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Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice | 
| Author: Eric Lichtblau
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy Used: $9.50
You Save: $17.45 (65%)
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 98519
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.8
ISBN: 037542492X
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931
EAN: 9780375424922
ASIN: 037542492X
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush and his top advisors declared that the struggle against terrorism would be nothing less than a war–a new kind of war that would require new tactics, new tools, and a new mind-set. Bush’s Law is the unprecedented account of how the Bush administration employed its “war on terror” to mask the most radical remaking of American justice in generations.
On orders from the highest levels of the administration, counterterrorism officials at the FBI, the NSA, and the CIA were asked to play roles they had never played before. But with that unprecedented power, administration officials butted up against–or disregarded altogether–the legal restrictions meant to safeguard Americans’ rights, as they gave legal sanction to covert programs and secret interrogation tactics, a swept up thousands of suspects in the drift net.
Eric Lichtblau, who has covered the Justice Department and national security issues for the duration of the Bush administration, details not only the development of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program–initiated by the vice president’s office in the weeks after 9/11–but also the intense pressure that the White House brought to bear on The New York Times to thwart his story on the program.
Bush’s Law is an unparalleled and authoritative investigative report on the hidden internal struggles over secret programs and policies that tore at the constitutional fabric of the country and, ultimately, brought down an attorney general.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Bush's Law is very well researched & written July 20, 2008
N&W Train Man (Roanoke area of VA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Hooray for the First Amendment June 24, 2008
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
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 taking a Pentagon Papers-type injunction to keep the _New York Times_ from publishing the story. The sorts of people who accuse Lichtblau of helping the cause of terrorism or who leave him death threat e-mails will miss some of the lessons here. It is not the case that the paper rushed into print with the story; Lichtblau describes how the story was essentially complete by 2004, but the paper sat on it at the request of the administration. It was only a year later, with new evidence that the wiretapping was out of control, that publication happened. The go-ahead was advanced when the staff of the _Times_ negotiating about the decision with the White House discovered that the administration had been lying to the paper about how limited the wiretapping was and how it was universally supported by administration lawyers. (When the story was published, the president attacked the decision to do so, but did not dispute a thing in it. "Confirmation didn't come any better than this," Lichtblau notes.) And Lichtblau shows that there were two additional stories about clever ways the government was using to assess communications or money paths of terrorists, but unlike the NSA wiretaps, they had no conflict with the Constitution nor with the right to privacy; not one word of these ever appeared in print. Lichtblau's book is sometimes exciting, although its descriptions of what our government does in our name are often infuriating: our president and his aides executed an eavesdropping program that many of their own lawyers thought unconstitutional, and they lied about it to reporters and to the public, and then they accused the journalists of helping terrorism. There is no advocacy needed for a free press, but a reader closing these pages will have a new appreciation for our First Amendment.
The Truth May 27, 2008
Half-A-Jew (USA)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Eric Lichtblau, has penned a must read tomb for those seeking truth and reconciliation post Bush. Hopefully enough citizens will read it that the push for a post Bus Truth and Reconciliation Commission will be created to bring accountability to the criminals who have run this country into the ground.
BOOK READS LIKE A CLANCY THRILLER May 22, 2008
HERBDEXTER (CAPE COD, MASS.)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
A Must read--even if it makes you sick May 9, 2008
Daniel E. Marthaler (california)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
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.
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