Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice

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.

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

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.

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.

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.