ABSTRACT
For anyone with even a faint understanding of the pattern of conservative behavior in wartime, from the infamous Palmer raids after World War I through J. Edgar Hoover’s excesses in the Vietnam era, it was as predictable as sunrise that the administration of George W. Bush would err on the side of extraconstitutional behavior in its conduct of the so-called War on Terror. The pattern is for Presidents to obtain legal opinions from compliant White House counsel and an equally subservient Attorney General to assure them that extraordinary circumstances justified extraordinary consolidation of power in the executive branch.
