Pulitzer Prizewinner Eric Lichtblau offers an unparalleled and authoritative investigation of the Bush administration's internal struggles over secret programs and policies that tore at the constitution and, ultimately, brought down an attorney general. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush and his top advisors declared that the struggle against terrorism would be nothing less than a wara war that would require new tactics, new tools, and a new mind-set.Bush's Lawis the alarming account of how the "war on terror" has been used to mask the most radical remaking of American justice in generations.

Eric Lichtblau received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, for his stories on the NSA's wiretapping program. He has worked in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, covering the Justice Department, since 2002. From 1999 to 2002 he covered the Justice Department for the Los Angeles Times. He is a graduate of Cornell University and lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

From the Hardcover edition.

Prologue	p. vii
"This Thing Called the Constitution"	p. 3
Collateral Damage	p. 19
"Don't Embarrass the Bureau"	p. 75
Threats, Pronouncements, and the Media Wars	p. 113
Sworn to Secrecy	p. 137
Blood on Our Hands	p. 186
High-Level Confirmation	p. 212
Swift-Boated (Round Two)	p. 232
A Loyal Bushie	p. 264
Epilogue	p. 301
Notes	p. 313
Index	p. 335
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"This Thing Called the Constitution"

Washington is a town in love with its acronyms. In the days of bedlam that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, none was more important than SIOC, the emergency command center at the FBI's headquarters. It was there, amid a tangled web of sixty miles of fiber-optic cables, 225 computer terminals, and enough secure video monitors to stage an episode of the TV thriller 24, that the Bush administration's top intelligence and law enforcement officials collected minute-by-minute updates and steeled themselves for what all in the room thought certain would be a "second wave" of terrorist attacks. But it was there too that a onetime Wall Street executive who ran the nation's immigration service was the first to ask an unpopular question that day that would resonate for years to come inside the Bush White House and out: How far are we willing to stretch and bend the Constitution in hopes of deterring another attack? And at what cost to the fabric of the country?

Even before the last legs had given out on the World Trade Center's Twin Towers on that horrific day, the FBI had begun the monumental task of piecing together what had happened. Who were the jihadists who had carried out the audacious attacks? How had they operated so invisibly, and with such impunity, on American soil? Who had helped them? And, most urgently, what other plots were already underway? There was no better law enforcement agency in the world than the FBI at solving a crime, and this investigation-code-named Penttbom-would be the biggest in its history. Thousands of agents, working more mundane tasks like drug seizures and white-collar crime on September 10, were now dispatched to the case as newly deputized counterterrorism sleuths. Investigators would be helped by a few early breaks: a piece of Mohamed Atta's luggage that didn't make it onto Flight 11 held a treasure trove of detailed preparations for the hijackings, and a search of a rental car parked at Logan Airport produced flight manuals and other potentially important bits of evidence. With 4,400 planes rerouted within hours, FBI agents were already scouring leads and eyeing other possible plotters. President Bush had made it clear to his war team: there could not be another attack, not on his watch. "Don't ever let this happen again," Bush told his attorney general, John Ashcroft, at an emergency White House meeting the day after the attacks.

For Ashcroft, an unlikely general in the war on terrorism who had once railed against the abusive reach of Big Brother government in his days in the Senate, the edict would become a guiding mantra. The rules of engagement had changed, Ashcroft told his aides, and that meant no lead, no possible plot, no strand of intelligence, however tangential or improbable it might seem, could go unchecked. The two suspicious Muslims found on the train to Texas with $5,000 in cash and box cutters; those immigrants in the dilapidated Detroit apartment found with the odd scribbling in the day-planner; the Saudi radiologist in San Antonio with the same last name as one of the hijackers; the homeless Egyptian man arrested for trespassing at a 7- Eleven in Baltimore-all were eyed as the next possible Mohamed Atta in the days and weeks immediately after 9/11. With planes grounded for days and the country shaken to its core, the investigation was playing out in the most public of ways, each step chronicled on CNN. The public manhunt was on.

Sub rosa, however, investigators were already employing unorthodox, push-the-limits tactics in those early days that would not become publicly known, even in the exhaustive, 567-page report of the 9/11 Commission three years later. The National Security Agency, in what amounted to a pilot project for a much bigger and more controversial exercise, would begin intercepting American calls and e-mails to and from Afghanistan, home of the Taliban, i

Excerpted from Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice by Eric Lichtblau
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