"Law? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Law"

The newly-declassified Justice Department memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 demonstrates just how far the Bush Assministration was willing to flout the law. The memo, written by a senior official, asserting that federal laws barring assault and other crimes didn't apply to military interrogators, because the President's commander-in-chief authority supposedly trumped such laws. Must have been a change to the Constitution that nobody else noticed. . .

The memo is breathtaking in its broad assumption that the executive can ignore laws. Eugene Fidell, Yale Law military justice scholar, said that the memo was "a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency." Although the Justice Department had to recind the ill-advised memo nine months after it was issued, it's an example of the Bushits' enduring contempt for the law.