How scary and incriminating is that statement. The NYT review of Jack Goldsmith’s book, “The Terror Presidency” is just one more insider’s judgment that proves how what many of us write about these thugs in GG’s thread is often too mild.

NYT, Books of The Times

Former Law Adviser Speaks Out on Bush

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, Published: September 11, 2007

In October 2003 Jack Goldsmith, a legal scholar with sterling conservative credentials, was hired to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and the attorney general about the legality of presidential actions. As he was briefed on counterterrorism measures the Bush administration had adopted in the wake of 9/11, Mr. Goldsmith says he was alarmed to discover that many of those policies “rested on severely damaged legal foundations,” that the legal opinions that supported these counterterrorism operations were, in his view, “sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the president.”

Mr. Goldsmith eventually withdrew several key department opinions — including two highly controversial “torture memos” dealing with the authority of the executive branch to conduct coercive interrogation — but only after contentious battles with administration hardliners led by David Addington, then Vice President Cheney’s legal adviser and now chief of staff.

As Mr. Goldsmith recounts in his chilling new book, “The Terror Presidency,” he and his Justice Department colleagues (in consultation with lawyers from the State Department, the Defense Department, the C.I.A. and the National Security Council) reached a consensus in 2003 that the Fourth Geneva Convention (which governs the duties of an occupying power and the treatment of civilians) affords protection to all Iraqis, including those who are terrorists. When he delivered this decision to the White House, he recalls, Mr. Addington exploded: “ ‘The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,’ he barked. ‘You cannot question his decision.’ ”

The portrait of the Bush administration that Mr. Goldsmith — who resigned from the Office of Legal Counsel in June 2004, only nine months after assuming the post — draws in this book is a devastating one. It is a portrait of a highly insular White House obsessively focused on expanding presidential power and loathe to consult with Congress, a White House that frequently made up its mind about a course of action before consulting with experts, a White House that sidelined Congress in its policymaking and willfully pursued a “go-it-alone approach” based on “minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/books/11kaku.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin

“I heard Elie Wiesel once say something to the effect that finally you speak out the truth so as not to let yourself down, so as not to let yourself become less than human: that even if no one listens it is still better to speak up: that you will then avoid the despair of losing your humanity. To all who have spoken so clearly on the this thread I give my thanks, because it seems it has not yet come to the point where I am seeing and speaking alone, and that is something to be grateful for, one small thing in these sad times.”

-- Jkalos

"You can engage in all the purple rhetoric you like, but it will surely backfire on you in 2008. You think you can dish it out, but you won't be able to take the return fire. Rudy will crush you:"

nabalzbbfr

I read your heartfelt, soul-searching, wonderfully expressed words that I wished I had written and most certainly felt, directly followed by that nabazneezer gutter garbage. I doubt sneezer could even begin to understand our anguish or hopes. He huffs and puffs and snoozes through life and misses so much. It’s his/her loss, not ours. I think that ending colon is where his brain resides, or maybe a little lower.

Thanks

I second that perceptive nomination.