Jack Goldsmith - George W. Bush - Torture - Human Rights - Geneva Conventions - Alberto Gonzales - Donald Rumsfeld - Terrorism - New York Times

This is really a good article by Jeffrey Rosen about Bush administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith, one of the few Bush people who seems to have both a conscience and a brain. I have been reading a lot if international law stuff, including stuff by Goldsmith, and I will be honest enough to admit that his connection to the Bush administration definitely mitigated my appreciation for his arguments (though I did like and use for a class his book "Who Rules the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World).

This article is sympathetic to Goldsmith -- even as it quotes him as saying "I am not a civil libertarian" --in part because he did play a crucial and respectable role in attempting to stop the blanket and ongoing illegalities of the Bush administration, particularly regarding torture. This article is worth a read.

Jack Goldsmith - George W. Bush - Torture - Human Rights - Geneva Conventions - Alberto Gonzales - Donald Rumsfeld - Terrorism - New York Times: "

The heroes of Goldsmith’s book — his historical models of presidential leadership in wartime — are Presidents Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both of them, as Arthur Schlesinger noted in his essay “War and the Constitution,” “were lawyers who, while duly respecting their profession, regarded law as secondary to political leadership.” In Goldsmith’s view, an indifference to the political process has ultimately made Bush a less effective wartime leader than his greatest predecessors. Surprisingly, Bush, who is not a lawyer, allowed far more legalistic positions in the war on terror to be adopted in his name, without bothering to try to persuade Congress and the public that his positions were correct. “I don’t know if President Bush understood how extreme some of the arguments were about executive power that some people in his administration were making,” Goldsmith told me. “It’s hard to know how he would know.”

The Bush administration’s legalistic “go-it-alone approach,” Goldsmith suggests, is the antithesis of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s willingness to collaborate with Congress. Bush, he argues, ignored the truism that presidential power is the power to persuade. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense,” Goldsmith concludes in his book. “This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”

Goldsmith says he remains convinced of the seriousness of the terrorist threat and the need to take aggressive action to combat it, but he believes, quoting his conservative Harvard Law colleague Charles Fried, that the Bush administration “badly overplayed a winning hand.” In retrospect, Goldsmith told me, Bush “could have achieved all that he wanted to achieve, and put it on a firmer foundation, if he had been willing to reach out to other institutions of government.” Instead, Goldsmith said, he weakened the presidency he was so determined to strengthen. “I don’t think any president in the near future can have the same attitude toward executive power, because the other institutions of government won’t allow it,” he said softly. “The Bush administration has borrowed its power against future presidents.”

On that last point my guess is Goldsmith is totally wrong and/or wishful thinking. One thing we have seen since Lincoln's time is a progressive (the term used in all meanings) increase in the imperial presidency. At the height of our empire, do you really think the executive is going to lose power? Don't bet on it. President Hillary is not going to hesistate to use her power, oh no, not at all.