Going it Alone:The Terror Presidency: Justice and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration

Abstract

Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency is one of the most important evaluations of the Bush Administration's War on Terror to come from inside the administration. More than just a memoir, the book offers a cogent historical and legal analysis of the profound dilemmas that confront administration officials caught between competing demands of protecting the American public while respecting civil liberties. The review sympathetically considers the issues as presented in the book, and traces through the ways in which these difficult matters, all the ones that have confronted the Bush administration and created so many political disputes, will continue to confront its successors of either political party. The review agrees with Goldsmith that there is no magic formula by which they will go away.

Keywords: Jack Goldsmith, war on terror, counterterrorism, Bush administration, David Addington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, civil liberties, national security, office of legal counsel, Hamdan, Hamdi, Boumediene, executive power, torture memos, enemy combatant