It was an interesting read, the article about Jack Goldsmith, only because of the anecdotal stuff that reveals more about the personalities of the participants. Most of the ‘meat’ of Goldsmith’s tales, however, provided nothing I’d call greatly enlightening, other than Goldsmith’s own decisionmaking.

It became clear long ago that Addington competed with Cheney to be the biggest dick in the country. I’d previously surmised Yoo was more the skulking sort of bully, preferring to work in the background. And Gonzalez always struck me as the genial tool.

So amid this contingent of hyperegos in grey suits, what have I gained from reading this?

That I like Mrs. Ashcroft sticking out her tongue. That Snow, like Gonzalez, is a little man, a water-carrier, who thought nothing of troubling a very sick man. That Jack Goldsmith existed at all.

Yet I was struck by one overriding thought, that Goldsmith is mostly hyping Goldsmith here. It’ll sell plenty of books and his book will prove useful for future historians and psychiatric analysts.

But will it promote good government? Increase our security? Benefit the nation or world?

No. It will serve as a primer for future authoritarians, instructing them in what not to do, while they amass and concentrate executive power. The kind of power Attila the Hun should revel in, but not the president of a healthy democracy.

I’m fully aware of the threat of organized terror groups, and consider them another variant of previous death-dealing criminal organizations. Their ultimate threat rests almost solely upon the potential to acquire nuclear bombs. The notion they’ll ever create one of their own is laughable.

A serious anti-terror program would put the highest priority on eliminating nuclear stockpiles, such as the one wielded by the Soviets throughout the Cold War. After that, infiltration of terror orgs by intel operatives is necessary. That’s a process that will take years to achieve.

Yet we must always be mindful that guys like the Unabomber and Tim McVeigh could cause a lot of terror and death and pain with minimal or zero networks. That means no-one, no matter how powerful and focused, can ever provide us security blanket guarantees. All this nonsense about what a president ‘needs’ to disrupt terror networks remains a bunch of hoo-haw.

Sure, some perceptive, forward thinking needs to take place. Minor adjustments to laws to improve efficiency will prove helpful. But the outlandish power grabs that have occurred in this administration have yet to be demonstrated as necessary. They may have broken up some killing events, just as some police departments have done via the use of snitches and good gumshoe work. But the moral trade-offs, the wholesale broadsides that have shattered civil liberties, will ultimately be shown to be a very rotten and unnecessary barter. The only guarantees from this course are a lesser democracy, reduced goodwill in the world and greater animosities zealots can feed off to recruit fresh terrorists against us.

Goldsmith provides no answers for that, as yet. His book seems to suggest that his way would yield output a little less stinky. But so far as this intro to his work reveals, it ultimately retains the look and consistency of just another brand of shit.