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The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration
by: Jack L. Goldsmith

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 342.73062
EAN: 9780393065503
ISBN: 0393065502
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: September 10, 2007
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Sales Rank: 11988
Studio: W. W. Norton

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Product Description:
A central player's account of the clash between the rule of law and the necessity of defending America.

Jack Goldsmith's duty as head of the Office of Legal Counsel was to advise President Bush what he could and could not do...legally. Goldsmith took the job in October 2003 and began to review the work of his predecessors. Their opinions were the legal framework governing the conduct of the military and intelligence agencies in the war on terror, and he found many—especially those regulating the treatment and interrogation of prisoners—that were deeply flawed.

Goldsmith is a conservative lawyer who understands the imperative of averting another 9/11. But his unflinching insistence that we abide by the law put him on a collision course with powerful figures in the administration. Goldsmith's fascinating analysis of parallel legal crises in the Lincoln and Roosevelt administrations shows why Bush's apparent indifference to human rights has damaged his presidency and, perhaps, his standing in history. 8 pages of photographs.

Customer Reviews

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Rating:

- An Honest Intellectual Conservative Dumped by Bush Radicals
This book is good example of how not even intellectually honest conservative could survive the radical ideology of the Bush Administration. Jack Goldsmith lasted only 9 months as head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) before having to resign.

Goldsmith took office in October 2003. His time in office, though brief, was spent thinking and opining about some of the most complex wartime decisions about executive branch power any administration has ever encountered. Little did he know that people he considered to be fellow conservatives were actually radicals who cared nothing about the separation of powers and did everything they could to undermine it and shape legal opinions accordingly.

That is what all the debate today about a "unitary executive" concerns. The radicals maintained that there were no constraints on a President in wartime. Goldsmith, a real conservative scholar, knew ... Read More

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- Superb inside look at the early Bush administration's counterterrorism policies
The grand irony of the (early - pre-2004) Bush administration's counterterrorism policies, Goldsmith observes, is that although the Bush administration lawyers sought "to leave the presidency stronger than they found it", in fact they "seem to have achieved the opposite". The reason is simply that the American constitutional system really does have three branches of government. Although the judiciary in principle has little constitutional role to play in matters of war or foreign policy generally, the fact that the war on terror has been conceived by the administration as a global war - in which the whole world is the battleground, in which even American citizens on American soil could be named as enemy combatants and indefinitely detained solely on the say-so of the executive - ensures that the Supreme Court cannot be left aside.

The administration's tunnel vision has thus left it blind to the fact that, ... Read More

Rating:

- An appreciated look into governement and The Bush Presidency.
I thank Mr. Goldsmith for sharing his experience in the Bush Presidency. The account was informative on the workings of government and the men involved. Well done!

Rating:

- Where are the "good guys?"
In the book "The Terror Presidency" by Jack Goldsmith, the author gives the best reasoning for allowing torture that I have ever seen. He has also written opinions that give the widest latitude to the government to suspend habeas corpus and trial by jury. Mr. Goldsmith is a conservative lawyer and a college professor, according the book's jacket. (Obviously not of the "originalist" school of thought since it is clear the makers would be appalled by these opinions which are exactly the opposite of their intentions.) Mr Goldsmith's idea is to stretch the Constitution as far as possible in order to deal with the danger of terrorism.

There are other opinions that, according to Mr. Goldsmith, are necessary for the United States. For instance, he states that the US should never recognize the International Criminal Court and uses Rumsfeld's explanation that weak nations could use it to protect themselves against ... Read More

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