The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration

The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration | Jack L. Goldsmith | Fascinating inside look at the Bush administration

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The Terror Preside...

	The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration Jack L. Goldsmith W. W. Norton, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Scarier and scarier!

Little new is discussed here, but to see it all together is scary. This presidency began as illegitimate as it could be, and probably the 2004 election was manipulated too. But none of it matters because those who could do something to take back the presidency and reestablish the power of the Constitution have been sitting on their hands. Impeachment should have been started as soon as the Supreme Court refused to let the Florida vote be completed because their decision was a forgone conclusion, right down party lines. 9/11 seved to emphasis just how criminal this president was willing to become, and how arrogant he could truly be. Too many books are available now with nothing being accomplished. Congress is hog tied and the Supreme Court are pathetic yes men.

Enumerating the awful truths in this book, which is so much like a dozen more, at this point serves no purpose. Bush and his henchmen have managed to wallow around and run out the clock. Now watch as the next president - especially a Democrat - will be vilified from day one and the unrelenting smear and fear that will eminate from the right. Lies that will be repeated so often that eventually they will be accepted as truth. It is the way of politics in the 21st century and if we don't get back on track soon we will lose our country and everything it has always stood for, and just because one administration was allowed to rip it asunder without sufficient protest.

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Fascinating inside look at the Bush administration

I give this book five stars despite the fact that I have several disagreements with the author. Why five stars? Because this book is basically fair and puts the Bush administration's actions into historical perspective, which is hard to find in a book about the Bush administration, pro or con.

Although highly critical of the Bush administration's view of presidential power, as well as Bush's shortcomings as a communicator and consensus builder, Goldsmith nonetheless portrays an administration bound by the rule of law and compliant with the legal opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel, where Goldsmith served for ten months as an Assistant Attorney General.

Goldsmith provides no evidence that the Bush administration ever acted contrary to counsel, and nearly always had a solid constitutional basis for its actions. Indeed, a couple of Supreme Court decisions which struck down elements of the war on terror were themselves departures from long-standing precedent. (In making this point, Goldsmith observes that the Supreme Court, not just Congress and the President, is influenced by public opinion, the press, the academy, the spirit of the times, and the passions of the moment. Here, too, he faults Bush for being tone-deaf to the nuances of leadership and the importance of getting everyone on board. He has a point: whenever a court bounced some thorny issue back to the president, he was nearly always able to get what he wanted from Congress, even the Democratic-controlled Congress. Had he been more prone to consultation, Bush arguably could have avoided some of these legal challenges.)

Goldsmith points out the extreme difficulty of discerning the exact limits of the law during times of crisis, and describes how these issues played out in the administrations of Lincoln and FDR. This leads to one of my main quibbles with the author - he is more critical of Bush for potential abuses of power, stemming from his imperial view of the presidency, than of the actual abuses of Lincoln and FDR, which far surpassed any of the excesses of Bush. (It will also come as a surprise to many readers that the controversial rendition program, considered by many as one of the black marks of the war on terror, was actually conceived during the Clinton administration.)

I also disagree with Goldsmith when he tries to contrast the views of Bush and FDR on the limits of presidential power. FDR, he says, made limited claims geared towards specific situations, whereas Bush made broad claims with no discernible limits. But Goldsmith himself admits that FDR was being cagey, a salesman, and relied upon tendentious opinions that were purpose-built by a compliant Attorney General. There is no doubt that FDR/Truman would have done - and did do - whatever it took to defeat the Germans and Japanese, Constitution or no Constitution. (Readers may recall that it was Truman, not Bush, who ordered the use of atomic bombs, and it was FDR, not Bush, who interred 90,000 Japanese Americans in relocation camps. Given these facts, Goldsmith is incredibly lenient towards FDR.) As for Bush, his claims to presidentail power are clearly focused on the same area as were FDR's - national security. In other areas, Bush has deferred to Congress and almost entirely eschewed his veto powers.

In those cases where Goldsmith personally found flaws in the legal opinions of his predecessors, the administration reluctantly changed course, but change course it did. Goldsmith makes the point - which should be obvious, but is generally ignored - that people of good will can have honest disagreements about what the Constitution requires and prohibits, about the limits of presidential power, about the handling of prisoners of war, and any of the other legal controversies surrounding national security. Nonetheless, it is clear from Goldsmith's account that when Bush says his policies were vetted and approved by lawyers versed in Constitutional, international, and national security law, he is telling the absolute truth.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft comes across quite favorably; his successor, Alberto Gonzales, much less so. (The problem with Gonzales was not a tolerance for criminality, but rather a lack of experience in national security law, a deficiency which gave him a tendency to rubber-stamp flawed legal opinions from subordinates rather than ask the tough questions.)

Goldsmith attributes most of these flawed opinions to John Woo, the number two deputy at the OLC, who although an expert in the relevant law, cranked out several opinions that Goldsmith viewed as over-broad and imprecise. Goldsmith charitably attributes this to the crisis atmosphere that pervaded the White House in the months following 9/11, when fears of an imminent second major terrorist attack were running rampant.

This book may be like a Rorschach test, where what we see is determined by our own predispositions and tendencies. Be that as it may, I nonetheless recommend the book. For anyone with an open mind about Bush, if there are any such people left, the book describes a presidency that is deeply flawed, but hardly the criminal, rogue, Constitution-shredding despotism portrayed by its critics.

Indeed, as the author points out, never in our history has the conduct of war been so constrained by the influence of lawyers as the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Ironically, Goldsmith says that it was precisely the administration's preoccupation with following the letter of the law, and being justified by the law, that made it ignore the more subtle arts of persuasion and leadership.

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Nothing you didn't know, but chilling nonetheless

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the Bush Presidency has not been its seizure of unprecedented power to the detriment of the standing of the other branches of government, but how most members of his party gave him unqualified support in this authoritarian venture, accepting the administration's position that all those who oppose him are liberal, ignorant, defeatists. Of course, there have been a few exceptions, former Congressman Bob Barr for example who has called for the President's impeachment, but by and large the silence from Republicans has been nothing short of chilling.

Professor Goldsmith, a conservative lawyer with unassailable credentials who served in the Bush Justice Department as the Head of the Office of Legal Counsel, does not tell us anything we didn't know in terms of the policies of the administration, but gives a frightening first hand account of how the President skirted and even broke the law, even as Dick Cheney's hatchet men threatened and bullied those who were disturbed by these efforts. Goldsmith describes a White House inclined to twist the law like a mafia lawyer, often making arguments that fly in the face of 200 years of history, such as the strange idea that international treaties are not binding on the Executive Branch.

While often couched in "leagaleze," Goldsmith demolishes the comparisons often invoked by the administration's defenders with actions taken by Lincoln and FDR, explaining how both these presidents made every effort not to overly disturb the balance of power between the branches of government. Perhaps most frightening of all, Goldsmith explains how the use of 9/11 risks the evisceration of the institutions and principles on which America's democracy rests and how, without quick intervention, the imperial president might quickly become a permanent state of affairs.

A worthwhile read.

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Historical,engrossing--A MUST read!

A fabulous insight into how our government operates under pressure, during war times--It is wonderful that Jack Goldmith has the principles and morals to stand up for what he believes in.

9/11: Bush/Cheney Blinked, and bin-Laden Won

After serving the Bush II administration for an entire ten months as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from October 2003 to August 2004, Jack Goldsmith has offered up a recap and post-mortem on the major issues with which he was confronted during those 300-odd days. As it turns out, however, they were critical days, and the issues were equally critical: terrorist seizure, confinement, and methods of interrogation as well as the NSA's secret monitoring of communications.

Much of THE TERROR PRESIDENCY is devoted to the arcana of Geneva Conventions and Protocols concerning torture, Presidential/Executive branch wartime powers, and dissection of the weak legal structure upon which lawyer John Yoo authorized and approved earlier Bush II administration OLC opinions concerning those issues. With this subject matter comes, of course, the infinite (or is it infinitesimal?) parsing of words and phrases and nuances over which only a lawyer can get enthused. Readers looking for juicy insider stories about the Bush Presidency will find these discussions off-putting, to be charitable.

However, hidden among the legalistic treatises are some remarkable, if all too briefly discussed, gems as well as some truly troubling presumptions. On a somewhat academic level, Mr. Goldsmith provides a badly needed sense of historical perspective regarding the usurpation of additional Executive Branch powers during wartime. The author repeatedly compares and contrasts the post-9/11 actions of George W. Bush with those of Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War and FDR during World War II. On the one hand, the actions of those earlier Presidents provide a degree of historical cover for President Bush. At the same time, Mr. Goldsmith makes clear the enormous difference between Lincoln's and FDR's open, concisely defined, condition motivated, and carefully limited actions and the paranoically secretive, broadly defined, philosophically motivated, and ostensibly permanent actions of Bush II. "The power to manage the vast, whirring machinery of government derives from individual skills as persuader, bargainer, and leader," Goldsmith admirably quotes Arthur Schlesinger. Contrast this statement with "Bush the decider," the uncompromiser, the ignorer of allies, the partisan, and the gut reactor who speaks to and receives his guidance from "a higher authority."

Better still are the occasional first-hand accounts of events in the inner workings of the Bush Administration following the events of 9/11. Regretably, Mr. Goldsmith is a bit too much of a tease, opening the shutters ever-so-briefly before jamming them closed again with lawyerly circumspection. Nevertheless, John Yoo comes off as irresponsible, Alberto Gonzalez as a feckless featherweight, and John Ashcraft as more astute and statesmanlike than one would have thought. David Addington, Dick Cheney's chief assistant, becomes the true villain in this piece, an imperious blowhard and spiteful bully whose favorite argument regarding homeland security appears to center on threatening anyone who disagrees with him that they will be held responsible for 100,000 deaths in the next terror attack on U.S. soil. So much for the Constitution when fear rules.

And that is the true revelation in THE TERROR PRESIDENCY, as suggested by the book's very name. Goldsmith suggests convincingly that virtually every national security action of the Bush/Cheney administration since 9/11 has been motivated by fear of another attack. More specifically, fear of the political damage that would result from being blamed for not stopping the next attack. Goldsmith asserts clearly that fear of a second attack trumped every other consideration, legal or otherwise. In other words, by having three airplanes fly into three buildings on American soil, Osama bin-Laden changed the dynamic of American democracy and the manner in which the Constitution is applied to Presidential powers and American civil liberties.

Most horrifying of all, Goldsmith perceives this to be a near permanent state of affairs, and he conjures up the prospect of devastating attacks without ever mentioning mushroom clouds. "For generations the Terror Presidency will be characterized by unremitting fear of devastating attack, an obsession with preventing the attack, and a proclivity to act aggressively and preemptively to do so." A secretive Presidency is unilaterally and secretively making tradeoffs between perceived security and lost civil liberty without public discussion or Congressional consent. In essence, Bush/Cheney and the American government blinked, giving bin-Laden the ultimate terrorist victory of altering for the worse the governmental behavior and society of the target.

THE TERROR PRESIDENCY suffers from a surfeit of legalese and self-justification, and some readers will likely find either or both off-putting. Yet despite Mr. Goldsmith's overemphasis on legalisms and underreporting of the inner workings of the Bush Administration during the critical months following 9/11, this book sheds some disturbing new light on this Administration's motives and modus operandi.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7

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