NYTimes Magazine
"Ashcroft, who looked like he was near death, sort of puffed up his chest," Goldsmith recalls. "All of a sudden, energy and color came into his face, and he said that he didn’t appreciate them coming to visit him under those circumstances, that he had concerns about the matter they were asking about and that, in any event, he wasn’t the attorney general at the moment; Jim Comey was. He actually gave a two-minute speech, and I was sure at the end of it he was going to die. It was the most amazing scene I’ve ever witnessed."
After a bit of silence, Goldsmith told me, Gonzales thanked Ashcroft, and he and Card walked out of the room. "At that moment," Goldsmith recalled, "Mrs. Ashcroft, who obviously couldn’t believe what she saw happening to her sick husband, looked at Gonzales and Card as they walked out of the room and stuck her tongue out at them. She had no idea what we were discussing, but this sweet-looking woman sticking out her tongue was the ultimate expression of disapproval. It captured the feeling in the room perfectly."
Jack Goldsmith, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, witness to the famous Ashcroft scene, reveals himself as attempting to be a legal bulwark against many of the Administration's Unitary Executive activities.
Jack Goldsmith spoke with Jeffery Rosen for this article, who attended law school with both Goldsmith and John Yoo, in anticipation of publication of "The Terror Presidency", which Goldsmith wrote about the 9 months he spent in Ashcroft's Department of Justice, and his role in withdrawing the famous "Torture Memos".
What this article reveals is the existence of significant legal objections to the directions taken by the Bush Administration's CIA and military torture and surveillance techniques, and how these objections were over-ruled politically by Bush, in a dance of White House brinksmanship within the administration. We already know something about this brinksmanship, through James Comey's description of the mass resignations offered in response to the attempted coercion of the sickened Ashcroft. And from Goldsmith, we begin to hear a new dimension -- largely, as it is described in Rosen's article, from David Addington, who at one point threatened Goldsmith with responsibility for American deaths, should he deliver an Office of Legal Counsel opinion contrary to the Administrations wants:
Months later, when Goldsmith tried to question another presidential decision, Addington expressed his views even more pointedly. "If you rule that way," Addington exclaimed in disgust, Goldsmith recalls, "the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands."
This is an administration which prefers the exercise of power -- which it understands to be an ability to act without restraints, rather than as an ability to act with support from the Constitution. Goldsmith -- with Comey, Ashcroft and others -- stood in that gap, between the power of the Administration and the Constitution. We hear again, at the end of the article that the Bush administration "badly overplayed a winning hand," through arrogance of power -- acting unrestrainedly -- insisted on acting without Congress' support, when it certainly could have easily obtained it.
And we hear now how the visceral rejection we all feel for their arrogance of power, reached into a hospital room some few years ago, gathering its force, and delivered itself from the point of a tongue.
UPDATE: 8:24 PM EDT . Discussed below:
"We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court," Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.
I invite readers: what other thing might we -- in David Addington's sense of the phrase -- be one bomb away from getting rid of?
For example, I think we're one bomb away -- in Addington's Sense -- from getting rid of that smug grin on Cheney's face.
Isn't that fun? Add yours in the comment section!