[Texgreen] Wash Post: Bush is a psychopath, drunk on power

[Roger Baker]

[Makes sense to me.-- Roger]



<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/12/ 
AR2007011201952.html>

JURISPRUDENCE
The Imperial Presidency

By Dahlia Lithwick
Sunday, January 14, 2007; Page B02



Why is the United States poised to try Jose Padilla as a dangerous  
terrorist, long after it has become clear that he was just the wrong  
Muslim in the wrong airport on the wrong day?

Why is Washington still holding hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo  
Bay, Cuba, long after years of interrogation and abuse have  
established that few, if any, of them are the deadly terrorists they  
have been held out to be?

And why is President Bush still issuing grandiose and provocative  
signing statements, the latest of which claims that the executive  
branch has the power to open mail when it sees fit?

I once believed that the common thread here is presidential blindness  
-- an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the chief executive  
to believe that these futile measures are integral to combating  
terrorism; a self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from  
recognizing that Padilla is a chump and Guantanamo Bay is just a  
holding pen for a jumble of innocent or half-guilty wretches.

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these efforts isn't  
to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla,  
Guantanamo Bay or signing statements moves the country an inch closer  
to eradicating terrorism. The object is a larger one: expanding  
executive power, for its own sake.

Two scrupulously reported pieces on the Padilla case are  
illuminating. On Jan. 3, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio  
interviewed Mark Corallo, who was spokesman for then-Attorney General  
John D. Ashcroft, about the behind-the-scenes decision-making in the  
Padilla case -- a case that has lolled through the federal courts for  
years. According to Totenberg, when the Supreme Court sent Padilla's  
case back to the lower federal courts on technical grounds in 2004,  
the Bush administration's sole concern was preserving its  
constitutional claim that it could hold citizens as enemy combatants.  
"Justice Department officials warned that if the case went back to  
the Supreme Court, the administration would almost certainly lose,"  
she reports, which is why Padilla was dragged back to the lower  
courts. Her sources further confirmed that "key players in the  
Defense Department and Vice President Cheney's office insisted that  
the power to detain Americans as enemy combatants had to be preserved."

Deborah Sontag's story on Padilla in the Jan. 4 New York Times makes  
the same point: He was moved from military custody to criminal court  
only as "a legal maneuver that kept the issue of his detention  
without charges out of the Supreme Court." This is why the White  
House moved Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal  
courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were shopping for the  
best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their  
claims about Padilla's dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of  
advancing their claims about executive power. When confronted with  
the possibility of losing on those claims, they pulled him back to  
the criminal courts so as not to lose powers they'd already won.

This need to preserve new legal ground also explains the continued  
operation of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Last week marked  
the fifth anniversary of the camp that -- as then-Defense Secretary  
Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in 2002 -- houses only "the worst of the  
worst." Now that more than half of them have been released (the best  
of the worst?) and even though only about 80 will ever see trials,  
the camp remains open. Why? Civil rights groups worldwide and even  
close U.S. allies such as Denmark, England and Germany clamor for its  
closure.

But Guantanamo Bay stays open for the same reason that Padilla stays  
on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and  
detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration  
cannot retreat from that position without ceding ground. The  
president is as much a prisoner of Guantanamo Bay as the detainees  
are. Having gone nose to nose with Congress over his authority to  
craft stripped-down courts, guaranteed to produce guilty verdicts,  
Bush cannot call off the trials. The endgame in the war against  
terrorism isn't holding the line against terrorists. It's holding the  
line on hard-fought claims to limitless presidential authority.

Enter these signing statements. The most recent of the all-but- 
meaningless postscripts Bush tacks onto legislation gives him the  
power to "authorize a search of mail in an emergency" to "protect  
human life and safety" and for "foreign intelligence collection."  
There is some debate about whether the president has that power  
already, but it misses the point. The purpose of these signing  
statements is to plant a flag on the moon -- one more way for the  
chief executive to stake out the furthest corners in the field of his  
desired powers.

Last spring, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer profiled David Addington,  
Cheney's chief of staff and legal adviser. Addington's worldview in  
brief: a single-minded devotion to something called the New Paradigm,  
a constitutional theory of virtually limitless executive power,  
wherein "the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to  
disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if  
national security demands it," Mayer describes.

Bush administration insiders told Mayer that Addington and Cheney had  
been "laying the groundwork" for a vast expansion of presidential  
power long before 9/11. And in 2002, the vice president told ABC News  
that the presidency was "weaker today as an institution because of  
the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35  
years." Rebuilding that presidency has been their goal for decades.

The image of Addington scrutinizing "every bill before President Bush  
signs it, searching for any language that might impinge on  
Presidential power," as Mayer puts it, can be amusing, sort of like  
the mother of the bride obsessing over a tricky seating chart. But  
this zeal to restore an all-powerful presidency traps the Bush  
administration in its own worst legal sinkholes. This newfound  
authority -- to maintain a disastrous Guantanamo Bay, to stage rights- 
free tribunals and to hold detainees forever -- is the kind of power  
that Richard M. Nixon could have only dreamed about, and cannot be  
let go.

In a heartbreaking letter from Guantanamo Bay last week, published in  
the Los Angeles Times, inmate Jumah al-Dossari writes: "The purpose  
of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed." I  
fear he is wrong. The destruction of Dossari, Padilla, Zacarias  
Moussaoui, Yasser Esam Hamdi and some of our most basic civil  
liberties was never a purpose or a goal -- it was a byproduct. The  
true purpose is more abstract and more tragic: to establish a clunky  
post-Watergate dream of an imperial presidency, whatever the human  
cost may be.

dahlia.lithwick@hotmail.com

Dahlia Lithwick covers legal affairs for Slate, the online magazine  
at www.slate.com.