Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice Review

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Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice ReviewThis is a good solid work about law and justice in the Bush Administration. It's a story of good and evil, law and lawlessness, trust and distrust. You might want to consider first reading Robert Conquest's fine book The Great Terror, which is about the purges, the show trials, law and justice under Stalin. Much is different, of course, but there are some uncomfortable parallels. Perhaps the most striking thing in The Great Terror was that under Stalin, being suspected of anti-Soviet activities was a serious crime. This is not the same as actually being guilty of such activity, but rather just the fact that you had been suspected (even if totally innocent, as the vast majority were) earned you a trip to the cellars to be shot, or a death sentence in the labor camps. Bush's Law makes it clear that suspicion earns punishment in one form or another.
Bush's Law emphasizes the use and misuse of national security letters, the bypassing of the normal legal safeguards, the punishments for Justice Department and FBI people who "weren't on the team". Loyalty becomes the paramount virtue: "meine ehre heist treue" (my honor is loyalty). The book talks about the firings of the US Attorneys: being "loyal Bushies" was crucial to being kept on, and the dissembling explanations by Gonzales and the White House made a mockery of the traditional image of blind justice with a scales in one hand and a sword in the other. The book describes how Gonzales explored the possibilities of prosecuting journalists under the Espionage Act of 1917. You get the strong impression that a free press was considered a greater threat to America than al Qaeda.
For a book on a similar subject, try Clive Smith's Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side. The focus here is limited to Guantanamo: the treatment of the prisoners, the lack of hearings, the regarding of lawyers for the detainees as the enemy. It's a very depressing book, and it packs a very powerful punch indeed. Taken together, Bush's Law is primarily about the threats to Americans when laws are routinely broken and the Constitution is regarded as an annoyance, Smith's book is an extension: without the safeguards, without some judges and the free press standing up, the next steps could lead to Guantanamos, and then another few steps perhaps to the Soviet system where the law is whatever authority says it is, and justice is meaningless. What Bush's Law describes is not new: we might do well to ponder on John Mitchell (Nixon's Attorney General) who had serious discussions about the possibility of kidnapping war protesters and sending them to secret Soviet-style gulags. We can also think about the death threats Lichtblau describes, and the suggestions that he and other reporters be arrested, tried for treason, and hanged. There are those who believe that the war on terror justifies any suspension of civil liberties and justifies any actions by those in authority. Such people are not alone: Stalin, Hitler, and Mao had large numbers of adherents who felt the same way. So--a good book, replete with heroes and villians galore.Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice Overview

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The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 Review

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The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 ReviewThe more you read about this administration, the more you piece together the inner workings and mechanizations of a dysfunctional leadership that spends more time on propaganda and plausible deniability than on governance.
Suskind paints a picture that is becoming all too familiar. Everything for Mr. Bush was funneled through the narrow straw of Dick Cheney who filtered all the information the president would see. This not only slowed the information process, it effectively buried it. (It seems Richard Clarke who wrote "Against All Enemies" was right).
Following the attack on 9/11, Cheney instituted the One Percent Doctrine: If there is one percent chance of a terrorist action, there should be a response. Considering that almost all events short of the laws of physics have a one percent chance, our intelligence and law enforcement agencies ran ragged around the world chasing minutiae that came to nothing instead of focusing on hard evidence and solid leads. These were thrown into the mix of nonsense dilluting intelligence efforts.
The CIA and FBI were also being harried to get results so the administration could use these successes for public consumption. In some cases, they were forced to end operations that might have borne fruit if the administration had not blown them by publicizing the investigations.
Do you remember when no WMD were found, and this administration blamed the intelligence community for giving them the wrong information? It turns out, according to Ron Suskind, that the White House kept sending back CIA reports that claimed there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden. We learn that CIA analysts and supervisors were livid when the White House constantly asked them if there was a connection between the two. Their reports were returned with their concluding paragraphs deleted or questions about Hussein and Osama added. In short, they cherry-picked and publicized mischaracterized and misinterpreted information to achieve their political ends.
Now enter George Tenet, fall guy, who has to take the hit for Bush and Cheney. The man who doesn't remember ever having said "it's a slam dunk" found that the administration had made public this statement he doesn't remember making. It was now time for Tenet and the CIA to take the fall for an administration that ignored its warnings. Tenet receives the Medal of Freedom for keeping his mouth shut. Blaming the CIA did have its consequences. Analysts whose reports were ignored or mischaracterized began leaking information to the press, information that embarrassed the White House.
Suskind said it best in his closing pages: "Mistakes can't be publicly acknowledged; certainty, even in the face of countermanding evidence, becomes a surrogate for courage; will stands in for earned--regularly tested--conviction." "... the self-interested use of classified materials to carry forward politcal ends; the very concealment of the true nature of what's been happening since 9/11 in favor of a sanitized, 'need to know' version--are all means that, whatever their advertised value, strike at the nation's character." This sums up his feelings about the Bush/Cheney administration. As a famous Amnerican once said, "any government that doesn't trust its people doesn't deserve the trust of the people."
If there is at least a one percent chance that Suskind is right, shouldn't the American people respond?The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 Overview

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