Eric Lichtblau’s Bush’s Law: Has American Justice Been Remade, or Just Bungled?

NY Times reporter Eric Lichtblau has published an account of DOJ during the Bush years, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice, which we can add to the growing shelf of books looking at the legal aspects of Bush Administration national security policy. It mostly hews to the formula: bad things done, people hurt, the Constitution trashed.

The book is a taut read; Lichtblau is a talented reporter. The material on the NSA surveillance regime is the centerpiece, a story Lichtblau broke with James Risen. But I don’t think the material comes anywhere close to its “All the President’s Men” aspirations (Jeff Rosen has a contrary take on that). DOJ looks more like a bunch of bumblers than serious heavies, and the law seems to have survived the test mostly intact. It’s low theater rather than high. That’s not to say that there haven’t been many collateral casualties, but at least at home nothing like during the McCarthy era (most of us would have lost our jobs by now).

For more, see my review in the New York Observer here.