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.

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.

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.

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.

I asked my husband to read this book. He is learned in History, especially U.S. History, and I was interested in his remarks. He was surprised at the depth of the deception taking place by the Bush Administration and the assault on our civil rights.

This is a very impressive and unusual book written by a reporter who has covered the Justice Dept for a long time. There have been any number of good books published about the War on Terror and the Bush Administration's response to it. What sets Licthblau's book apart from the rest is that large sections are written in the first person and not only recount the events and facts but describe the mindset and calculus employed by policymakers who in real time had to make the decisions necessary to protect the country from follow-up attacks after September 11. Perhaps the strongest chapter in the book details the pressure the White House put on the New York Times that led the paper--much to Licthblau's chagrin--to hold off on publishing the story about NSA's surveillance program for a year. For this reason, I agree with the reviewer in the NY Times book review who wrote that this book is the equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein's classic "All the President's Men" for the terror age.

This 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.

I'm really disappointed that Lichtblau and others in the press can't seem to look at all of the available facts when reporting on the Bush presidency and the war on terror. Allow me to explain: We're all worried about possible erosion of civil liberties and the ongoing war in Iraq, but if the press does not engage in neutral reporting, then how are we ever going to keep our civil liberties? In making our decisions about what to do, we need to know if the press is giving us the full facts of the story or instead presenting parts of a story to push its point of view. I feel that Lichtblau is doing the later.

The New York Times, for which Lichtblau writes, is noted for its anti-Bush reporting practices. See Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War for details. While the press is now saying it did not do enough to stop Bush, this book looks at about 5 years of press coverage and claims that starting about 8 weeks after 9/11 the press began to frame Bush as an enemy and to actively oppose his policies. Lichtblau does not take this type of criticism into consideration, but pushes the "Bush lied, people died" meme even further. See Alterman for an example of this: The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America.

Evidence that contradicts Lichtblau is out there, and I would have liked to seen him and others come right out and take on accusations of bias rather than just ignoring it. Instead its more of the same stuff I read in the New York Times on a regular bases. So that is why I'm disappointed in this book; I wanted something new and fresh that would tackle the fuller picture. There just really does not seem to be any surprises here.