In those first weeks and months after the horrendous attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States was loosed from her moorings. The extent of this is becoming more known as time passes and we are able to look back and reflect.

And it is clearer as we are able to look at some of the documentation from that time that was previously secret and is now being made known.

A spate of that was made public Monday when the Obama administration released nine legal opinions that had been private. The memos are part of a chilling view into how close we all may have come to losing some of our most basic Constitutional rights.

The memos also said the president could, at his decision, abrogate any treaty he deemed necessary.

We know some will throw the blame directly on former President George W. Bush and certainly he deserves his share. But the memos cannot be read without remembering the context in which they were written and they cannot be read without remembering who was giving Bush advice. We pointedly refer to Vice President Dick Cheney, who is certainly no civil libertarian.

While most of the news stories coming out of this development concern the justification for the extraordinary rendition program — more about that a bit further down — our attention was most drawn to the wide range of rights Bush's legal team told him he could simply disregard without approval from anyone.

For instance, the memos say Bush was allowed to conduct searches without obtaining a warrant, that First Amendment speech and free press rights could be suspended, that the U.S. military could be used within the borders of the United States.

Given our own interest, it is tough to imagine an America without Freedom of Speech, or where homes may simply be broken into by authorities without any cause given. We can all be assured, if the attorneys found a way to abrogate the First and Fourth amendments, our other basic rights would also have been in great danger.

According to a memo left behind by a Bush administration attorney, the memos had not been relied upon since 2003. That's good, but it still means for two years the Bush administration was relying on legal advice that we find frightening and clearly outside any Constitutional law we have ever heard of.

The memos were not used since 2003, but the Bush administration official wrote that it was still important that they be officially repudiated, which he did in his memo.

We will probably never know of the violations that occurred to the Fourth Amendment. So far as we know, the First Amendment was never abrogated.

Perhaps the legal opinion used most was that of extraordinary rendition, whereby detainees in the war on terror were sent to other nations where torture is not a violation of the law. The only stipulation the memos put on officials is that the U.S. could not specifically ask that the detainees be tortured. That, of course, is just a way of covering their behinds.

We know there are those who will read this who do not have a problem with the U.S. using torture. In a vote, perhaps the majority would vote for it.

But this is a reason why the United States is different. It is not because of the land upon which we sit, it is because of the ideals we have always held.

When our ideals include permitting torture, when they include breaking into homes without warrants, when they include no free speech or press, then America is no longer special, it is just one more repressive regime.