and he explains his reasoning item by item.
1. War v. Crime
2. Guantanamo Bay
3. Military detention
4. Habeas Corpus
5. Military Commissions
6. Targeted Killing
7. Rendition
8. Secret Prisons
9. Surveillance
10. State Secrets
11. Interrogation
His conclusion?
The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.
...
A good example of these strategies in action is the Obama administration's "new" rationale for detaining enemy forces indefinitely without charge or trial. The administration took the same basic position as its predecessor but placed it in prettier wrapping. It eliminated the dreaded label "enemy combatant." It narrowed the scope of those who can be detained from persons who "support" al Qaeda and its affiliates to persons who "substantially support" them--a change without large practical consequences, but a change nonetheless. And it grounded its authority to detain in Congress's authorization for the war and the international laws of war, showing that the president's detention powers were approved by bodies outside the presidency. This was the Bush position as well, but with an important difference: The Bush administration argued that it could detain enemy soldiers on its own constitutional authority, and without congressional support. The Obama administration dropped this argument (but did not reject it), and won favorable press coverage for its "departure" from the Bush position even though the change affected nothing in the president's present power to detain.
...
the former vice president is wrong to say that the new president is dismantling the Bush approach to terrorism.
President Obama has not changed much of substance from the late Bush practices, and the changes he has made, including changes in presentation, are designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run. Viewed this way, President Obama is in the process of strengthening the presidency to fight terrorism.
Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, was an Assistant Attorney General in the Bush administration and is the author of The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (W.W. Norton 2007).
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/the-cheney-fallacy
He wrote that in May 2009. 4 years later, he's must be pissing from joy.
Jack Landman Goldsmith (born September 26, 1962) is a Harvard Law School professor who has written a number of texts regarding international law, civil procedure, cyber law, and national security law.[1] He has been "widely considered one of the brightest stars in the conservative legal firmament."[2]
He was a law professor at the University of Chicago when in 2002, he joined the Bush administration as legal adviser to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense. In October 2003 he was appointed as an United States Assistant Attorney General, leading the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice under Attorney General John Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey. He resigned in July 2004.[3] He wrote a book about his experiences there called The Terror Presidency (2007).[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Goldsmith
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