I am the law.(George W, Bush's war powers)

"Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," stated President Bush when asked by reporters in Panama about allegations that the CIA is using KGB facilities in eastern Europe as torture chambers. "We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice.... Anything we do ... to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture."

Mr. Bush's answer transcended his well-documented difficulties with the English language, ascending to nearly Clintonian heights of artful dissimulation. Mr. Bush's claim is a stark assertion of dictatorial power: whatever my administration does is legal. And since torture is illegal, the methods authorized by the administration must be something else.

The president's comments in Panama offer a useful counterpoint to Vice President Cheney's attempt to induce Congress to remove an anti-torture amendment from the military appropriations bill. In a November 1 meeting with Senate Republicans, reported Newsweek, Cheney insisted that prohibiting torture--which the administration doesn't practice, remember--would "tie the president's hands."

Recent autopsies on 44 prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan produced reported causes of death such as "strangulation," "asphyxiation," and "blunt force injuries." This indicates that approved forms of interrogation include methods best described as "torture," had honest use of that term not been banished by presidential decree.

The approval of torturing enemy combatants finds its genesis in a September 25,2001 Justice Department memo by former Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo. The Yoo memorandum contends that "the Constitution vests the President with the plenary authority, as Commander in Chief and the sole organ of the Nation in its foreign relations, to use military force abroad." Congress, according to that memo, cannot "place any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make." (Emphasis added.) Presumably, the power to define the "nature of the response" would include authorizing use of potentially lethal forms of painful physical distress against prisoners (we can't call it "torture," of course).

Now a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley, Yoo has given more extensive treatment to his view of presidential war powers in his new book The Powers of War and Peace. A former clerk for Federal ...