terrorist activity.

The 37-page memo has not been released. Its existence was disclosed on Tuesday in a footnote of a separate secret memo, dated March 14, 2003, released by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," the footnote states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States." Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Programme, or TSP.

That programme intercepted phone calls and e-mails on US soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court.

Source : PTI