A pair of newly released documents reveal more details about the Bush administration’s legal rationale for the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens after the 9/11 attacks. The documents relate to sweeping surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency under the program known as Stellar Wind. In a decade-old memo obtained by The Washington Post, Jack Goldsmith, who led President George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, says the 9/11 attacks justify what he calls the president’s “inherent constitutional authority” to order warrantless wiretapping, an authority “that Congress cannot curtail.” Patrick Toomey, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Washington Post the memo’s conclusions “suggest that the president’s power to monitor the communications of Americans is virtually unlimited … when it comes to foreign intelligence.” Toomey also said that while the Obama administration’s legal rationales may have shifted, “some of today’s surveillance programs are even broader and more intrusive than those put in place more than a decade ago by President Bush.”