The Imperial Presidency - WP

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/12/AR2007011201952_pf.html

The Imperial Presidency

By Dahlia Lithwick
Sunday, January 14, 2007; 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.

(Lithwick goes on to document this in the the article)

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1. President a prisoner of Guantanamo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/12/AR2007011201952_pf.html

. . . 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.