This stuff always just makes me sad.
Hoover Institute:
Jack Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency after 9/11 (W.W. Norton, 2012) and many other books and articles related to terrorism, national security, and international law. Before coming to Harvard, Goldsmith served in 2003–4 as assistant attorney general, Office of Legal Counsel, and in 2002–3 as special counsel to the general counsel to the Department of Defense. Goldsmith holds a JD from Yale Law School, a BA and an MA from Oxford University, and a BA from Washington and Lee University. He clerked for Supreme Court justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Court of Appeals judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, and Judge George Aldrich on the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal. Goldsmith is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Wikipedia:
In October 2003, Goldsmith was selected to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal guidance to the president and all executive branch agencies, including those tasked with the interrogation of enemy combatants. This placed him in a position to influence debates within the Bush administration regarding the conduct of the War on Terror, where he was successful in moderating some of what he considered to be the "constitutional excesses" embraced by the White House. Goldsmith resigned from the OLC 30 June 2004.
During his tenure at OLC Goldsmith withdrew as legally defective what have been called variously the Bybee Memo or the Torture Memos..
According to Goldsmith, one consequence of OLC's "power to interpret the law is the power to bestow on government officials what is effectively an advance pardon for actions taken at the edges of vague criminal statutes."[8]
[edit] The Terror Presidency
Goldsmith is the author of The Terror Presidency, a book that details his tenure at OLC and reaction to legal opinions the Bush administration promulgated in the war on terror,... Though he is largely sympathetic with the concerns of the Bush administration's terrorism policies, his primary claim is that fear of another attack drove the administration' policy, and that its focus on the hard power of prerogative rather than the soft power of persuasion had been counterproductive, both in the war on terror and in the extension of effective executive authority. Some of the assertions made in the book include that the Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, David Addington, at one point said that "we’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court," referring to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that rules on warrants for secret wiretapping by the United States government.
Goldsmith appeared on Bill Moyers' show on September 7, 2007 to discuss his work, and his time in Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital room when Alberto Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card attempted to persuade Ashcroft to change his mind about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program. He reported that Mrs. Ashcroft stuck her tongue out at Gonzales and Card as they left the room.
Goldsmith has clarified his opinions more recently on NOW on PBS, going so far as to respond to the question "What's the downside of regular courts" a statement culminating in "Another reason you might not want to use the trial system is that the trial system, to be legitimate, has to have the possibility of acquitting someone of a crime" in reference to attempts to allow military trials of American Citizens while withholding government evidence"...
Book overview:
The surprising truth behind Barack Obama's decision to continue many of his predecessor's counterterrorism policies.
Conventional wisdom holds that 9/11 sounded the death knell for presidential accountability. In fact, the opposite is true. The novel powers that our post-9/11 commanders in chief assumed—endless detentions, military commissions, state secrets, broad surveillance, and more—are the culmination of a two-century expansion of presidential authority. But these new powers have been met with thousands of barely visible legal and political constraints—enforced by congressional committees, government lawyers, courts, and the media—that have transformed our unprecedentedly powerful presidency into one that is also unprecedentedly accountable.
These constraints are the key to understanding why Obama continued the Bush counterterrorism program, and in this light, the events of the last decade should be seen as a victory, not a failure, of American constitutional government. We have actually preserved the framers’ original idea of a balanced constitution, despite the vast increase in presidential power made necessary by this age of permanent emergency.
Actual sentence(s) in the actual online excerpt. Actually.
War and emergency invariably shift power to the Presidency. Permanent war and permanent emergency threaten to make the shift permanent.
Other reviews
"Obama's Anti-Terror Program Is More or Less Bush's, Says Book"
Assorted other stuff. Including:
Fire When Ready
Obama's targeted drone strikes -- even on Americans -- aren't illegal. In fact, there's a solid legal foundation and a number of checks and balances upholding his right to take out terrorists.
Sigh. |