QUICK TAKE: "The Terror Presidency" by Jack Goldsmith
The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration
by Jack Goldsmith
This book is well and truly scary and deserves to be read alongside Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Presidency" (which I reviewed here). Liberals have been hailing Jack Goldsmith - former Assistant Attorney General heading the Office of Legal Counsel under Bush - as a supposed repentant conservative who thought Bush went over the top. Read the book and you'll see a man who is fine with torture and Cheney's vision of an imperial Presidency with very few checks or balances. Basically, his only fallout with the Administration was because he thought his job was to find legal excuses to let Bush and Cheney break any law they wanted to, but that at the end of the day he had a couple of issues that try as he might he just couldn't figure out a legal loophole for. He resigned because he realized he'd disappointed his evil empire overlords, not because he had any remorse of conscience over torturing people (including people he had gone to view in Bush's gulags).
That said, the man is not dense like Bush, I definitely learned a lot from him about how the executive branch's legal issues work and in particular the ways Bush and Cheney have abused and destroyed even the thin walls of checks and balances that were already there. Probably the scariest thing I learned from the book that was new was the exact mechanisms which the President can use to ensure people can break any law he wants broken and no one will ever be held accountable. Basically, the President wants to directly break or contradict a law passed by Congress. So he goes to the Office of Legal Counsel (run by one of his own appointees - traditionally the office tried to be genuinely independent but only their own sense of propriety "ensured" that, and under Bush even that paper thin protection is gone) who then writes a legal opinion stating that actually the law Congress passed is unconstitutional because the President can do whatever he wants in supposed self-proclaimed times of war (never mind the obvious falsehood of that notion or even if you believe it then never mind the fact that Congress has not declared war on anybody in Bush's years in office), or else playing word games with the language of a law passed by Congress and claiming that the President can really do whatever it was that the law was clearly meant to ban. The memo/opinion is often kept secret but disseminated to the CIA and other agencies who then proceed to break the law knowing that if they are ever called out and hauled into court that they can say "hey, we were acting in good faith under the best legal advice available" which generally means no court will ever hold them accountable. Leaving the only accountability possible left to be impeachment of the President which a feckless Congress will almost never do or succeed in doing and which by its very nature is a political circus far more than a judicial hearing. So basically, separation of powers no longer exists in reality, the Office of Legal Counsel and such procedures have rendered it null and void, the President makes the law, executes it, and judges whether his own actions are legal. Brilliant, that's some Republican Democracy we've got there. The founding fathers are no doubt turning over in their graves.
It's a quick read, very much worth it.
posted by mobookblog @ 8:32 PM
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