This is an very interesting development. It appears to me that this renders the legal authority of Yoo memorandum to a level akin to graffiti on a bathroom wall:

Neither the attorney general at the time, John D. Ashcroft, nor his deputy, Larry D. Thompson, were aware of the 81-page memo when it was written and sent to the Pentagon in March 2003, according to several former senior department officials. The Pentagon was told in December 2003 to disregard the legal advice in the memo after Justice Department lawyers raised objections.

The sequence of events is now that someone demanded this memo, got a copy, and sent it out for implementation without any sort of legal review. This memo said that “military operations combating terrorism inside the United States are not limited by Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures”.

For anyone who wishes to assert that DoJ opinions indemnify law breakers (Mukasey), it becomes increasingly clear that the political appointees of the DoJ created a clown show, and that John Ashcroft was one of those showing the greatest integrity.^*

^*He doesn’t have much, he just had the most integrity. Still, that is something I never expected to write.