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A book review of mine, from the Ideas section of today's print edition:

HOW WOULD A PATRIOT ACT? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. By Glenn Greenwald. Working Assets Publishing. 146 pages. $12.

For a lawyer, Glenn Greenwald doesn’t mince words:

"I believe that the concentrated and unlimited power now claimed by President Bush constitutes a true crisis for the United States ... we are moving away from the founding principles of our constitutional republic towards theories of power that the founders identified as the hallmarks of tyranny."

So he writes in the preface of "How Would a Patriot Act?," his broadside against what he calls "deliberate, ongoing lawbreaking ordered personally by the president."

Before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Greenwald, then practicing law in New York, was so apolitical he didn’t even vote in presidential elections. He describes his political philosophy to that point as a vague notion that as long as the federal government stayed divided, government couldn’t do too much mischief.

Immediately after the attacks, he joined with a large majority of Americans in supporting President George W. Bush and the invasion of Afghanistan, and he says he continued to support the president for months thereafter.

But the jailing of a U.S. citizen without charges, counsel or a trial got his lawyerly attention. And the longer he looked and the more he saw, the more disturbed he became. In October 2005, Greenwald started a blog called "Unclaimed Territory" that examined legal issues pertaining to the administration’s behavior. The title, he says, describes his pre-9/11 political allegiance.

The blog became the go-to Web site for information on the legal issue of presidential power immediately after The New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning December disclosure of the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Traditional media appeared unable or unwilling to address the legal issues raised by the program, so Greenwald’s blog filled the void. Earlier this year, Greenwald announced that he would be turning his observations into a book. So many readers of his blog placed advance orders with online bookseller Amazon.com earlier this month that the book hit No. 1 in sales there and stayed No. 1 for several days despite a lack of promotion. (Its publisher, Working Assets, primarily manages politically liberal investments and sells long-distance service; it has never published a book before.)

Greenwald has aimed his book at all Americans, not just liberals or conservatives, for he believes the overarching constitutional issues raised by many of the president’s actions are not partisan but, rather, go to the heart of what it means to be an American. In light of the big picture this book so clearly describes and so strongly documents, it stands out among the many recent books attacking the Bush presidency and deserves the widest possible audience.

Greenwald argues that by holding U.S. citizens without charge, trial or counsel; torturing prisoners and sending them to other countries to be tortured; and wiretapping U.S. citizens without a warrant, the president and his top officials are violating the Constitution and U.S. and international law. He demolishes the legal arguments of the administration supporting its actions and those of its defenders in academia and the blogosphere, claiming that their actions stem from an overarching belief among Bush and his closest associates that the executive branch should — and, in time of war, must — operate without oversight, the Constitution be damned.

" ... all of these controversial actions can be traced to a single cause, a shared root," he writes. "They are grounded in, and are the by-product of, an unprecedented and truly radical theory of presidential power that, at its core, maintains that the president’s power is literally unlimited and absolute in matters relating to terrorism and national security. ... In short, President Bush has claimed the defining powers of a king."

Several current and former administration officials, such as onetime counsel John Yoo (author of the administration’s so-called "torture memo" attempting to justify the rough treatment of prisoners, and now a law school professor), have been advocating expansion of presidential power in legal articles long before Bush took office.

Moreover, Greenwald says, the president has been demonstrating his contempt for law through the use of "signing statements" attached to enacted legislation. In theory, such statements indicate how the executive branch understands a new law and carry no legal weight. But Bush has used them to announce that he does not intend to be bound by parts or all of the laws to which they are attached. One example is the signing statement on a ban on torture that passed the House 308-122 and the Senate 90-9 this past fall — margins that probably would lead any normal person to believe that the American people, through their elected representatives, had spoken quite clearly.

(The president’s disregard of Congress may be even more widespread than Greenwald claims. On April 30, the Boston Globe reported that the president has "claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution." These laws have pertained not only to terrorism and national security, but also to such topics as affirmative action, nuclear-industry whistle-blowing and scientific research. If nothing else, this fact might explain why Bush has never vetoed a bill since taking office.)

Several factors have made the administration’s actions possible, Greenwald writes, among them a compliant Congress controlled by the president’s own party and an incurious national news media. (That incuriosity could and should be the subject of other books.)

But the administration’s primary weapon in wielding these techniques, he writes, is fear: Since 9/11, Bush and his staff have repeatedly raised the specter of future terrorist attacks to defend their actions, deflect criticism and even smear their critics. Indeed, Bush’s first words in a statement he issued May 11 after USA Today reported that the government had been secretly amassing telephone-call records of most Americans were, "After September 11 ..."

But the real issue, Greenwald makes clear, is not wiretapping vs. no wiretapping, but legal wiretapping vs. illegal — criminal — warrantless wiretapping, and the misleading information given to Congress by such officials as Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (then White House counsel) to hide the nature and extent of that program.

Interestingly, after much blunt criticism, Greenwald doesn’t advocate any specific solution to this constitutional crisis other than for you to register your displeasure, if any, with your elected officials.
But, as he knows, Congress has only two options if it wishes to end the administration’s lawbreaking:

• Cut off funds for wiretapping not in compliance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which two Republican* senators, Arlen Specter and Dianne Feinstein, recently have proposed to do. This measure requires hoping the administration doesn’t just shift money appropriated for other purposes, as The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward has claimed it unconstitutionally did to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. (A similar diversion was at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal 20 years ago.)
• Impeach the president and remove him from office.

Both options are political, but Greenwald believes this issue is not partisan: Either you believe we are governed by the rule of law — the Constitution, treaties, statutes and court rulings — or you don’t. As he sees it, if you do, the administration’s actions should disturb you, and if you don’t, then you’re un-American by definition.

Greenwald makes an excellent case that the man sitting in the Oval Office is claiming the powers of a dictator-king — and that if we truly are self-governing, then we need to start governing him.

Lex Alexander, the News & Record’s citizen-journalism coordinator, blogs at The Lex Files, blog.news-record.com/lexblog. Contact him at 373-7088 or lalexander@news-record.com

*In their admirable haste to insert this bit of late-breaking news -- Specter and Feinstein announced their plans around midday Thursday, which is close to deadline for our book page -- my editors inadvertently assigned Feinstein to the GOP. She is, of course, a Democrat.