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Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice

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This is a good solid work about law and justice in the Bush Administration. It's a story of good and evil, law and lawlessness, trust and distrust. You might want to consider first reading Robert Conquest's fine book The Great Terror, which is about the purges, the show trials, law and justice under Stalin. Much is different, of course, but there are some uncomfortable parallels. Perhaps the most striking thing in The Great Terror was that under Stalin, being suspected of anti-Soviet activities was a serious crime. This is not the same as actually being guilty of such activity, but rather just the fact that you had been suspected (even if totally innocent, as the vast majority were) earned you a trip to the cellars to be shot, or a death sentence in the labor camps. Bush's Law makes it clear that suspicion earns punishment in one form or another.

Bush's Law emphasizes the use and misuse of national security letters, the bypassing of the normal legal safeguards, the punishments for Justice Department and FBI people who "weren't on the team". Loyalty becomes the paramount virtue: "meine ehre heist treue" (my honor is loyalty). The book talks about the firings of the US Attorneys: being "loyal Bushies" was crucial to being kept on, and the dissembling explanations by Gonzales and the White House made a mockery of the traditional image of blind justice with a scales in one hand and a sword in the other. The book describes how Gonzales explored the possibilities of prosecuting journalists under the Espionage Act of 1917. You get the strong impression that a free press was considered a greater threat to America than al Qaeda.

For a book on a similar subject, try Clive Smith's Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side. The focus here is limited to Guantanamo: the treatment of the prisoners, the lack of hearings, the regarding of lawyers for the detainees as the enemy. It's a very depressing book, and it packs a very powerful punch indeed. Taken together, Bush's Law is primarily about the threats to Americans when laws are routinely broken and the Constitution is regarded as an annoyance, Smith's book is an extension: without the safeguards, without some judges and the free press standing up, the next steps could lead to Guantanamos, and then another few steps perhaps to the Soviet system where the law is whatever authority says it is, and justice is meaningless. What Bush's Law describes is not new: we might do well to ponder on John Mitchell (Nixon's Attorney General) who had serious discussions about the possibility of kidnapping war protesters and sending them to secret Soviet-style gulags. We can also think about the death threats Lichtblau describes, and the suggestions that he and other reporters be arrested, tried for treason, and hanged. There are those who believe that the war on terror justifies any suspension of civil liberties and justifies any actions by those in authority. Such people are not alone: Stalin, Hitler, and Mao had large numbers of adherents who felt the same way. So--a good book, replete with heroes and villians galore.

This is a very impressive and unusual book written by a reporter who has covered the Justice Dept for a long time. There have been any number of good books published about the War on Terror and the Bush Administration's response to it. What sets Licthblau's book apart from the rest is that large sections are written in the first person and not only recount the events and facts but describe the mindset and calculus employed by policymakers who in real time had to make the decisions necessary to protect the country from follow-up attacks after September 11. Perhaps the strongest chapter in the book details the pressure the White House put on the New York Times that led the paper--much to Licthblau's chagrin--to hold off on publishing the story about NSA's surveillance program for a year. For this reason, I agree with the reviewer in the NY Times book review who wrote that this book is the equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein's classic "All the President's Men" for the terror age.

It took me a while to read this book. Not because it wasn't well written, on the contrary, it is an extremely well written book. No, I could only stomach around 20 or so pages at a time, before I was so angry I had to put it down. This is a must read for people who want to know what the Bush Administration has been up to for the last few years. Unfortunately, some of the details cannot be included, as they are either unknown or classified. In any case, a book that flows, that is easy to read and has (IMHO) one of the most pressing themes of today.

Everyone knows that there were big changes because of the 9/11 attacks. There had to be legal changes, too, and different ways of investigating crimes. No one disputes that the legal and investigative changes had to come, but the Constitution did not change. Those who were interested in torturing prisoners, or reading our e-mails, or snooping around our closets, had to do legalistic contortions to get their way. There are still those who say that such actions were fully justified, but undoubtedly the abuse of our Bill of Rights is part of the reason the current president has record-level unpopularity ratings. Eric Lichtblau has worked for the _New York Times_, and got a Pulitzer in 2006 for his stories on the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts. The centerpiece of his book, _Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice_ (Pantheon), is an insider's view on how he got that story and especially how the _Times_ only eventually, after much hesitation, printed it. That isn't the only story here, though, as Lichtblau has written a wider account of how the re-interpretation of the laws has made victims of citizens and of administrators who did not willingly accept that the re-interpretations were legal.

Lichtblau writes of the post-9/11 attitude, "This was a war planned in secret at the highest reaches of the Bush administration, with a go-it-alone muscularity that relied at its core on a broad, omnipotent reading of the president's wartime authority." There are a few heroes here who understood that the furious expansion of presidential powers was not just a given, like James Ziglar, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who objected to ethnic-profile sweeps of Muslim neighborhoods. He called it "a violation of the Constitution, and I'm not going to be part of it," earning the distrust of the administration; he was eventually forced out. Chief among the victims of the surveillance described here is Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer in Oregon whose fingerprints, the FBI said, matched a terrorist bomber in Spain. You would think matching fingerprints was something basic in which the FBI would be expert. Spain tried to warn the FBI off, insisting that the fingerprint didn't match Mayfield's. For false arrest and harassment, Mayfield's family got a $2 million settlement. There were thousands of arrests which eventually showed no connection to terrorism. The expanded wiretap capacity was not constitutionally defensible, but even so, it might have had the practical effect of leading to the arrests of lots of terrorists. This just didn't happen.

The central part of the book, how Lichtblau and fellow reporter James Risen got their Pulitzer-winning story on the NSA wiretapping, gives plenty of details about the hard work of reporting. There are more than a few comparisons to Watergate; there is a Deep Throat figure pointing the pair of reporters in the right direction, for instance, and the administration considered taking a Pentagon Papers-type injunction to keep the _New York Times_ from publishing the story. The sorts of people who accuse Lichtblau of helping the cause of terrorism or who leave him death threat e-mails will miss some of the lessons here. It is not the case that the paper rushed into print with the story; Lichtblau describes how the story was essentially complete by 2004, but the paper sat on it at the request of the administration. It was only a year later, with new evidence that the wiretapping was out of control, that publication happened. The go-ahead was advanced when the staff of the _Times_ negotiating about the decision with the White House discovered that the administration had been lying to the paper about how limited the wiretapping was and how it was universally supported by administration lawyers. (When the story was published, the president attacked the decision to do so, but did not dispute a thing in it. "Confirmation didn't come any better than this," Lichtblau notes.) And Lichtblau shows that there were two additional stories about clever ways the government was using to assess communications or money paths of terrorists, but unlike the NSA wiretaps, they had no conflict with the Constitution nor with the right to privacy; not one word of these ever appeared in print. Lichtblau's book is sometimes exciting, although its descriptions of what our government does in our name are often infuriating: our president and his aides executed an eavesdropping program that many of their own lawyers thought unconstitutional, and they lied about it to reporters and to the public, and then they accused the journalists of helping terrorism. There is no advocacy needed for a free press, but a reader closing these pages will have a new appreciation for our First Amendment.

This book is written with a lot of first person stories. Rather than a typical critique of government agencies it is almost like a "CLANCY NOVEL."

For anyone interested in government and the law it is a must read!!! You can follow up on the book in Mr. Lichtblau's NY TIMES articles which become a

continuation of the things that he wrote about in the book.

This book illustrates how George W Bush and his administration have interpreted the US Constitution, its laws and justice. It also spells out some of the administration lawlessness, distrust and evil ways.

If have read other books on how Stalin and later Hitler used their powers to eliminate those that stood-in-their-way and/or opposed them, you might see some parallels.

If you think that the hallmark of the Bush administration was to prevent another 9/11 attack on the U.S., you should read this book. In the course of its preventive efforts, the administration diminished our constitutional values, reduced the power of the co-equal judicial and legislative branches, assumed monarchical powers, all without any evidence we have to date that this was necessary to protecting us from another attack. This book documents that the approach, led by Cheney and his sidekick, David Addington, that it was better secretly to rewrite the Constitution than to be sorry.

Well, that is not how the Constitution says the Constitution can be amended. As Benjamin Franklin said, "He who seeks safety at the expense of liberty deserves neither." We have yet to see evidence of a single credible terrorist attack that was prevented by the Draconian measures described and analyzed in this book. But the book presents plenty of evidence that Cheney, Addington and Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, with President Bush's consent, did much to diminish our liberties. And it details how this aggrandizement of power by the political people in the Executive branch fit in with Cheney's long-held belief that there should be few checks and balances on the Presidency.

Read this in conjunction with Jane Mayer's excellent book, "The Dark Side," and see if you don't get a picture that describes Franco's Spain or Mussolini's Italy as well as our own country under the Bush administration. But for the press, especially The New York Times, we might never have learned about much of this, as it was done secretly and with little resistance from the Congress.

Eric Lichtblau, has penned a must read tomb for those seeking truth and reconciliation post Bush. Hopefully enough citizens will read it that the push for a post Bus Truth and Reconciliation Commission will be created to bring accountability to the criminals who have run this country into the ground.

This book addresses the erosion of individual rights of citizens in the prosecution of the "war on terror".

Eric Lichtblau is an investigative journalist and was working for the "New York Times" when he wrote about the spy programs.

Among the disturbing stories were citizens falsely arrested as a result of sloppy,incompetent investigations in an era of paranoia.The condition of the FBI as a result of Louis Freeh was discussed.

The author writes about his investigative journalism on the huge story of the NSA wiretapping program and the level of secrecy from the Bush administration.

Mr. Lichtblau quoted Judge Anna Diggs Taylor on the NSA program-"There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution."

True to the title of the book, Mr. Lichtblau focuses on the Justice Department and some of the scandals when John Ashcroft, and later on, Alberto Gonzalez headed Justice.

With Ashcroft, the administration in general,was dysfunctional with periodic competition with other agencies.

Gonzalez was even more incompetent than his predecessor but was also a Bush loyalist to a fault. A lackie.

The purge of US Attorneys for political purposes was addressed. As well as the ideological screening process in employment of the Justice department.

Domestic spying eventually led into spying on the European financial system(SWIFT). Data-mining was used also.

Another topic was the nonsensical "legal advice" that basically gave Bush dictatorial power.

A telling subject was Bush's closing of the Office of Professional Responsibility(OPR) investigation into the domestic spying program of the NSA.

The documentation of this book is good with notes in the back. "Bush's Law" is another work resulting from the battle between the press and a secretive administration.

Some other excellent books on the general subject are:

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals

This is an excellent overview of the damaging impact of the Bush administration on the Justice Department from the New York Times reporter who has covered the Department over the past decade. He shared a Pulitzer prize for breaking the story of the government's illegal wiretapping of domestic communications. I had been aware of most of the events in the book as stories that made the news, but they were spread out over several years. Not only does Lichblau pull them together, he also adds absorbing context to them. Highly recommended.