Torturegate

US Attorney General John Ashcroft has emphatically refused to release the "torture memo" quoted in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, so the WSJ has released the memo itself!

Joshua Micah Marshall has a link to the PDF, but it's getting heavy traffic right now and I can't download it.

Based on yesterday's leak, Marshall highlights the following passage for particular attention:

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

"So the right to set aside law is "inherent in the president".

That claim alone should stop everyone in their tracks and prompt a serious consideration of the safety of the American republic under this president. It is the very definition of a constitutional monarchy, let alone a constitutional republic, that the law is superior to the executive, not the other way around. This is the essence of what the rule of law means -- a government of laws, not men, and all that.

Now, we know that presidents sometimes break laws and they frequently bend them, if only in cases where the laws don't seem to anticipate a situation the president finds himself confronting. There is even an argument that the president can refuse to enforce laws he deems unconstitutional.

But there is no power inherent in the president simply to set aside the law. Richard Nixon famously argued that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." But the constitutional rulings emerging out of Watergate said otherwise. And history has been equally unkind to his claim."