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A few days back, VP Cheney made some odd comments about his understanding of the powers of the president and the oath of office in an interview with the Washington Times. At the time, I pointed out that Cheney seems to have confused the oath of enlistment for the US military with the oath of office for the President and VP. Several of you wrote in to ask whether or not this was merely a slip of the tongue, and I wrote back that although I didn't have any direct proof, I was fairly certain it was not. But now I have proof.

Here's Cehney talking to FoxNews:

WALLACE: This is at the core of the controversies that I want to get to with you in a moment. If the president during war decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?

CHENEY: General proposition, I'd say yes. You need to be more specific than that. I mean -- but clearly, when you take the oath of office on January 20th of 2001, as we did, you take the oath to support and defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

For the record, here once again is the oath of office taken by the President and Vice President:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

And here is the oath of enlistment into the military:

"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

Notice that in the VP oath there is no mention whatsoever of enemies, and that as a result the entire duty of both the President and the VP is to the constitution itself. Andrew Sullivan explains why this matters:

How can the suspension of all laws into the power of the executive branch in wartime be seen as a defense or protection of the Constitution? Perhaps for a brief amount of time in a dire emergency, after which there would be a thorough accounting to the Congress and the Courts. But indefinitely? As inherent in the office? And with jurisdiction over the entire United States as well as the world? With "enemy combatants" defined as anyone the president calls an "enemy combatant" and no distinction between citizen ad non-citizen? Including the right to torture? Indefinitely?

What Cheney has advanced is that the president has the right to dissolve the constitution permanently. That he has the right to commit war crimes with impunity. That there is no legal authority to which he is ever required to pay deference in a war that is his and his alone to declare and end. Now when you consider that, in Cheney's view, these war-powers are limitless, and that war is declared not by the Congress but by the president, and can be defined against a broad, amorphous enemy such as "terrorism", and never end, you begin to see what a dangerous man he is, and how much danger we have all been in since he seized control of the government seven years ago.

And lest you think this is an overstatement, here's Cheney again in his own words:

The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.

He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.

The sole source of authority for the President of the United States is the United States Constitution. It is not, as Cheney claims here, "the nature of the world we live in." That is one of the foundational differences between our system of constitutional government and systems based on either monarchical or totalitarian control The power of the presidency is limited by the text of the constitution. Period. The end. Full stop. If the constitution needs to be rewritten because the world has changed, then let's have a debate and rewrite it. But it does not change simply because the world has changed.

The conservative movement has spent decades promoting the idea of original intent and strict constructionist in reading the constitution. They have claimed on innumerable occasions to be outraged by the actions of "out of control," "unaccountable," "activist" judges who go beyond the clear meaning of the text in the constitution to create new powers and new rights. They argue, for example, that although the Fourth Amendment makes reference to "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects," it does not mean that citizens have a right to privacy that includes things like the right to use birth control.

But of course those arguments were just a means to an end, and not an end in themselves. They weren't deployed because they actually believed them, but because the arguments helped achieve a desired policy outcome. Cheney's argument here, and the wide support it receive from conservatives, make that absolutely clear. If conservatives refuse to accept that there should even be a debate about the meaning of the Fourth Amendment - and to be absolutely clear here, I do believe that the text of the Fourth, combined with the historical record on its ratification, supports the liberal reading - there is absolutely no way to defend their support of Cheney's claims. Because there is nothing in the text of the constitution nor in the extensive historical record surrounding its ratification that supports the idea that "the nature of the world" changes the power of the presidency. Nothing.

The actions of the President are not by definition legal. That is not how our system works. I don't care if the President is someone I support or someone I oppose. Because my loyalty, first and foremost, is to the Constitution, and not to a particular party, ideology, or individual. And I believe that without ever having bothered to even take an oath.

One of the topics that I haven't weighed in on yet is the bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq. At first I assumed that the story was going to be so well covered that I didn't need to write about torture again, and then I got busy. But as Glenn Greenwald chronicles, the story was almost entirely ignored by everyone outside the blogosphere:

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in scope and unambiguous:

The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections. "The president's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment," the summary said. Members of Bush's Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed, according to the report.

The policies which the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously concludes were authorized by Bush, Rumsfeld and several other top Bush officials did not merely lead to "abuse" and humiliating treatment, but are directly -- and unquestionably -- responsible for numerous detainee murders. Many of those deaths caused by abusive treatment have been formally characterized as "homicides" by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling compilations of autopsy findings on detainees in U.S. custody, obtained by the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling exhibit in a war crimes trial).

A bipartisan report issued without a single dissent explicitly connects senior administration officials and even the president himself to war crimes, and the entire country just shrugs its shoulders and moves on?

Andrew Sullivan:

The Senate's bipartisan report, issued with no dissents, reiterates and adds factual context to what we already know. And there is no equivocation in the report.

The person who authorized all the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, the man who gave the green light to the abuses in that prison, is the president of the United States, George W. Bush.

Again: there is no longer any reasonable factual debate about this (hence to near total silence of the Republican right), and the Senate report finally holds the president responsible in bipartisan fashion:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

Those ghastly pctures of naked, hooded prisoners? Bush approved nudity and hooding of prisoners. Hypothermia? Sleep deprivation? Bush signed a memo removing the most baseline protections for all human beings under the Geneva Conventions. Waterboarding? Bush knew full well. As did Rice and Tenet and Powell and that poseur in defense of human rights, Paul Wolfowitz. But even before the memo, before any prisoners were captured, the Bush administration was working on how to torture them:

In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel's Office had already solicited information on detainee "exploitation" from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

Let's be absolutely clear what this means: When we saw an image of Lynndie England pulling a naked prisoner around on a leash, we assumed at the time that she improvised this, or was some kind of "bad apple." This is and was a conscious lie to the Congress, and to the American people, and to the world. The person who authorized the use of nudity and leashes on prisoners was not Lynndie England or any of the other grunts thrown to the wolves.

It gets worse:

The torture and abuse techniques authorized by the president of the United States were drawn from methods designed by the Communist Chinese to extract false confessions from broken human beings (although many of the torture methods - from hypothermia to sleep deprivation - had been pioneered by the Gestapo using George Tenet's precise phrase "enhanced interrogation". The historical proof of this is here - and Americans tried and executed those responsible for the same techniques now used by the president of the United States.)

Of all of the people involved in this, the one's I've always thought should be held least accountable are the enlisted men and women who were put into the middle of this god-awful mess, and yet so far they are the only ones who have been held accountable. This makes less than no sense. The entire premise of the chain of command in the military is that responsibility flows up the chain, not down. When people are issuing orders that might send people to their death, there simply is no other way for things to work. And yet in this instance, things have been deliberately manipulated by the administration, its defenders, and by some of the military brass to make sure that we only look down and not up.

Scott Horton:

The report tells us that when photos and other evidence of abuse first surfaced, the Bush Administration firmly denied any connection between their policies and the abuse, then attempted to scapegoat a group of more than a dozen young recruits (but not, of course, any of their supervising officers, who knew the details of the administration's involvement and would have made things messy if disciplined). The report puts these actions in an unforgiving light:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.

One final point before I let this go, and for that I head back to Andrew:

The MSM also made torture possible - especially cable news. Even PBS demanded that guests not use the word torture to decribe torture. The issue was barely present in the last campagn; and Bush has not been asked about his war crimes in any single exit interview so far. The AP and the NYT and the WaPo collude in robbing the English language of its plain meaning. This is not to bely that amazing work that many MSM reporters have done - from Dana Priest and Jane Mayer to Scott Horton and Charlie Savage. But so many of their editors seem unable to tell the truth about this country's war crimes in the past seven years.

The fact that it all this is inconvenient and uncomfortable makes it more important to speak the truth, not less. And yet up and down the line, there's silence.

This country has not always been this way. From the time of George Washington straight through to the Greatest Generation, we were better than this. We did not behave this way. We stood up to fight those who engaged in this sort of behavior. What has changed? Where did it all go so wrong?

Via ThinkProgress, here's VP Cheney in the Washington Times:

"In my mind, the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in, on January 20 of 2001, to protect and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. And that's what we've done," he said...

"I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11," Mr. Cheney said.

Notice anything weird about what he said? I did.

First, here's the oath of office taken by the President and Vice President of the United States:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Nothing about protecting and defending the country, nor is there anything about "enemies foreign and domestic." That comes from a different oath of office, one that the VP never himself took:

"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

That's the oath of enlistment into the US military. It is not the oath that Cheney took when he became Vice President.

The President and Vice President swear to protect and defend the constitution, and not the people of the United States. That's not a minor or insignificant difference.

And my new hero.

Newsweek:

In the spring of 2004, Tamm had just finished a yearlong stint at a Justice Department unit handling wiretaps of suspected terrorists and spies--a unit so sensitive that employees are required to put their hands through a biometric scanner to check their fingerprints upon entering. While there, Tamm stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that "the program" (as it was commonly called within the office) was "probably illegal."

Tamm agonized over what to do. He tried to raise the issue with a former colleague working for the Senate Judiciary Committee. But the friend, wary of discussing what sounded like government secrets, shut down their conversation. For weeks, Tamm couldn't sleep. The idea of lawlessness at the Justice Department angered him. Finally, one day during his lunch hour, Tamm ducked into a subway station near the U.S. District Courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue. He headed for a pair of adjoining pay phones partially concealed by large, illuminated Metro maps. Tamm had been eyeing the phone booths on his way to work in the morning. Now, as he slipped through the parade of midday subway riders, his heart was pounding, his body trembling. Tamm felt like a spy. After looking around to make sure nobody was watching, he picked up a phone and called The New York Times.

That one call began a series of events that would engulf Washington--and upend Tamm's life. Eighteen months after he first disclosed what he knew, the Times reported that President George W. Bush had secretly authorized the NSA to intercept phone calls and e-mails of individuals inside the United States without judicial warrants. The drama followed a quiet, separate rebellion within the highest ranks of the Justice Department concerning the same program. (James Comey, then the deputy attorney general, together with FBI head Robert Mueller and several other senior Justice officials, threatened to resign.) President Bush condemned the leak to the Times as a "shameful act." Federal agents launched a criminal investigation to determine the identity of the culprit.

The story of Tamm's phone call is an untold chapter in the history of the secret wars inside the Bush administration. The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its story. The two reporters who worked on it each published books. Congress, after extensive debate, last summer passed a major new law to govern the way such surveillance is conducted. But Tamm--who was not the Times's only source, but played the key role in tipping off the paper--has not fared so well. The FBI has pursued him relentlessly for the past two and a half years. Agents have raided his house, hauled away personal possessions and grilled his wife, a teenage daughter and a grown son. More recently, they've been questioning Tamm's friends and associates about nearly every aspect of his life. Tamm has resisted pressure to plead to a felony for divulging classified information. But he is living under a pall, never sure if or when federal agents might arrest him.

Exhausted by the uncertainty clouding his life, Tamm now is telling his story publicly for the first time. "I thought this [secret program] was something the other branches of the government--and the public--ought to know about. So they could decide: do they want this massive spying program to be taking place?" Tamm told NEWSWEEK, in one of a series of recent interviews that he granted against the advice of his lawyers. "If somebody were to say, who am I to do that? I would say, 'I had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution.' It's stunning that somebody higher up the chain of command didn't speak up."

Excellent news, this:

Dialing back his predecessor's expansive view of the office, Vice President-elect Joe Biden plans on "restoring the Office of the Vice President to its historical role" as adviser to the president and tie-breaker in the Senate, an aide to Biden said Saturday.

The declaration results from an attention-getting article coming from the Las Vegas Sun, which is reporting Sunday in a story by Washington Bureau reporter Lisa Mascaro that the new Congress "will reassert its constitutional independence from the White House by barring the vice president from joining in internal Senate deliberations, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in an interview with the Sun."

"The move is intended to restore checks and balances to a system that tilted heavily toward the White House in the Bush presidency," Mascaro writes. "By giving Vice President Dick Cheney regular access to Senate Republican caucuses, at times with White House advisers in tow, party unity became more important to many Republicans than upholding their responsibilities to provide legislative oversight of the executive, experts say."

The paper says that when Reid was asked whether Biden will be allowed to attend Senate Democratic caucus meetings, Reid said: "Absolutely not."

Elizabeth Alexander, spokesperson for the vice president-elect, e-mailed in response: "Vice President-elect Biden had no intention of continuing the practice started by Vice President Cheney of regularly attending internal legislative branch meetings -- he firmly believes in restoring the Office of the Vice President to its historical role. He and Senator Reid see eye to eye on this."

Although the new administration is going to face all kinds of short- and medium-term problems, nothing is more important over the long-term than repairing the damage done to our constitutional structures.

WaPo: Judge Rules Bush Aides Must Obey Congressional Subpoenas

A federal judge today ruled that a former top aide to President Bush is required to appear before a congressional committee, rejecting an argument by the White House that she was shielded by executive privilege from giving such testimony.

In rejecting the White House position, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled that former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers is legally required to appear before the House Judiciary Committee.

But, Bates ruled, Miers can invoke executive privilege in response to specific questions. The White House had argued that Miers and Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten were shielded from appearing or providing documents to the committee by absolute immunity under the legal doctrine of executive privilege.

"The Executive cannot identify a single judicial opinion that recognizes absolute immunity for senior presidential advisors in this or any other context," Bates wrote in a 93-page opinion. "That simple yet critical fact bears repeating: the asserted absolute immunity claim here is entirely unsupported by existing case law."

Hey judge, tell us how you really feel!

In case you missed it, Mark Kleiman translates:

"Without any support in the case law." That's lawyerese for "complete bullsh*t." It's not what you ever want a federal judge to say about a claim made in court by the Department of Justice on behalf of the President of the United States. Or, rather, it's not what you want the Department of Justice to ever force a judge to say by making an utterly bogus claim; the credibility of the Administration in the courts is a national resource, one of the many this crew of clowns and grifters has wreckd. Presumably the judge, a Bush appointee himself, wouldn't have said it if he hadn't been forced to be the outrageousness of the arguments presented to him.

GU's Marty Lederman does the analysis:

It is an extraordinarily thorough, scholarly and thoughtful opinion. It is also, IMHO, correct on the merits. It is important not only for its holding on the immunity question, but also for its holding and analysis on congressional standing, and for its unequivocal rejection (pp. 39-41) of one of the Administration's principal arguments with respect to all of these privilege disputes in the U.S. Attorney matter -- the notion that because the subject matter of the investigations is presidential removal of the U.S. Attorneys, Congress has no legitimate oversight function at all. The court quite correctly rejects this view...

It bears mentioning that the judge who so ruled is a Republican jurist who worked on the Starr Whitewater team, and who was appointed to the bench by the sitting President Bush. And he ruled with the Bush Administration's claims to executive secrecy in the Cheney Task Force case (see note 38 of today's opinion, distinguishing it) -- he is, in other words, very solicitous of the legitimate needs of executive confidentiality. Which makes today's decision all the more remarkable.

Glenn Greenwald continues:

In unusually strong language, the court pointed out that the President's claim that his aides enjoyed absolute immunity from Congressional investigations was "unprecedented" and "without any support in case law" (p. 3). Like so many perverse claims of absolute presidential authority, this claim was plainly contrary to the core principles of how our country has long functioned: "Federal precedent dating as far back as 1807 contemplates that even the Executive is bound to comply with duly issued subpoenas," Judge Bates wrote (p. 31)....

That the Bush administration's claim was purely lawless has long been obvious. After all, the Supreme Court, in 1974, already explicitly ruled (in the context of a criminal investigation) that Richard Nixon lacked exactly the absolute immunity that Bush officials claimed here....

All along, the refusal of Bush aides to testify (and today's ruling obviously applies to Karl Rove as well) was nothing more than another lawless attempt by the administration to shroud everything it does in secrecy and shield itself completely from accountability of any kind. Indeed, as the court pointed out today, quoting a 1975 Supreme Court case, the power to compel testimony and documents from the Executive branch is indispensable to what are -- at least in theory -- the core Congressional functions of lawmaking and oversight (p. 36):

The power of inquiry -- with process to enforce it -- is an essential and appropriate auxillary to the legislative function.

Today's ruling should should elevate the pressure on Bolton, Miers, Rove and other Bush officials to respond to Congressional inquiries regarding what they know about the firing of these U.S. Attorneys, but as a practical matter, its impact will be quite limited. Miers, Bolton and friends can still (and certainly will) assert privilege with respect to specific conversations and documents (the court only resolved whether they have immunity from Congressional subpoenas generally, not whether specific documents and conversations are privileged). More importantly, this administration has repeatedly demonstrated complete indifference to legal process.

The court did note, in several places, that Congress likely has (again, at least in theory) the inherent authority to arrest and detain Executive Branch officials who refuse to comply with their Subpoenas.

Block by block and brick by brick, the ridiculous legal theories built by Bush, Rove, and Cheney are being dismantled.

Borrowed from Glenn Greenwald....

Associated Press, yesterday:

Foreign-owned hotels in China face the prospect of "severe retaliation" if they refuse to install government software that can spy on Internet use by hotel guests coming to watch the summer Olympic games, a U.S. lawmaker said Tuesday. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., produced a translated version of a document from China's Public Security Bureau that requires hotels to use the monitoring equipment. . . . .

Brownback said several international hotel chains confirmed receiving the order from China's Public Security Bureau. The hotels are in a bind, he said, because they don't want to comply with the order, but also don't want to jeopardize their investment of millions of dollars to expand their businesses in China.

Rocky Mountain News, October 11, 2007:

The National Security Agency and other government agencies retaliated against Qwest because the Denver telco refused to go along with a phone spying program, documents released Wednesday suggest. . . .

The secret contracts -- worth hundreds of millions of dollars -- made [Qwest CEO Joseph] Nacchio optimistic about Qwest's future, even as his staff was warning him the company might not make its numbers, Nacchio's defense attorneys have maintained. . . .

Nacchio planned to demonstrate at trial that he had a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., to discuss a $100 million project. According to the documents, another topic also was discussed at that meeting, one with which Nacchio refused to comply.

The topic itself is redacted each time it appears in the hundreds of pages of documents, but there is mention of Nacchio believing the request was both inappropriate and illegal, and repeatedly refusing to go along with it.

The NSA contract was awarded in July 2001 to companies other than Qwest.

USA Today reported in May 2006 that Qwest, unlike AT&T and Verizon, balked at helping the NSA track phone calling patterns that may have indicated terrorist organizational activities. Nacchio's attorney, Herbert Stern, confirmed that Nacchio refused to turn over customer telephone records because he didn't think the NSA program had legal standing.

In the documents, Nacchio also asserts Qwest was in line to build a $2 billion private government network called GovNet and do other government business, including a network between the U.S. and South America.

To which Glenn adds:

The vast bulk of America's surveillance state and intelligence activities (budgeted at roughly $70 billion each year) are now outsourced to and performed by these private corporations. The precise financial dynamic which Sen. Brownback is impotently protesting in China -- that corporations are highly incentivized to assent to and enable all government spying lest they lose extremely lucrative government contracts (and, conversely, that they're eager to cooperate with the Government in order to receive more contracts and become further integrated in government activities) -- is exactly the dynamic that drives America's surveillance state.

Indeed, it was that very substantial profit motive -- as the Rocky Mountain News article above illustrates -- that led American telecoms in the U.S. not just to acquiesce to, but eagerly embrace, the Bush administration's desire to spy illegally on their customers' telephone and email communications. Those who agreed to help the Government break the law received far more of the billions and billions of dollars of government surveillance and defense contracts, while Qwest -- by refusing the Bush administration's requests for illegal spying -- was punished by being frozen out of this private-public consortium.

More inanely still, Sen. Brownback is specifically outraged by the intrusive spying activities in which the Chinese Government plans to engage with regard to the telephone and email communications of foreign visitors...That's the same Sen. Sam Brownback who voted last year to enact the Protect America Act, which "allow[ed] for massive, untargeted collection of international communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts. It contain[ed] virtually no protections for the U.S. end of the phone call or email, leaving decisions about the collection, mining and use of Americans' private communications up to this administration." And it's the same Sen. Brownback who also voted for this year's FISA Amendments Act, which empowers the U.S. Government to tap directly into the U.S. telecommunications systems in order to monitor international emails and telephone calls with no individual warrant required.

I know there are plenty on the right who would argue that this is different because they are Communist China (i.e. evil) and we are the United States of America (i.e. good), but if that's not moral and legal relativism, what is?