Barack Obama: "My predecessor, who I disagreed with on a whole host of issues, still had a basic regard for the rule of law."

Obama is right, but perhaps not in the way he thinks.

A thread.

According to Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, both detained at Guantánamo, "Our interrogations… were conducted with us chained to the floor for hours on end in circumstances so prolonged that it was practice to have plastic chairs…that could be easily hosed off because

prisoners would be forced to urinate during the course of them and were not allowed to go to the toilet." (Human Rights Watch, "The Road to Abu Ghraib," 2004) https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/usa0604/3.htm

What lay behind that torture regime? According to Jack Goldsmith, who worked in Bush's Office of Legal Counsel, "Perhaps the oddest thing about my fortieth-birthday trip to GTMO and the naval brigs was that the plane was full of lawyers. This was an apt metaphor for many of the

Bush administration's terrorism policies: never in the history of the United States had lawyers had such extraordinary influence over war policy as they did after 9/11." https://books.google.com/books?id=VNIkpM23nJ8C&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=%22perhaps+the+oddest+thing+about+my+fortieth-birthday+trip%22&source=bl&ots=p6yW5klLO-&sig=ACfU3U0aIMSQU0zCHsl76Qx3yurmRf7HzQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjYtoiUvJ3qAhUShXIEHQzqC1gQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22perhaps%20the%20oddest%20thing%20about%20my%20fortieth-birthday%20trip%22&f=false

As George Tenet, Bush's CIA chief, wrote in his memoirs, "Despite what Hollywood might have you believe, in situations like this [the capture, interrogation, and torture of Al Qaeda logistics chief Abu Zubayda] you don’t call in the tough guys; you call in the lawyers.”

So, yeah, that's how Bush respected the rule of law. Obama is right in the sense that Magritte defined surrealism: "To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen."

Quotes from Rasul and Iqbal, Goldsmith, and Magritte from Jack Johnson's Law Without Future: Anti-Constitutional Politics and the American Right, which I highly recommend! https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/15945_toc.html