Saturday, December 29, 2007 1:14 PM
Blawg Book Highlighter #16: The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration.
Jack Goldsmith is now a law professor at Harvard University. But from October 2003 to June 2004 he headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. His job then, as described in his book The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, was to advise President Bush what he could and could not…legally.
In a post-9/11 world, Goldsmith writes, the rule of law took a beating at the hands of President Bush. As he reviewed the work of his predecessors, the conservative lawyer found many of the opinions that provided the legal framework governing the conduct of the military and intelligence agencies in the war on terror – especially those regulating the treatment and interrogation of prisoners - were “deeply flawed.” The book’s description states that Goldsmith’s “unflinching insistence that we abide by the law put him on a collision course with powerful figures in the administration.
Tim Rutton, writing for the Los Angeles Times, praises The Terror Presidency as “an important book” that provides “a genuine service to the national interest – on several levels, none more pressing that its implicit demand for a sober consideration of the current historical moment in all its complexity.” He writes: “On the long shelf of books written from inside President George W. Bush’s administration, none is more fundamentally significant, nor as challenging to the preconceptions of left and right, as Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration.”
Michiko Kakutani, writing for the International Herald Tribune, calls The Terror Presidency a “chilling new book” that “stands out by virtue that (Goldsmith) was privy to internal White House debates about explosive matters like secret surveillance, coercive interrogation and the detention and trial of enemy combatants.” Kakutani adds that the books “is also distinguished by Goldsmith’s writing from the point of view of a conservative who shared many of the Bush White House’s objectives (and who was an ideological ally of John Yoo, one of the main architects of the administration’s legal responses to a post-911 worlds and the author of some of the very opinions Goldsmith would later call into question.”
David Cole of the New York Times is not as sold on the book’s merits. “For all its strengths as a descriptive account of an administration run amok,” Cole writes, “the prescriptive elements of The Terror Presidency are at best conventional and at worst perverse.”
To learn more about the book, read excerpts from the book published in the online magazine Slate or an in-depth article about the author in the New York Times Magazine.
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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
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